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Tag: Tsunamis

  • Today in History: December 26, deadly tsunami in Asia

    Today in History: December 26, deadly tsunami in Asia

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    Today in History

    Today is Monday, Dec. 26, the 360th day of 2022. There are five days left in the year.

    Today’s Highlight in History:

    On Dec. 26, 2004, more than 230,000 people, mostly in southern Asia, were killed by a 100-foot-high tsunami triggered by a 9.1-magnitude earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean.

    On this date:

    In 1799, former President George Washington was eulogized by Col. Henry Lee as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

    In 1865, James H. Nason of Franklin, Massachusetts, received a patent for “an improved coffee percolator.”

    In 1908, Jack Johnson became the first African-American boxer to win the world heavyweight championship as he defeated Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia.

    In 1917, during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation authorizing the government to take over operation of the nation’s railroads.

    In 1941, during World War II, Winston Churchill became the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress.

    In 1966, Kwanzaa was first celebrated.

    In 1980, Iranian television footage was broadcast in the United States showing a dozen of the American hostages sending messages to their families.

    In 1990, Nancy Cruzan, the young woman in an irreversible vegetative state whose case led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the right to die, died at a Missouri hospital.

    In 1994, French commandos stormed a hijacked Air France jetliner on the ground in Marseille, killing four Algerian hijackers and freeing 170 hostages.

    In 1996, six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado. (To date, the slaying remains unsolved.)

    In 2003, an earthquake struck the historic Iranian city of Bam, killing at least 26,000 people.

    In 2006, former President Gerald R. Ford died in Rancho Mirage, California, at age 93.

    Ten years ago: Toyota Motor Corp. said it had reached a settlement worth more than $1 billion in a case involving unintended acceleration problems in its vehicles. Soul singer Fontella Bass, 72, died in St. Louis.

    Five years ago: The snowfall total from a storm that began on Christmas Day reached 53 inches in Erie, Pennsylvania – the biggest-ever two-day total in the state’s history. The cities of New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia sued the Defense Department, charging that the military failed to properly use the national background check system for guns; the lawsuit said the failure to report criminal records of service members had allowed a former member of the Air Force to kill more than two dozen people at a Texas church in November. Voters in Liberia went to the polls for a runoff election that saw former soccer star George Weah elected as the African country’s new president.

    One year ago: South African Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu died at 90; the retired archbishop had been an uncompromising foe of apartheid and a modern-day activist for racial justice and LGBT rights. A major Christmas weekend storm caused whiteout conditions and closed key highways amid blowing snow in mountains of Northern California and Nevada.

    Today’s Birthdays: R&B singer Abdul “Duke” Fakir (The Four Tops) is 87. “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh is 77. Country musician Bob Carpenter (The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) is 76. Funk musician George Porter Jr. (The Meters) is 75. Baseball Hall of Fame catcher Carlton Fisk is 75. Retired MLB All-Star Chris Chambliss is 74. Baseball Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith is 68. Former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana is 67. Humorist David Sedaris is 66. Rock musician James Kottak (The Scorpions) is 60. Rock musician Lars Ulrich (Metallica) is 59. Actor Nadia Dajani is 57. Rock singer James Mercer (The Shins; Flake) is 52. Actor-singer Jared Leto is 51. Actor Kendra C. Johnson is 46. Rock singer Chris Daughtry is 43. Actor Beth Behrs is 37. Actor Kit Harington is 36. Actor Eden Sher is 31. Pop singer Jade Thirlwall (Little Mix Actor) is 30. Actor Zach Mills is 27.

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  • IAEA discusses Ukraine nuclear plant protections with Russia

    IAEA discusses Ukraine nuclear plant protections with Russia

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    KYIV, Ukraine — The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog met Thursday in Moscow with officials from Russia’s military and state atomic energy company as he pursues a long-running drive to set up a protection zone around a Russian-occupied nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

    Russian company Rosatom described the talks on measures needed to safeguard Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and the surrounding region as “substantive, useful and frank.” International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi indicated that more negotiations were needed after “another round of necessary discussions.”

    “It’s key that the zone focuses solely on preventing a nuclear accident,” he tweeted. “I am continuing my efforts towards this goal with a sense of utmost urgency.”

    The meeting in Moscow came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a defiant wartime visit to the U.S. capital, his first known trip outside his country in the nearly 10 months since Russia invaded.

    The visit to Washington was aimed at reinvigorating support for Ukraine in the U.S. and around the world at a time when Russia appears to have lost battlefield momentum. There is concern that Ukraine’s allies are growing weary of providing the military and economic assistance that have enabled Ukraine to keep fighting.

    The Russian military on Thursday reported that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu paid a visit to Russian troops on the front line what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine. The exact location of the visit was not disclosed.

    A video released by the Russian Defense Ministry showed Shoigu inspecting temporary troop quarters in dugouts and talking to military commanders.

    Before his trip to Washington, Zelenskyy met with Ukrainian troops in the eastern city of Bakhmut, the recent focus of some of the war’s most intense combat. Russian President Vladimir Putin has never been seen traveling to front-line areas. Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that Putin visited his Ukraine command headquarters last week, but its location wasn’t disclosed, and it wasn’t even clear if it was in Ukraine.

    The IAEA’s Grossi has urged Russia and Ukraine for over three months to agree on a safety zone around Europe’s largest nuclear power station. Zaporizhizia province and areas across the Dnieper River from the nuclear power plant have been under regular shelling since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly called for a demilitarized zone around the plant, which was seized by Russian forces early in the war.

    Although all six of the plant’s reactors are shut down, the reactor core and used nuclear fuel must still be cooled for lengthy periods to prevent them overheating and triggering dangerous meltdowns like the ones that occurred in 2011 when a tsunami hit the Fukushima plant in Japan. Ukraine saw the world’s worst nuclear accident, at Chernobyl in 1986.

    Ukraine and Russia have blamed each other for the repeated shelling, which has led on multiple occasions to the Zaporizhizia plant losing the electricity needed to operate the cooling system. Ukrainian officials earlier this month also accused Russian troops of installing multiple rocket launchers at the site.

    Grossi said in November that the main issues under discussion involve military equipment and the radius of the safety zone. He said the IAEA’s proposal is very simple: “Don’t shoot at the plant, don’t shoot from the plant.”

    ———

    Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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  • Strong quake shakes main Indonesia island; no tsunami alert

    Strong quake shakes main Indonesia island; no tsunami alert

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    JAKARTA, Indonesia — A strong earthquake shook parts of Indonesia’s main island of Java on Saturday, causing panic and sending people into the streets, but there were no immediate reports of casualties. Officials said there was no danger of a tsunami.

    The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at magnitude 5.7 and said it was centered about 18 kilometers (11 miles) southeast of Banjar, a city between West Java and Central Java provinces, at a depth of 112 kilometers (70 miles).

    A magnitude 5.6 earthquake on Nov. 21 killed at least 331 people and injured nearly 600 in West Java’s Cianjur city. It was the deadliest quake in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed about 4,340 people.

    Dwikorita Karnawati, head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysical Agency, said there was no danger of a tsunami but warned of possible aftershocks.

    The agency put a preliminary magnitude at 6.4. Variations in early measurements are common.

    High-rises in Jakarta, the capital, swayed for more than 10 seconds and some ordered evacuations, sending streams of people into the streets. Even two-story homes shook in Central Java’s cities of Kulon Progo, Bantul, Kebumen and Cilacap.

    Earthquakes occur frequently across the sprawling archipelago nation, but it is uncommon for them to be felt in Jakarta.

    The country of more than 270 million people is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin known as the “Ring of Fire.”

    In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.

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  • Magnitude 7 quake shocks Solomon Islands but no major damage

    Magnitude 7 quake shocks Solomon Islands but no major damage

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    WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A powerful magnitude 7.0 earthquake rattled the Solomon Islands Tuesday afternoon, overturning tables and sending people racing for higher ground.

    There were no immediate reports of widespread damage or injuries. An initial tsunami warning was withdrawn after the threat passed.

    Government spokesperson George Herming said he was in his office on the second floor of a building in the capital, Honiara, when the quake rocked the city. He said he crawled underneath his table.

    “It’s a huge one that just shocked everybody,” Herming said.

    “We have tables and desks, books and everything scattered all over the place as a result of the earthquake, but there’s no major damage to structure or buildings,” he said.

    Herming said the Solomon Islands, which is home to about 700,000 people, doesn’t have any big high-rises that might be vulnerable to a quake. He said there was some panic around the town and traffic jams as everybody tried to drive to higher ground.

    Freelance journalist Charley Piringi said he was standing outside near schools on the outskirts of Honiara when the quake sent the children running.

    “The earthquake rocked the place,” he said. “It was a huge one. We were all shocked, and everyone is running everywhere.”

    The quake’s epicenter was in the ocean about 56 kilometers (35 miles) southwest of Honiara at a depth of 13 kilometers (8 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

    The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially warned of possible hazardous waves for the region but later downgraded a tsunami warning as the threat passed.

    The Solomon Islands sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a arc along the Pacific Ocean rim where many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur.

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  • Over 100 dead, dozens missing in storm-ravaged Philippines

    Over 100 dead, dozens missing in storm-ravaged Philippines

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    MANILA, Philippines — More than 100 people have died in one of the most destructive storms to lash the Philippines this year with dozens more feared missing after villagers fled in the wrong direction and got buried in a boulder-laden mudslide. Almost two million others were swamped by floods in several provinces, officials said Monday.

    At least 53 of 105 people who died — mostly in flash floods and landslides — were from Maguindanao province in a Muslim autonomous region, which was swamped by unusually heavy rains set off by Tropical Storm Nalgae. The storm blew out into the South China Sea on Sunday, leaving a trail of destruction in a large swath of the archipelago.

    A large contingent of rescuers with bulldozers, backhoes and sniffer dogs resumed retrieval work in southern Kusiong village in hard-hit Maguindanao, where as many as 80 to 100 people, including entire families, are feared to have been buried by a boulder-laden mudslide or swept away by flash floods that started overnight Thursday, said Naguib Sinarimbo, the interior minister for the Bangsamoro autonomous region run by former separatist guerrillas under a peace pact.

    The government’s main disaster-response agency said there were at least 98 storm deaths, and seven other fatalities were later reported by three provincial governors. At least 69 people were injured and 63 others remain missing.

    About 1.9 million people were lashed by the storm, including more than 975,000 villagers who fled to evacuation centers or homes of relatives. At least 4,100 houses and 16,260 hectares (40,180 acres) of rice and other crops were damaged by floodwaters at a time when the country was bracing for a looming food crisis because of global supply disruptions, officials said.

    Sinarimbo said the official tally of missing people did not include most of those feared missing in the huge mudslide that hit Kusiong because entire families may have been buried and no member was left to provide names and details to authorities.

    The catastrophe in Kusiong, populated mostly by the Teduray ethnic minority group, was particularly tragic because its more than 2,000 villagers have carried out disaster-preparedness drills every year for decades to brace for a tsunami because of a deadly history. But they were not as prepared for the dangers that could come from Mount Minandar, where their village lies at the foothills, Sinarimbo said.

    “When the people heard the warning bells, they ran up and gathered in a church on a high ground,” Sinarimbo told The Associated Press on Saturday, citing accounts by Kusiong villagers.

    “The problem was, it was not a tsunami that inundated them but a big volume of water and mud that came down from the mountain,” he said.

    In August 1976, an 8.1-magnitude earthquake and a tsunami in the Moro Gulf that struck around midnight left thousands of people dead and devastated coastal provinces in one of the deadliest natural disasters in Philippine history.

    Lying between the Moro Gulf and 446-meter (1,464-foot) Mount Minandar, Kusiong was among the hardest hit by the 1976 catastrophe. The village never forgot the tragedy. Elderly villagers who survived the tsunami and powerful earthquake passed on the nightmarish story to their children, warning them to be prepared.

    “Every year, they hold drills to brace for a tsunami. Somebody was assigned to bang the alarm bells and they designated high grounds where people should run to,” Sinarimbo said. “Villagers were even taught the sound of an approaching big wave based on the recollection of the tsunami survivors.”

    “But there wasn’t as much focus on the geo-hazards on the mountainside,” he said.

    There were more than 100 rescuers from the army, police and volunteers from other provinces Saturday in Kusiong, but they were unable to dig at a spot where survivors said the church lay underneath because the muddy mound was still dangerously soft, officials said.

    A coast guard video provided to media on Monday showed some of its men helping search for buried bodies in Kusiong by poking long wooden sticks into the muddy, light-brown sludge.

    The stormy weather in a large swath of the country hindered transportation as millions of Filipinos planned to travel over a long weekend for visits to relatives’ tombs and for family reunions on All Saints’ Day in the largely Roman Catholic nation.

    Nearly 200 domestic and international flights were canceled, Manila’s international airport was briefly closed amid stormy weather and voyages in storm-whipped seas were prohibited by the coast guard, stranding thousands of passengers.

    Floodwaters swamped many provinces and cities, trapping some people on their roofs. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. inspected the extent of damage aboard a helicopter over Cavite province Monday and later handed boxes of food and other supplies to storm victims in Noveleta town, where some residents were trapped on their roofs at the height of flooding over the weekend.

    “The powerful surge of water destroyed the flood controls so there was so much flooding,” he told a news conference.

    About 20 typhoons and storms batter the Philippine archipelago each year. It is located on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a region along most of the Pacific Ocean rim where many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur, making the nation one of the world’s most disaster-prone.

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  • Philippine storm victims feared tsunami, ran toward mudslide

    Philippine storm victims feared tsunami, ran toward mudslide

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    MANILA, Philippines — Victims of a huge mudslide set off by a storm in a coastal Philippine village that had once been devastated by a killer tsunami mistakenly thought a tidal wave was coming and ran to higher ground where they were buried alive by the boulder-laden deluge, an official said Sunday.

    At least 20 bodies, including those of children, have been dug out by rescuers in the vast muddy mound that now covers much of Kusiong village in southern Maguindanao province, among the hardest-hit by Tropical Storm Nalgae, which blew out of the northwestern Philippines early Sunday.

    Officials fear 80 to 100 more people, including entire families, may have been buried by the deluge or washed away by flash floods in Kusiong between Thursday night and early Friday, according to Naguib Sinarimbo, the interior minister for a Muslim autonomous region run by former separatist guerrillas.

    Nalgae, which had vast rain clouds, left at least 73 people dead in eight provinces and one city in the Philippine archipelago, including in Kusiong, and a trail of destruction and flooding in one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries.

    The catastrophe in Kusiong, populated mostly by the Teduray ethnic minority group, was particularly tragic because its more than 2,000 villagers have carried out disaster-preparedness drills every year for decades to brace for a tsunami because of a deadly history. But they were not as prepared for the dangers that could come from Mount Minandar, where their village lies at the foothills, Sinarimbo said.

    “When the people heard the warning bells, they ran up and gathered in a church on a high ground,” Sinarimbo told The Associated Press, citing accounts by Kusiong villagers.

    “The problem was, it was not a tsunami that inundated them but a big volume of water and mud that came down from the mountain,” he said.

    In August 1976, an 8.1-magnitude earthquake and a tsunami in the Moro Gulf that struck around midnight left thousands of people dead and devastated coastal provinces in one of the deadliest natural disasters in Philippine history.

    Lying between the Moro Gulf and 446-meter (1,464-foot) Mount Minandar, Kusiong was among the hardest hit by the 1976 catastrophe. The village never forgot the tragedy. Elderly villagers who survived the tsunami and powerful earthquake passed on the nightmarish story to their children, warning them to be prepared.

    “Every year, they hold drills to brace for a tsunami. Somebody was assigned to bang the alarm bells and they designated high grounds where people should run to,” Sinarimbo said. “Villagers were even taught the sound of an approaching big wave based on the recollection of the tsunami survivors.”

    “But there wasn’t as much focus on the geo-hazards on the mountainside,” he said.

    Bulldozers, backhoes and payloaders were brought to Kusiong on Saturday with more than 100 rescuers from the army, police and volunteers from other provinces, but they were unable to dig at a spot where survivors said the church lay underneath because the muddy mound was still dangerously soft, officials said.

    The national disaster-response agency reported 22 missing from the storm’s onslaught in several provinces. Sinarimbo said many of the missing in Kusiong were not included in the government’s official tally because entire families may have been buried and no member was left to provide names and details to authorities.

    Army Lt. Col. Dennis Almorato, who went to the mudslide-hit community Saturday, said the muddy deluge buried about 60 rural houses in about 5 hectares (12 acres) of the community. He gave no estimate of how many villagers may have been buried but described the extent of the mudslide as “overwhelming” and said the nighttime disaster may have unfolded fast.

    A regional army commander, Major Gen. Roy Galido, has been ordered to lead an emergency command center to head search and retrieval work in Kusiong, officials said.

    The stormy weather in a large swath of the country prompted the coast guard to prohibit sea travel in dangerously rough seas as millions of Filipinos planned to travel over a long weekend for visits to relatives’ tombs and for family reunions on All Saints’ Day in the largely Roman Catholic nation.

    More than 100 domestic and international flights were canceled, Manila’s international airport was briefly closed amid stormy weather and sea voyages in storm-whipped seas were prohibited by the coast guard, stranding thousands of passengers.

    Floodwaters swamped many provinces and cities, trapping some people on their roofs, and more than 700 houses were damaged. More than 168,000 people fled to evacuation camps. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. expressed disappointment over the high casualty toll in a televised meeting with disaster-mitigation officials Saturday.

    “We should have done better,” Marcos Jr. said. “We were not able to anticipate that the volume of water will be that much so we were not able to warn the people and then to evacuate them out of the way of the incoming flash floods.”

    About 20 typhoons and storms batter the Philippine archipelago each year. It is located on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a region along most of the Pacific Ocean rim where many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur, making the nation one of the world’s most disaster-prone.

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