Mother Earth Suffers

At first severe floods hit China. Now the authorities are worried of chemicals that has been washed down the from two chemical storage facilities, into the Songhua river in Jilin city. The Songhua River is the largest tributary of the Heilongjiang river, also known as the Amur river in Russia, on the China-Russia border. A total of 7,000 barrels from the storage facilities of two chemical plants had been washed into the river. Around 400 barrels have been recovered so far by workers at eight stations on the river. 4,000 of the barrels were empty, it was reported. The remaining 3,000 contained flammable chemicals,

Elsewhere in Jilin, 30,000 people in the town of Kouqian were said to be trapped by flood waters after a reservoir and two rivers burst its banks.
Water quality in the river was being monitored at seven stations, Xinhua news agency said.


Russian authorities were also checking the water in the Heilongjiang river (the Amur river), a report on Russian television said.

Five years ago a chemical spill in the Songhua river left the city of Harbin and its 3.8 million residents without water for five days.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is experiencing its worst floods in living memory. The South West monsoon rains have caused devastating floods as the Indus River, (travelling about 3,000km in Pakistan territory) and other major rivers burst their banks. Communications have been severed making dispatch of food aids difficult. Rescue teams in northern Pakistan are battling to reach tens of thousands of people cut off by the monsoon flooding.

While water is receding in some areas, many communities remain stranded by the region's worst flooding for 80 years.

The UN said 3m people had been affected and more than 1,400 had been killed. The government said some 27,000 people remained trapped and awaiting help.

The United Nations' World Food Programme says it has provided emergency food for 42,000 people in Pakistan by Monday and that by the end of the week it expects to have helped 250,000 people.

Continuous rain has hampered emergency services and delayed. The return of monsoon rains has grounded helicopters and raised fears of renewed flooding.


Forecasters said rain would continue in the north-west and in southern provinces of Punjab and Sindh over the coming days.

There are many areas the army admits that it has not reached at all. There are several valleys in the north-west of Pakistan where they do not know how many people have died or how much destruction there is. Time is now crucial for those people waiting for aid, who do not yet have food or clean water.

However, WFP spokeswoman Emilia Casella said about 1.8 million needed food aid.

The Pakistani military says it has committed 30,000 troops and dozens of helicopters to the relief effort, but winching individuals to safety is a slow process.

Aid agencies say the risk of water-borne diseases especially cholera, spreading will remain high until the flood waters fully recede.
While flood waters ravage China and Pakistan, the  opposite happens to Russia. A record heat wave across Central Russia has started wildfires that have destroyed entire villages.

Moscow is mobilising more forces to fight hundreds of wildfires raging across a vast area of Central Russia. At least 40 people have died in fires in the past week, and seven regions are under a state of emergency.

Officials say 13 warehouses in a naval aviation storage area were destroyed in the blaze near Kolomna, outside Moscow; which began on Thursday and lasted into Friday,  with the loss of an unknown quantity of military hardware. According to Russian news agency Interfax, the Kolomna depot services aircraft from all of Russian navy's fleets.

Elsewhere, extra firefighters went to protect a major nuclear facility at Sarov, in the Nizhny Novgorod region.
Many children are also being evacuated from summer camps threatened by fires.

About a fifth of Russia's grain crop has been destroyed and there was another big rise in the price of wheat on international markets on Monday.
As of July 30, some 25 million acres (about 10 million hectares) of grain had been lost, an area roughly the size of Kentucky - and growing. Then last week, fires that had been ignored for days by local officials began spreading out of control. By Aug. 2, they had scorched more than 300,000 acres (121,000 hectares) and destroyed 1,500 homes in more than a dozen regions, some of which declared a state of emergency.


The record heatwave is expected to last for the next few days. Temperatures in the Moscow area are expected to hit about 38C (100F) this week.

Besides causing poor visibility, the fires pose a health risk for those with respiratory problems.
While the States grappled with the BP oil spill fiasco, news broke out of an earthquake in Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Mankind is still unrepentant of all the signs and will continue to plunder on,  till the Earth could not take it anymore.