MIAMI — The rapidly intensifying Irene that’s already cut a destructive path through the Caribbean is the first hurricane to seriously threaten the U.S. in almost three years, a worry for some emergency management officials who hope people haven’t become complacent about the dangers.

Predictions by the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Irene was likely to become a major Category 3 hurricane later Tuesday.

By Thursday, as it roars toward the U.S. coast over warm open waters, it could become a Category 4, NHC hurricane specialist John Cangialosi said late Monday. Winds in such a storm can blow from 131 to 155 mph. By contrast, Hurricane Katrina was a Category 3 when it hit New Orleans in 2005.

Late Tuesday morning, the first Atlantic hurricane of the season had maximum sustained winds around 100 mph and was near the Turks and Caicos islands in the Caribbean.

Current projections have Irene tracking off Florida’s coast on Friday and then making landfall in the Carolinas on Saturday or Sunday. From there it could move into Chesapeake Bay, the hurricane center said. The last hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. was Ike, which pounded Texas in 2008.

The center did caution, however, that predictions made days in advance can be off by hundreds of miles. For instance, some models show Irene could remain offshore along the East Coast.

With tropical force winds that extend 205 miles and hurricane force winds 50 miles from Irene’s center, Irene could still hit Florida hard even if it doesn’t make landfall there.

Bryan Koon, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said after a meeting Monday with Gov. Rick Scott that the two have frequently discussed raising awareness since the Atlantic hurricane season began June 1.

“We want to make sure Floridians are paying attention,” Koon said. “We are at the height of the hurricane season right now. If it’s not Hurricane Irene, it could be the follow-up storm that impacts us.”

‘Take this storm seriously’
After several extremely active years, Florida has not been struck by a hurricane since Wilma raked across the state’s south in 2005. The Hurricane Center said it was responsible for five deaths in the state and came two months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

“For residents in states that may be affected later this week, it’s critical that you take this storm seriously,” said Craig Fugate, administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Julio Gonzalez in Miami was heeding the warnings and headed to a hardware store to pick up what he needed to protect his home.

“I’m gonna board up,” he said Monday. “It’s best to play it safe.”

Others were stocking up on bottled water and plywood. And Hurricane Irene was trending on Twitter.

The storm slashed directly across Puerto Rico, tearing up trees and knocking out power to more than a million people. It then headed out to sea, north of the Dominican Republic, where the powerful storm’s outer bands were buffeting the north coast with dangerous sea surge and downpours. President Barack Obama declared an emergency for Puerto Rico, making it eligible for federal help.

‘Looks like it could get bad’
Irene was forecast to pass over or near the Turks and Caicos Islands and the southeastern Bahamas by Tuesday night and be near the central Bahamas early Wednesday.

In the overseas U.K. territory of the Turks and Caicos, a steady stream of customers bought plywood and nails at hardware stores, while others readied storm shutters and emergency kits at home.

“I can tell you I don’t want this storm to come. It looks like it could get bad, so I’ve definitely got to get my boats out of the water,” said Dedrick Handfield at the North Caicos hardware store where he works.

Many of the center’s computer models had the storm veering northward away from Florida’s east coast toward Georgia and the Carolinas, but forecasters said much was still unclear.

“In terms of where it’s going to go, there is still a pretty high level of uncertainty,” said Wallace Hogsett, a National Hurricane Center meteorologist. “It’s a very difficult forecast in terms of when it’s going to turn northward.”

One key reason for that, he said, is the difficulty of measuring the effect on Irene of the high terrain of the island of Hispaniola, which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican. Hurricane warnings were up on the northern side of the Dominican Republic, as well as the Turks and Caicos islands just south of the long Bahamas chain. Forecasters say it depends on which way the storm veers after passing the Bahamas Tuesday or into Wednesday and heads into the very warm Atlantic waters.

And several past hurricanes have turned into Category 4 or 5 monsters but hit land with much less force.

The other big factor is exactly when the storm will encounter a higher-level trough along the U.S. East Coast, which will eventually turn it to the north.

“Timing is everything,” Hogsett said.

In South Carolina, state and coastal emergency agencies went on alert for possibly the first hurricane to hit there in seven years.

As Haitians mark the anniversary on Wednesday of the earthquake that flattened much of the capital Port-au-Prince, hopes that a better nation could rise from the rubble have given way to a crushing sense of bitterness and despair.

Reconstruction work has barely begun despite billions of dollars in pledged aid, profiteering by Haiti’s tiny and notoriously corrupt elite has reached epic proportions, and a national cholera epidemic has added to the misery of a country where the magnitude 7 quake killed about 250,000 people and left more than a million homeless.

Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, was in bad shape before the quake. But promises from the international community to “build Haiti back better” now ring hollow to many of the country’s most vulnerable.

Banks, schools and government offices were ordered closed for the anniversary and a national day of mourning was to kick off with a service offered by the papal envoy to Haiti at the quake-shattered remains of the National Cathedral in downtown Port-au-Prince.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the special U.N. envoy for Haiti who heads its main disaster management body, was due to attend the service along with a host of officials including outgoing Haitian President Rene Preval.

Clinton, in an interview with NBC News’ Mara Schiavocampo, said he was not satisfied with the rate of progress, but remained optimistic that this would change.

“Everyday there’s hope and there’s frustration, but I’d say the hope still outweighs the frustration,” he said. “I think there has been some real progress. We got 60 percent of the pledges for the first year distributed.”

Schiavocampo, noting that some of the additions to the tent camps to make them more livable — such as concrete structures and latrines — also made them easier to rely on as permanent housing, asked Clinton if he expects them to still be in use in the next several years.

“If they’re here in five years, I’ll be really diasppointed,” responded Clinton, who co-chairs the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission with Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. “But I have to tell you, I didn’t think we’d get a third of the people out in a year because we knew couldn’t do any comprehensive block-by-block building.”

Clinton continued, saying that those who have left the camps were able to clear rubble from

their existing homes, or get into temporary housing.

“So, where actually that’s the one area where there are more people out of those camps than what I thought would be, but I want to really see a lot of rapid movement.”

‘Continuing spirit’ of Haitians
He said between 40 to 60 exhibitors were expected at a housing expo in spring and the Haitian government would then choose which of them were eligible for aid.

“Then I’ll be surprised if we don’t really start going to town on the housing,” Clinton said. “I think you’ll see big time movement and there’ll be employment and there’ll be new businesses as a result of it. So, we’ll do better on housing this year.”

He said he was “most encouraged by the fact that I can’t find any donor who has given up,” but also by the the “continuing spirit of the people of Haiti.”

Clinton has faced pointed criticism for painfully slow progress in relief and rebuilding efforts so far. He acknowledged disappointment with the commission’s work in remarks to foreign reporters on Tuesday.

“Nobody’s been more frustrated than I am that we haven’t done more,” he said.

In his interview with Schiavocampo, Clinton said he was asked “a lot” by donors about what their money had been spent on.

“If someone wants to know how was their money spent and was it well spent, how do you answer that question?” he said. “Well, I think first of all, to answer how it was spent, I have to know to whom they gave it.

“But, for example, anyone who gave me money … I just raised for about three days $15 million  and we spent 85 percent of it and I can tell you how every penny of it was spent,” he added.

In Champs Mars, Port-au-Prince’s central plaza where thousands of families made homeless by the quake live in a sweltering tent city, residents said the official ceremonies and renewed pledges of aid and progress for Haiti from foreign officials, were like something taking place in another world.

Hundreds of thousands are still living in such camps and are falling victim to the cholera that has already taken some 3,750 lives since mid-October.

Political impasse
A political impasse since a disputed presidential election on November 28 has fueled further instability in the Caribbean country.

“I hear about aid on TV but us in Champs Mars, we’ve never seen it. We have no way to get out,” said 55-year-old Ginelle Pierre Louis.

“The diplomats pass through in the air, in helicopters, but they never come through here on the ground,” said Hyacinthe Mintha, 56, a resident of Champs Mars, which overlooks the heavily damaged presidential palace.

Mintha’s daughter, Hyacinthe Benita, 39, lives in a metal and wood shack with a frayed tarp roof and a thin pallet as the only bed for herself and her four children.

“We are still here in misery,” she said of the quake anniversary. “I hope this year brings serious change because 2010 was hell for us,” she added.

“The president’s right over there,” said Benita, gesturing toward the annex where Preval, who is deeply unpopular, works behind the presidential palace. “He’s never done anything for us, he’s never come to see us at all. They look at us like animals,” she said.

The new chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said Tuesday that real recovery and development in Haiti depended on accountability and strong leadership by the Caribbean country’s government.

“Leadership that is not there,” she said after returning to Miami International Airport. “It will be crucial, critical, necessary for Haiti’s next leader to take every step necessary to institute the needed changes to bring transparency, trust and credibility back to this nation.”

Ros-Lehtinen said future U.S. and international support for Haiti depended on concrete eff orts to curb corruption and graft. The congresswoman said she planned to reintroduce legislati on to increase oversight of U.S. funding to Haiti.

Cheryl Mills, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chief of staff, has said the U.S. could support throwing out the disputed results of Haiti’s first-round presidential election in November, if that’s what is proposed by a 12-member election team from the Organization of American States.

Fraudulent ballots
A draft copy of the OAS report on the election, obtained by The Associated Press, said the disputed vote should neither be thrown out entirely nor recounted.

But it said enough fraudulent or improper ballots should be invalidated to drop ruling-party candidate Jude Celestin into third place and out of the second-round runoff.

Denis O’Brien, a supporter of Bill Clinton and chairman of the Irish-owned cell phone company Digicel that is Haiti’s biggest foreign investor, told Reuters in an interview this week that the former U.S. leader had a solid understanding of what needs to be done to get Haiti back on its feet.

But one of his big problems, according to O’Brien, is that most members of Haiti’s ruling class have done little to help, seeking only to profit on the back of their nation’s catastrophe.

“There’s very few of the elite families that are actually doing a lot for Haiti,” O’Brien said.

“They’re making massive profits on the importation of goods, products, services, everything … Profiteering at a major scale is going on here,” he added.

Jimmy Jean-Louis, a Haitian-born actor and performer who now lives in Los Angeles but has visited his homeland frequently since the quake, said the ruling class had always benefited from chaos and mayhem in Haiti.

“The more destabilization there is, unfortunately, the more money the elite makes,” he said.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): PURECASHMAGAZINE, OUTBLUSH

Port-Au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) — It should be possible to keep an outbreak of cholera out of Haiti’s capital, but the potentially deadly disease remains a major risk, an international aid worker told CNN on Monday.

“I think we’ll be able to contain it fairly well, but it is a risk, it is a major risk,” said Jason Erb, deputy country director for the International Medical Corps.

The fast-moving outbreak has claimed at least 253 lives on the impoverished island nation, which has yet to recover from January’s massive earthquake. Another 3,015 cases have been reported, according to Haiti’s Health Ministry.

Even if the disease can be kept out of the capital, Port-au-Prince, it remains a serious risk in the tent camps that remain home to tens of thousands of earthquake survivors, Erb warned.

“It’s a danger because the camps are so crowded and so unhygienic,” he said on CNN’s “American Morning.”

Aid workers are trying to educate people about the importance of hand-washing and clean water in preventing the spread of cholera, he said.

A small number of cases have been reported in Port-au-Prince, but Erb said they seem to be the result of people carrying the disease from the camps — not from contaminated water in the capital.

And he cautioned against panic.

“You have to have quite a few people to contaminate a body of water,” he said. “It’s not just going to be one or two cases. That’s going to be quite controllable. It’s not good … but it’s not going to lead to a massive outbreak.”

There is “an awful lot of monitoring” for the disease, he said, and “cases generally don’t go unnoticed.”

Five patients in Port-au-Prince were infected north of the city in Artibonite, said Imogen Wall, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti.

They traveled to the nation’s main city, where health officials discovered them to be infected within the incubation period, she said.

The five have been isolated and are receiving treatment, she said.

Meanwhile, officials are stepping up sanitation efforts and setting up quarantine areas in Port-au-Prince. Authorities are bracing themselves for a possible larger outbreak nationwide.

“I think the only responsible thing we can do at the moment is prepare and plan for the worst-case scenario,” Wall said.

Wall said aid organizations are working on constructing facilities to treat patients and sending more doctors to the affected areas.

“We’re all right for supplies … but we’re short on medical personnel,” she said.

The cholera outbreak comes after recent heavy rains caused the banks of the Artibonite River to overflow and flood the area.

The river was dammed in 1956 to create Lac de Peligre and is Haiti’s dominant drainage system.

On Friday, officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Agency for International Development discussed efforts on a containment strategy for the outbreak.

The CDC will send an 11-member team to Haiti over the next few days to find out which antibiotics will be most effective in treating the outbreak.

USAID will provide supplies needed to set up treatment centers.

The group already has 300,000 oral re-hydration kits in position and is distributing water purification kits in affected areas.

Cholera is caused by a bacterial infection of the intestines and, in severe cases, is characterized by diarrhea, vomiting and leg cramps, according to the CDC. In such cases, rapid loss of body fluids can lead to dehydration and shock.

“Without treatment, death can occur within hours,” the agency says.

A person can get cholera by drinking water or eating food contaminated with the bacteria.

During epidemics, the source of the contamination is often the feces of an infected person, and infections can spread rapidly in areas where there is poor sewage treatment and a lack of clean drinking water.

All the reported cases in the Lower Artibonite involve severe diarrhea and vomiting, Wall said.

Ian Rawson, director of Hospital Albert Schweitzer Haiti near Verrettes, said patients began showing choleralike symptoms October 16.

The pace picked up significantly Tuesday and beyond, though he said the situation was under control Friday at his 80-bed facility about 16 miles east of St. Marc.

“So far, we’ve been able to manage it,” Rawson said, noting that new patients were now coming in via pickups about every 10 minutes.

Temperatures in the mid-90s exacerbated the dual concerns about dehydration and people contracting cholera by drinking tainted water.

People with buckets lined roadsides in and around villages, hoping that passers-by might have clean water, said Eric Lotz, Haiti’s national director for the nonprofit Operation Blessing.

The U.N. mission in Haiti credited access to clean water and free medical facilities for preventing feared outbreaks of cholera and tuberculosis.

Source (article): CNN

Source (pictures): PRESSTV, ONLINE.WORLDMAG, 101NEWS

COPIAPO, Chile  — Chile’s 33 newly rescued miners recovered from their ordeal on Thursday while also pondering the celebrity status they have gained following a more than two-month entrapment deep under a remote desert.

Most of the miners were found to be in decent health despite being stuck in a collapsed mine tunnel since August 5.

The men were resting in a hospital after being hoisted to the surface in a rescue operation watched by millions worldwide . One of the miners had pneumonia and was being treated with antibiotics.

In a complicated but flawless operation under the far northern desert of the South American nation, the miners were hauled out one-by-one through 2,050 feet of rock in a metal capsule little wider than a man’s shoulders.

With much of the world transfixed on TV, celebrations erupted in Chile. The miners, who set a world record for survival underground, were welcomed as national heroes.

It took about 22 hours from the time the first miner was brought to the surface until the last miner was pulled to freedom late on Wednesday, and then another roughly 2-1/2 hours until the last of the six rescuers also emerged from the gold and copper mine early on Thursday.

“It’s so incredible that they all made it out alive,” said 51-year-old Luis Pina, a miner, hugging a perfect stranger as he celebrated in the main square in Copiapo where thousands of people cheered and waved red, white and blue Chilean flags.

“We have done what the entire world was waiting for,” said shift foreman Luis Urzua who enforced tight rations of their limited food and supplies before help could arrive. “We had strength, we had spirit, we wanted to fight, we wanted to fight for our families, and that was the greatest thing.”

The first rescue worker down was last up — Manuel Gonzalez, a mine rescue expert with Chile’s state-owned Codelco copper company, talked the men through the final hours inside the mine. Then, he spent 26 minutes alone down below before he strapped himself into the capsule for the ride up. He reached the surface at 12:32 a.m. Thursday local time (11:32 p.m. Wednesday ET) to hugs from his comrades and President Sebastian Pinera.

Despite the suffering they went through, the previously unknown miners now have plenty to look forward to if they want to take up the offers open to them.

Among a flood of invitations and gifts, Real Madrid and Manchester United have invited the miners — many of whom are avid soccer fans — to watch them play in Europe.

Book, film contracts
A flamboyant local singer-turned-businessman has given them $10,000 each, while Apple boss Steve Jobs has sent them all a latest iPod and a Greek firm has offered an islands tour.

Most of the miners are unlikely to return to their old employment, with various job offers, plus book and film contracts, coming their way in the wake of their experience.

President Pinera, whose popularity has risen over his handling of the crisis, was at the San Jose mine in the Atacama desert to greet each man as he emerged and plans to host them at his palace in the capital Santiago.

“I hand the shift over to you,” Urzua, who was the last miner out, told Pinera.

Having suffered a massive earthquake in February that killed more than 500 people, Chileans were euphoric about the happy ending to their latest challenge and proud of the technology that went into the successful rescue.

Church bells and car horns sounded across Chile in celebration, while family members and well-wishers both wept and laughed for joy outside the mine.

President Barack Obama and other world leaders sent messages of congratulations, saying the miners’ survival was an inspiration to all.

When the mine caved in on August 5, the men were all thought dead in yet another of Latin America’s litany of mining accidents. But rescuers found them 17 days later with a bore hole the width of a grapefruit.

That tiny hole became an umbilical cord used to pass hydration gels, water and food to keep them alive until a bigger space could be bored to bring them up.

Mining has played a central but often sad role in Latin America since the Spanish conquistadors’ first hunt for gold.

For centuries, conditions were appalling but they have improved radically in recent decades and the industry has helped fuel an economic boom in some nations including Chile.

The rescue process — via a metal capsule named Phoenix after the mythical bird that rose from the ashes — will do no harm to the reputation of Chile, which is already an investor’s favorite in the region due to its economic progress.

“I hope that this serves as a lesson so that things change in Chilean mining,” said Gonzalez, the rescuer, after emerging. “I hope this never happens again.”

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (pictures): BOSTON.COM, IRISHTIMES

Copiapo, Chile (CNN) — In a desolate patch of Chile’s Atacama Desert, a world mesmerized by a 68-day tale of true grit expects a joyful ending Tuesday.

One by one, 33 miners, trapped in a gold and copper mine since the start of August, will put on green coveralls made of moisture-resisting material and personalized with names like Victor Antonio Segovia Rojas. Juan Illanes Palma. Alex Vega Salazar.

The oldest is 63. The youngest, only 19.

They’ll have on fresh underwear and socks when they climb into a claustrophobic capsule a little wider than the span of their shoulders.

They will be instructed on the communications equipment and the oxygen supply inside the rescue tube. And they will put on special goggles to protect their eyes, accustomed the vampiric darkness of the caved-in mine, to the lights up above.

Then the order to hoist will ring out and each man will begin a slow, bumpy, upward journey through half a mile of rock.

The men have been placed on liquid diets in case they vomit on the way to the surface and they have been exercising for an hour a day. One of the miners, Yonni Barrios, is a paramedic and has been weighing his fellow miners daily, taking blood tests and doing daily urine analysis.

It’s unclear exactly when the rescue will begin but it is likely to go from night into day. Some of the men will feel the intense chill of a desert night; others may come out to a searing sun burning high in a cloudless sky.

The rescue capsule will spin as it rises. It will be harrowing. And dark. Like a scary amusement park ride.

Except the thrill for these 33 men will lie at the end of the ride, when each will see the families they probably feared they would never see again.

“As he comes out he will be reborn,” said Nelly Bugueno about her son Victor Zamora Bugueno, a carrier pidgeon handler and a poet.

Nelly Bugueno has been camping out with the other families above the caved-in mine in this spartan area void of hotels, gas stations or any other amenities. They named it Camp Esperanza (Hope).

Tuesday, that hope was apparent as the families sang songs and could not contain the joy of long-awaited reunions.

Children played soccer in front of a red school house erected at the camp and 33 flags — 32 Chilean and a single Bolivian — representing the nationalities of the men buried underneath.

“God is in all places, At the same time your family loves you,” read a sign for Mario Nicolus Gomez Heredia, the oldest of the miners.

Gomez began mining at the tender age of 12. He became a spiritual leader for the trapped men and requested a crucifix and statuettes of saints so the men could construct a shrine.

But amid hope also lurked fear. What if something went wrong?

Claudio Lobos, brother of Franklin Lobos, 53, who once played soccer in a Chilean league, craved reassurance.

The cage looked small. Will his brother fit in there? Was it safe? he asked.

He was told the Chilean government has used every resource to save his brother. What more could a journalist say?

The first to come out will be five fit miners who possess the most technical know-how so that they can advise the rescue teams.

The next five will be the physically weakest, a term perhaps not appriopriate for anyone who has survived more than two months in the bowels of the earth. But one of the miners has diabetes; another has black lung.

The last to come out will be Luis Alberto Urzua Iribarren, 54. Like the captain of a sinking ship, the shift supervisor volunteered to stay behind until all his men were safe.

Once the men have been extracted, they will undergo about two hours of health checks at a field hospital set up at the mine. They will then be flown by helicopter to a hospital in the town of Copiapo — approximately a 15-minute flight.

Miners who are healthy enough will be allowed to visit briefly with family members in a reunion area before being taken to the hospital. Some have exhibited anxiety, according to Chilean Health Minister Jaime Manalich, and may experience psychological problems.

For the 33 men, the only contact with the outside world was through a small bore hole that sent them food, water and other supplies.

High above them, on a sweltering desert day, the buzz of electrical generators brought in by hordes of media began to drown out other sounds. About 1,500 journalists from 39 nations gathered hoping to tell a story survival.

But on this day, the entire world was watching with hope in their hearts for a very happy ending.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): GUARDIAN.CO, DAILYMAIL,