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.

When it doesn't pay to recycle

A recent news in the Features section of the Star, (I couldn't locate the link) on young recyclers in New Delhi, India sifting through rubbish to pick on 'e-waste' caught my attention. These destitute children should be at school instead of day in and day out rummaging through dismantled electronic equipment to prise out the integrated circuits, tiny transistors, capacitors from the discarded computers, printers and other electronic equipment. The children are unaware of the dangers they are exposing themselves.

It was reported by a United Nations survey that India would have 500% more e-waste fom old computers in 2020 than in 2007, and 18 times more hand phones.

The e-waste handlers risks detrimental effects on their respiratory, urinary and digestive systems besides reducing body immunity levels and getting exposed to carcinogens. Toxic metals and poisons enter the bloodstream during the laborious manual extraction process to recover gold, platinum, copper and lead using caustic soda and concentrated acids.

These children have no idea of the dangers they go through each day. There is no precautions taken such as using gloves, masks or ventilation fans. For these illiterate children who are desperate to work in search for a few rupees, it is either die of hunger now or die of metal poisoning later.

It was also reported that computers, television and mobile phones are most dangerous because they contain high levels of lead, mercury and cadmium. Among the 250 recyclers studied over 12 months, almost all suffered from asthma and bronchitis. Dangerous levels of lead, mercury and chromium-10 to 20 times higher than normal- were found in the subjects' blood and urine samples.

These poor children will be suffering from the effects of the time spent in the landfills before the Indian government enact laws to regulate the e-waste industry.

How one Volcano can put the world to a standstill.

I never imagined that a volcanic eruption in Iceland would affect my family. Just as my son, Ikmal was enjoying his 3 week sojourn in Paris, England and Dublin; Eyjafjallajokull chooses to violently gush out its contents. Ikmal is now patiently (I hope) waiting for his flight back to Bangalore, India from London. He is stranded in Dublin as Ireland closes all its airspace. I am praying that he would not be too late for his new academic year which started this week.


My other son, Afif in Sheffield, seems oblivious of all the fuss. He spent the weekend playing football in the Leeds-Bradford games, organized by his fellow Malaysian university students in the UK. I am praying that both of them would not be affected by the finely pulverized lava thrown out by a volcano eruption as it is said to consist mostly of molten silica. This translates that the volcanic ash consists of fine glass particles. Maybe the ash has not fallen where they are.

They say that the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull on Tuesday, April 13 2010, is not as great and powerful as major eruptions like Mount St. Helens in 1980, which released 1.5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, or the catastrophe of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883, which killed more than 40,000 people and was felt for months later around the world. During Eyjafjallajokull, by contrast, there have been no deaths; only about 800 living in the vicinity were evacuated.

But Eyjafjallajokull's eruption created a major airline disaster initially in Europe. Somehow, the calamity’s effects spread like wildfire around the world; the world being a global village it now is. The standstill in Europe causes a travel backlog elsewhere from Tokyo to Toronto, as airlines cancelled flights to Europe as European governments close their air space. The reason was they were scared that the 7-mile-high plume of volcanic gases and silicate ash which has spread across much of Europe, would be sucked into an aircraft’s engine and transmission system and cause it to stall.

Shutting down the continent's airspace and grounding thousands of flights was expensive and inconvenient, as millions are stranded across the globe; but it was far preferable to having planes falling out of the sky. And while the economic toll of such disasters may be rising, huge death tolls are far less common.

As Eyjafjallajokull is still spewing ash clouds, it is not known how long the effect of the explosion will linger.

The transport disruption, particularly across the Atlantic, comes as the industry is said to have started to recover from the worldwide recession, with business and international travel slowly picking up.

European airlines were already suffering from the slow pace of economic recovery there. Even before the latest crisis, the International Air Transport Association had projected that the industry would lose $2.8 billion this year, down from last year’s loss of $9.4 billion.

Eyjafjallajokull was unknown before April 13th. From now on it would be stated in history as the volcanic eruption that caused the world transportation system to go haywire and may make some airlines bankrupt. Ironically, land transport operators have been having a field day trying to bring stranded travelers back on their itinerary track.

As I write this, I am happy to note that the airspace in Scotland, Northern Ireland and parts of northern England is due to reopen on Tuesday, 20th April.

Restrictions to airspace above the rest of England and Wales could be lifted later on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Germany, France and Belgium have also said they will begin to reopen airspace from Tuesday.

My son, Ikmal will get to resume his studies sooner than I thought. Thank God.


P.S:

Ikmal arrived safely in Bangalore from London on 25th April,2010. He is thankful to the volcano for letting him extend his vacation to one month!

A Salute to Barack Obama

Not only America looks forward to Barack Obama to bring new light and glorious days to America once more, the whole world is waiting for greater things to come. I pray America under Obama will respect the sovereignty of other countries and not simply enter and invade other countries as it sees fit, just to protect its own interests.I hope Obama will bring a solution to the Middle East situation. I watched his inauguration on CNN last night and was inspired by his speech. With Obama as president and being the most powerful man in the world, he will surely be able to shape a better and fairer world for everyone.

I was glad that Obama had included climate change and the dependence of energy in his speech. Maybe America will contribute more to save the environment and not patronise other countries to save theirs.

Many world leaders remain sceptical of Obama's ability to carry out his mission. Let us work together because one man cannot do the job alone. Every one has to contribute for a better world. I just hope there won't be elements within the US itself that would jeapardise Obama's dreams.

As the US economy directly affects the Malaysian economy as well, whatever happens in the US will affect us as well.

In the final analysis, I simply hope American foreign policies will be a win-win situation for all. I am praying for wisdom to prevail.