To submit a formal service request to NYC, use 311. For emergency assistance, call 911. For more information about how the City is responding to the storm, visit: http://www.nyc.gov/severeweather
Info4Disasters.org launched it’s new website this past week. A virtual EOC for Hurricane Irene was created last night for sharing information with the public & colleagues.
And a quote that seems idyllic and possibly naive to Norwegian Americans -
“I would prefer to live in a society where police normally work unarmed,” said Johannes Knutsson, a professor of police research at the Norwegian Police University College.
Though graphic, the above aerial image from news helicopters reinforces the fact that the police, SWAT and counter-terrorism first responders were woefully unprepared and slow in their response. Their use of an overloaded boat in a country that daily flies thousands of oil workers via jet helicopters to offshore oil rigs will surely be a lesson learned in the forthcoming after action reports and inquiries – per the NYTimes article above -
” It took police SWAT units more than an hour to reach the camp, on Utoya Island, after reports of the shooting came in. Officers had to drive to the shore across from the site of the shooting attack, and use boats to get to the island. A police helicopter was unable to get off the ground; news crews that reached the island by air could only watch as the gunman continued the massacre. ”
Tragic loss of the one onsite first responder/police officer ( Trond Berntsen ), who was unarmed and was the step-brother of Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit .
UPDATE 20110614
Fareed Zakaria of CNN #GPS and #Google’s Eric Schmidt hold court at Direct Relief International in Santa Barbara and discuss #innovation -
Excellent presentation by Oculus & Azavea specialists on location-time analysis via CrisisMappers -
UPDATE 20110801
Local Japanese citizenry take radiologic sensing into their own hands in the wake of bureaucratic government and power industry collusion and criminal negligence via @nytimes -
Source: Agence France-Presse
Country: Japan
By Frank Zeller (AFP)
ISHINOMAKI, Japan — It oozes and reeks and sometimes it shimmers in oily rainbow colours. Millions of tonnes of putrid mud now fill every nook and cranny of Japan’s tsunami disaster zone.
Volunteers who have spent weekends shovelling it out of survivors’ half-wrecked homes have developed an intimate relationship with the muck that soils their overalls, gloves and workboots.
“It looks like layered chocolate cake, but it smells like a mix of saltwater and oil,” said Masato Arima, 35, a Tokyo project manager with a financial services firm, wearing a yellow hardhat and industrial facemask.
Joji Hiratsuka, another volunteer working in the devastated port town of Ishinomaki with aid group Nadia, has a different take on the stuff.
“It’s like rancid Jell-O. It’s black. You can’t describe the smell — oil, dead fish, everything. There’s petroleum from cars, boats and oil tanks. It’s not organic. It’s like the ocean, but in a bad way.”
Ishinomaki is littered with dramatic evidence of the March 11 quake and the monster wave it spawned that erased entire neighbourhoods here and left almost 25,000 people dead or missing along the shattered Pacific coast.
Cars now stick out at odd angles from a graveyard, watched over silently by stone Buddhas. Fishing boats lie scattered amid broken houses. And a Statue of Liberty figure towers oddly over a debris-strewn river island.
But while bulldozers and cranes will eventually remove the large-scale wreckage of Japan’s epic catastrophe, clearing the mud from thousands of homes is a job that must be done by hand, one scoop at a time.
“Someone has to do it,” said Christine Lavoie-Gagnon, whose volunteer group Nadia (a name that means “Hope”) took more than 100 people by bus to the town in the just-ended “Golden Week” of public holidays.
“People here have had the shock of their lives, something that only happens once every 1,000 years,” she said. “They’re left with their sorrow and fatigue — and lots of mud in their houses.
“Money is good, but they also need hands. Three of us came in the beginning, and now there are lots of us. We have people from Asia, Europe and the Americas. Hands don’t have nationalities.
“We come back so people don’t feel alone with their mud. We do whatever they ask us to do.”
The gritty labour has made the volunteers appreciate their day jobs — many of them are traders, brokers and staff at major global financial institutions. Yet most of them have kept coming back for more.
“The insides of these houses look like they went through a mixer,” said Hiratsuka, 49, a Canadian derivatives trader and ice hockey player dubbed “the human bulldozer” by his team-mates.
“We come and help people clean out their houses. They may not even be able to live there again, but it gives them breathing space. An elderly couple can’t dig through a tonne of dirt. They need help.”
There are better and worse days.
“One day we found about 20 kilograms (45 pounds) of chicken buried in the mud. It had been there for about three weeks, it was fermented and slimy,” Hiratsuka said, clearly not relishing the memory.
The more rewarding finds are families’ mementos and keepsakes — photographs, religious icons, urns with relatives’ ashes — that volunteers sometimes find in the mud, clean up and return to the families.
The job is not just about muscle power, but also emotional support.
Mother-of-two Yukako Ishikawa was so moved by the group’s help in her half-destroyed childhood home that she likened the motley crew of workers in outdoor wear and hazmat suits to a flock of deities.
“When I was alone here, I felt so much fear,” said Ishikawa, 36, who survived the tsunami when she took her young children and elderly parents to a nearby elementary school building with only minutes to spare.
Her family shuddered for days in the darkness and cold, waiting for help. Desperate for food, Ishikawa waded back through waist-deep water to salvage drink bottles, cans and plastic-sealed food from the flooded kitchen.
As the muddy waters receded, she returned to the two-storey house, the detritus of their former lives now a jumbled and soggy mess, wondering if and when she could start to reclaim her life.
“I was alone here in a house full of mud,” she said, as volunteers around her filled wheelbarrows and sandbags with black earth, cleaned hand-carved window frames and restored a small Japanese garden.
“They helped me through the hard time. Now I feel I can move forward.”
April 14 (Reuters) – The following lists the impact of the earthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan on March 11 and the subsequent crisis at a nuclear power plant. Asterisk indicates a new or updated entry.
DEATH TOLL * A total of 13,498 people were confirmed dead by Japan’s National Police Agency as of 7 p.m. (1000 GMT) on Thursday, while 14,734 were missing.
NUMBER OF PEOPLE EVACUATED * About 139,100 people were in shelters around the country as of Thursday following evacuation, the National Police Agency said. The government has set up an evacuation area around Tokyo Electric Power Co’s quake-stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, with a 20-km (12-mile) radius. More than 70,000 people lived in the largely rural area within the 20 km zone. It is unclear how many of them have been evacuated, but most are believed to have left. Another 136,000 people were within a zone extending a further 10 km, which has been advised to stay indoors. The government said on April 11 that because of accumulated radiation contamination, it would encourage people to leave certain areas beyond its 20 km exclusion zone around the plant and that children, pregnant women, and hospitalised patients should stay out of some areas 20-30 km from the nuclear complex.
HOUSEHOLDS WITHOUT ELECTRICITY * As a result of the March 11 quake and tsunami, followed by strong aftershocks on April 7 and 11, a total of 154,965 households in the north were still without electricity as of Thursday, Tohoku Electric Power Co said.
HOUSEHOLDS WITHOUT WATER
* At least 220,000 households in 8 prefectures were without running water as of early on Thursday, the Health Ministry said.
NUMBER OF BUILDINGS DAMAGED
* At least 72,554 buildings have been fully destroyed, washed away or burnt down, the National Police Agency of Japan said as of 1000 GMT on Wednesday.
IMPACT ON ECONOMY The government estimates the material damage from the quake and tsunami alone could top $300 billion, making it by far the world’s costliest natural disaster.
The top estimate would make it the world’s costliest natural disaster.
The estimate covers damage to roads, homes, factories and other infrastructure, but excludes lost economic activity from power outages and costs arising from damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant, as well as the impact of swings in financial markets and business sentiment.
The yen initially spiked to a record high against the dollar after the quake, prompting the first joint intervention by the Group of Seven rich nations in 11 years to help shield Japan’s export-reliant economy.
Japan’s reconstruction spending will almost certainly exceed that of the 1995 quake in Kobe, when the government needed extra budgets of more than 3 trillion yen.
The government is set to compile an extra budget worth about 4 trillion yen, focusing on removing debris, building temporary housing and restoring infrastructure such as schools. Japan plans to allocate 1 trillion yen to stem job losses and help the unemployed, the Nikkei business daily reported on Tuesday.
This is likely to be the first of several spending packages, but cabinet ministers, including the finance minister, have said that Japan, which has a huge public debt already twice the size of its $5 trillion economy, should avoid new bond issuance.
NUMBER OF COUNTRIES OFFERING AID
According to the Foreign Ministry, 135 countries and 39 international organisations have offered assistance. (Compiled by Tokyo Political and General News Team)
UPDATE 20110414
UPDATE 20110327
Terrifying
Brookings Oregon
UPDATE 20110319
Excellent Google 3D post EQ/tsunami damage assessment resource – go to
Google.org Crisis Response has created a 2.8GB portable globe for
response teams. It includes:
- 15-meter resolution LandSat imagery (source data from GLS-2000, circa 2000)
- OSM road layers
- Zenrin POI and Road vector layers
Please contact me, Pablo Mayrgundter (pmy@google.com) or Ryan Falor
(rfalor@google.com) for information.
We’ll also be working on updates in the next few days as we get new
data that can be shared. Our next update is anticipated in ~2 hours
and will include:
- 90-meter resolution global terrain from SRTM
The area of coverage of the globe is defined by this KML:
