RIO DE JANEIRO - Rains began pelting Rio again early Wednesday, hours after the heaviest deluge on record sent killer mudslides cascading down hillsides and turned streets into raging torrents in Brazil’s second-biggest city.

The death toll increased to 100 in Rio and the neighboring city of Niteroi, while children were kept from schools for a second straight day and authorities continued to urge people to stay at home.

The city remained on alert amid fears the continuing rains could dislodge saturated ground and cause more slides, Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes told GloboNews TV.

Authorities reported 104 people injured and 65 missing.

Huge red-brown paths of destruction slashed through shantytowns. Concrete and wooden homes were crushed and hurtled downhill, only to bury other structures.

Rio, which will host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, ground to a near halt as Mayor Eduardo Paes urged workers to stay home and ordered all schools closed. Most businesses were shuttered.

11 inches of rain
Streets across the city were quiet as flooded roadways made travel nearly impossible even before rain started falling again before dawn.

Eleven inches of rain drenched Rio in less than 24 hours Tuesday, and the forecast called for more rain through the weekend, though it was expected to lessen.

Officials said potential mudslides threatened at least 10,000 homes in the city of 6 million people. Some 1,200 people were left homeless by Tuesday’s downpour.

Paes urged people in endangered areas to take refuge with family or friends and he said no one should venture out.

“It is not advisable for people to leave their homes,” the mayor said. “We want to preserve lives.”

He told the Web site of the newspaper O Globo that the rainfall was the most that Rio had ever recorded in such a short period. The previous high was nine inches that fell on Jan. 2, 1966.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva urged Brazilians to pray for the rain to stop.

“This is the greatest flooding in the history of Rio de Janeiro, the biggest amount of rain in a single day,” Silva told reporters in Rio. “And when the man upstairs is nervous and makes it rain, we can only ask him to stop the rain in Rio de Janeiro so we can go on with life in the city.”

A representative for the Rio de Janeiro fire department, which was coordinating rescue efforts, said 95 people were known dead and about 100 were injured.

“We expect the death toll to rise,” said the official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

‘Chaos’
Claudio Ribeiro, a 24-year-old taxi driver, spent eight hours stranded on a highway Tuesday.

“I have never seen anything like this,” he said, wiping steam from the inside of his windshield to reveal a flooded roadway with hundreds of cars, taxis and buses packed together on high ground between raging torrents.

“Tell me, how is this city supposed to host the Olympics?” Ribeiro said. “Look at this chaos!”

Neither the 2014 World Cup nor the 2016 Olympics will be held during Brazil’s rainy season. The rains normally fall during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer in December through February, but the season has stretched into April this year.

Silva played down the possibility that similar downpours could wash out the biggest sporting events Brazil will ever host.

“Normally, the months of June and July are calmer, and Rio de Janeiro is prepared to host the Olympics and is prepared to host the World Cup with a lot of tranquility,” Silva said. “It’s not because of one catastrophe that we will think that it’s going to happen every year, or all the time.”

Rio 2016 organizers said in a statement that Tuesday’s rainfall was extremely unusual and could happen anywhere in the world. Organizers praised city and state authorities for responding quickly to the public safety crisis.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): I.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK

SAN BERNARDO, Chile - The Desarmes family left their native Haiti two weeks after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, joining the eldest son in Chile for what seemed a refuge from the fear and chaos of Port-au-Prince.

Their sense of security lasted barely a month. It was shattered at 3:43 a.m. Saturday when one of the most powerful quakes on record shook a swath of Chile.

All the Desarmes’ immediate family survived both quakes. But twice cursed, the family now sleeps in the garden of a home that the eldest son, Pierre Desarmes, found for them just south of the Chilean capital of Santiago. They fear yet another temblor will strike.

“I left my country and came here because of an earthquake,” Seraphin Philomene, a 21-year-old student and cousin of Desarmes, said Wednesday. “And here, the same thing!”

“My God, I left my country and I didn’t die, but I’m going to die here!”

Pierre Desarmes, 34, managed to get his family out of Haiti thanks to personal contacts at the Chilean Embassy in Port-au-Prince and the Chilean armed forces. Nine members of his family — his parents, two brothers and their families, and three cousins — arrived in Santiago on a Chilean air force plane Jan. 23.

Desarmes, the lead singer of a popular Haitian reggaeton band in Chile, still gets choked up when he recalls seeing his family for the first time stepping off the plane.

“I saw them but I didn’t believe it. I said, ‘My God, they’re here.’ It was a very difficult moment,” he said, speaking in French in the garden of the house the family now calls home.

“Each time I think about it, I get sad, because I realize I was able to do this because I was here. But there are so many people who are there and I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”

Deeply unsettled
His relatives had to leave Haiti with only hours’ notice, receiving instructions on where to go via cell phone text messages from a relative in the United States who was in contact with Desarmes in Santiago. Philomene didn’t even have time to pack, dashing to the Chilean Embassy when she received word the family had been cleared to fly out.

Saturday’s earthquake has made a difficult transition even more traumatic.

“When the aftershocks come, they refuse to stay in the house,” Desarmes said, sipping a Coke at a table in the garden, his relatives sitting nearby.

“I have to talk to them all day long telling them: ‘There are no problems, it’s a country that’s prepared for earthquakes, it’ll pass, it’s not so bad.’ But they don’t hear me. Psychologically for them, they’re still really affected by it.”

Desarmes’ brother, Stanley Desarmes, 32, is deeply unsettled. The father of a 2-year-old girl, Nelia, who plays in the yard, he worries for his family’s safety and is thinking about uprooting them again to move somewhere with less danger of earthquakes.

“I don’t know what I can do, but staying isn’t possible,” he said. “I could die and I could lose my family. I have to leave. I don’t know where, I don’t know how. But I don’t want to die with my family here.”

Philomene, his cousin, plans to stay, hoping to bring the rest of her family to Chile. She was the only member of her immediate family to get out because she was living with the Desarmes in the Haitian capital to finish her studies. Her mother, father, two sisters and a brother are still in Cap-Haitien, a town in northern Haiti about 90 miles from the capital.

“I’ve had no news from them,” she said, choking up.

‘God is looking out for us’
Reached late Wednesday by The Associated Press in Cap-Haitien, Philomene’s father, Luigene Philomene, was elated at the news that his daughter was safe. He said he hadn’t heard from her since before Chile’s earthquake and had been trying to reach relatives in Port-au-Prince for an update.

The elder Philomene said when he heard that his daughter had been in the Chile earthquake he thought of a Haitian saying that loosely translates as “we saved her from the river and she ended up in the sea.” Now he feels she has divine protection and the 43-year-old said he would eagerly join his daughter in South America if he could.

“God is looking for out for us,” he said. “Our family didn’t die in Haiti so they aren’t going to die in Chile either.”

Francius Pierre, a cousin of Seraphin’s in Port-au-Prince, had already learned from a brother that his relatives in Chile survived. Pierre, a university student who injured his knee in the Haitian quake, said Seraphin and his other relatives moved from Haiti for safety.

“If they knew something like this could happen again they never would have gone,” he said.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): BAHAMASLOCAL, DAILYMAIL

SANTIAGO, Chile - A massive magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, killing at least 85 people, triggering a tsunami and damaging buildings more than 200 miles away.

President Michelle Bachelet declared a “state of catastrophe”.

At least 23 aftershocks were reported, including one registering at 6.9 on the Richter scale.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake struck 56 miles northeast of the city of Concepcion at a depth of 22 miles at 3:34 a.m. (1:34 a.m. ET).

Jessica Sigala, a geophysicist with the USGS told NBC News that the quake released 500 times more energy than the than the one that hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12. The quake was felt in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is located more than 800 miles away.

Tsunami warnings were issued over a wide area, including Hawaii, South America, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, Russia and many Pacific islands.

NBC station KNHL reported that the first tsunami wave was expected to reach Hawaii’s coastline at 11:19 a.m. local time (4:19 p.m. ET). It warned that “urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property.”

Giant wave
Reuters reported that a tsunami caused by the quake caused “serious damage” to Chile’s sparsely populated Juan Fernández Islands. Citing local police, CNN reported that the islands had been hit by a 40-meter (131-foot) wave.

Bachelet, the country’s president, urged people to stay calm. She told Reuters that 85 deaths had been confirmed.

Edmundo Perez Yoma, the interior minister, warned the death toll “will continue rising.”

An Associated Press Television News cameraman said some buildings collapsed in the capital Santiago, which lies about 200 miles north of the epicenter.

In the moments after the quake, people streamed onto the streets of the capital, hugging each other and crying.

Jen Ross, a journalist based in Santiago, told NBC’s TODAY that she felt “three minutes of shaking”.

Broadcaster TVN reported that several hospitals had suffered structural damage and were being evacuated.

‘It’s like the end of the world’
“Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it’s like the end of the world,” one man told local television from the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings.

Simon Shalders, who lives in Santiago, told Sky News: “There was a lot of movement. The houses were really shaking, walls were moving backwards and forwards, and doors were swinging open.

“Santiago has got a history of earthquakes and basically there’s not a lot of old construction in Santiago because of these earthquakes.

“The new buildings in Santiago are designed to withstand fairly strong quakes and they probably held up pretty well.”

There were blackouts in parts of Santiago and communications were still down in the area closest to the epicenter.

Santiago resident Leo Perioto told CNN that “windows were wobbling a lot” in his six-story building.

“The whole building was shaking,” he added. “We could feel the walls moving from side to side.”

An earthquake of magnitude 8 or over can cause “tremendous damage,” the USGS said. The quake that devastated Port-au-Prince on January 12 was rated magnitude 7.0.

‘Threat to more distant coasts’
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the Chile quake generated a tsunami that may have been destructive along the coast near the epicenter “and could also be a threat to more distant coasts.”

According to a 2002 census, Concepcion is one of the largest cities in Chile with a population of around 670,000.

In 1960, Chile was hit by the world’s biggest earthquake since records dating back to 1900.

The 9.5 magnitude quake devastated the south-central city of Valdivia, killing 1,655 people and sending a tsunami which battered Easter Island 2,300 miles off Chile’s Pacific seaboard and continued as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

Alone in the darkness beneath layers of rubble, Dan Woolley felt blood streaming from his head and leg.

Then he remembered — he had an app for that.

Woolley, an aid worker, husband, and father of two boys, followed instructions on his cell phone to survive the January 12 earthquake in Haiti.

“I had an app that had pre-downloaded all this information about treating wounds. So I looked up excessive bleeding and I looked up compound fracture,” Woolley told CNN.

The application on his iPhone is filled with information about first aid and CPR from the American Heart Association. “So I knew I wasn’t making mistakes,” Woolley said. “That gave me confidence to treat my wounds properly.”

Trapped in the ruins of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, he used his shirt to bandage his leg, and tied his belt around the wound. To stop the bleeding on his head, he firmly pressed a sock to it.

Concerned he might have been experiencing shock, Woolley used the app to look up what to do. It warned him not to sleep. So he set his phone alarm to go off every 20 minutes.

Once the battery got down to less than 20 percent of its power, Woolley turned it off. By then, he says, he had trained his body not to sleep for long periods, drifting off only to wake up within minutes.

Woolley’s job keeps him tech savvy. He oversees interactive projects for the Christian child advocacy organization Compassion International in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

With his injuries tended to, he wrote a note to his family in his journal: “I was in a big accident, an earthquake. Don’t be upset at God. He always provides for his children even in hard times. I’m still praying that God will get me out, but he may not. But even so he will always take care of you.”

The journal is stained with his blood.

After more than 60 hours, Woolley was pulled from the rubble.

“Those guys are rescue heroes,” he said of the crew that pulled him out.

His colleague David Hames has not been found. The two had been standing together when the earthquake struck and the Hotel Montana crumbled. They were making a film about poverty in Haiti and had just gotten back to the hotel, heading to the elevator in the lobby.

“Then all of a sudden just all craziness broke loose,” Woolley said. “Convulsions of the ground around us, the walls started rippling and then falling on us. [Hames] yelled out, ‘I think it’s an earthquake!’ I looked for someplace safe to jump to and there was no safe place.”

When the shaking stopped, Woolley couldn’t see. And his friend was not with him.

He turned on the focus light of a camera he was wearing around his neck, but he didn’t have his glasses. “So I actually took some pictures and would look at the back of the lens of the camera and saw in one of those pictures the elevator that I ended up hobbling over to. And that became my safe place.”

Once in the elevator, he used the app — called “Pocket First Aid & CPR” from Jive Media — to tend to his injuries. Woolley said his phone “was like a high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife that enabled me to treat my own injuries, track time, stay awake and stay alive.”

Woolley heard voices of some other people trapped nearby, and they spoke with each other.

“About a day, maybe day and a half in, we heard rescuers, and they had a list of our names at that point, because they were able to talk to one of the people we were talking with. And so then it seemed like, OK, this is going to happen, we’re actually going to get rescued.

“But then it just took a long time and there were times where I didn’t hear anything or I’d hear drilling in a far part of the building and just didn’t get any reassurance they were still coming for me,” Woolley said.

“The scene outside was a lot more chaotic and less simple than I imagined in my head. … But eventually they came for me and did an amazing rescue.”

Back home now in Colorado Springs with his wife Christina and children Josh, 6, and Nathan, 3, Woolley said he’s grateful to God for getting him through the ordeal.

“Happiness is a morning with … family, filled with Legos, kissing boo-boos and normalcy.”

Source (article): CNN

Source (pictures): PDACORTEX

No question, the two church-goers from New Jersey had the best intentions in the world when they arrived in Port-au-Prince this week to help victims of Haiti’s killer earthquake.

Trouble was, that was all they had in a land where food, water, shelter and transportation are at a desperate premium, said Laura Blank, a disaster communications manager on the ground for World Vision, a Christian humanitarian aid group with long ties to the country.

“They seemed very eager and very passionate about helping the people of Haiti, but they didn’t have a ride to get out of the airport,” said Blank, who had to direct the pair to assistance.

More than a week after a magnitude-7 earthquake devastated the country, disaster organizers say they’re seeing the first signs of a problem that can hinder even the most ambitious recovery efforts: good intentions gone wrong.

From volunteer medical teams who show up uninvited, to stateside donors who ship boxes of unusable household goods, misdirected compassion can actually tax scarce resources, costing time, money, energy — and lives, experts say.

“Everyone wants to be a hero. Everyone wants to help,” said Dr. Thomas Kirsch, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Refugee and Disaster Response. “It’s not the way to do it.”

Even a medical crew from his own school — Kirsch declined to identify them — arrived in Haiti so ill-prepared they had to seek sustenance from non-governmental organizations.

“They had no bedding, supplies or food,” he said. “They ended up glomming onto some of the NGOs.”

Volunteers simply show up
What to do with well-meaning volunteers is not a new problem. In every disaster, large numbers of people simply show up to help. A handbook published by California disaster officials estimates organizers can count on 50,000 “convergent” volunteers after any severe earthquake. After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, more than 40,000 unsolicited volunteers arrived at Ground Zero in New York.

In the U.S. and around the world, aid organizations are walking a fine line, trying to encourage skilled professionals who can provide indispensable assistance — and waving off those who might not be

up to the task. At the federal Center for International Disaster Information, a stern note warns the well-intentioned:

“Volunteers without prior disaster relief experience are generally not selected for relief assignments,” it reads. “Most offers of another body to drive trucks, set up tents, and feed children are not accepted.”

It’s an effort to help would-be Samaritans recognize the reality of the situation, said CIDI director Suzanne H. Brooks.

“It’s very romantic in the TV and movies,” she said. “They think it’s flying in for a weekend. They need to think of it in terms of months.”

Those best suited to help are probably already there, experts said. They’re trained crews who not only have experience working in disasters, but also in developing nations, Kirsch said. The best teams also have a command of Haitian Creole and French, if possible.

When teams arrive without those skills and without their own supplies, they drain resources that could better be used for actual victims, said Dr. Kristi L. Koenig, an emergency physician at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in disaster response.

“Unless you’re part of a team before the disaster happens with a formal mission, you’re going to be part of the problem,” she said.

Even worse, certain volunteers have required emergency intervention themselves, Kirsch noted.

“Most people do quite well, but about 10 percent don’t,” he said. “They end up totally freaking out and having to be evacuated.”

Winter coats and high-heeled shoes?
A different but equally pressing problem is the flood of ill-advised donations that aid agencies already are facing, organizers said. A handful of “Help Haiti” food and clothing drives across the country are inspiring cringes among some workers, said Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, a coalition of agencies.

“I would strongly recommend that no donation drives be conducted unless there’s an existing organization on the ground, in Haiti, that has asked for the help,” Rothe-Smith said. “It does pile up very quickly.”

Donations of old clothes, canned goods, water and outdated prescriptions are accumulating, said Brooks. While such items sound useful, they’re actually expensive to sort, to transport and to distribute, she said. Cast-off drugs can be dangerous.

Oftentimes, the household items donated are simply not useful to the disaster victims they’re intended to help.

“I guarantee you someone is going to send a winter coat or high-heeled shoes,” Brooks said.

In fact, after the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, aid organizers in Sri Lanka were forced to deal with donations of stiletto shoes, expired cans of salmon, evening gowns and even thong panties, according to news reports. In Florida, a truckload of mink coats showed up during the 2004 hurricane season, Rothe-Smith said, a likely tax write-off for a retailer having trouble pushing furs.

The compassion behind some donations is understandable — and laudable, she added. People see dire images on television or in news reports and they want to help.

“It seems to make logical sense to go through your own cupboard and gather those items,” Rothe-Smith said.

The reality, however, is that inappropriate donations actually do more harm than good.

“If you buy a can of peas and it costs 59 cents, it’ll cost about $80 to get it where it needs to go,” Rothe-Smith said.

Mathematics of donation favor cash
Many agencies try to motivate donors with the mathematics of the situation. Jeff Nene, a spokesman for Convoy of Hope, a Springfield, Mo., agency that feeds 11,000 children a day in Haiti, urges cash donations that allow his group to buy in bulk from large suppliers and retailers.

“When people give $1, it translates into $7 in the field,” he said. “If they spend $5 for bottled water, that’s nice and it makes them feel good, but probably it costs us more than $5 to send it. If they give us $5, we can get $35 worth of water.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by virtually every aid agency.

“I would really say at this point, honestly, right now, money is the best thing to give,” Rothe-Smith said.

Donors can find vetted agencies helping in Haiti on sites such as Charity Navigator.

Still, trying to direct the flood of compassion can be tricky, Nene acknowledged.

“Some people get a little miffed by it. They think they’re trying to help and when you don’t receive it in that attitude and spirit, they get upset,” he said.

“You just have to tread lightly. You don’t want to crush people when they’re so willing to help.”

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): MSNBC