An unexpectedly severe snowstorm dumped half a foot or more snow across much of eastern Nebraska on Sunday, shut down an 80-mile stretch of Interstate 80 and was at least partially to blame for a crash southeast of Lincoln that killed a 22-year-old Sterling man. The Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office said Loren D. Muhm died after he lost control of his 2003 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and collided with an oncoming van on icy Nebraska 43 near Bennet. The other driver was uninjured. West of the Capital City, authorities shut down an 83-mile stretch of Interstate 80 as they dug out drivers stranded in the whiteout conditions. Eastbound lanes were closed from Grand Island to Northwest 48th Street in Lincoln, and westbound lanes from Northwest 48th to York. James Barger, a truck driver for Pierce, Colo.-based Indian Creek Express, said he was at the front of a massive pileup on the interstate just west of Goehner in Seward County on Sunday morning. He spoke to a reporter on the phone from a Red Cross shelter at 105 S. Sixth St. in Seward.
“My truck’s probably totaled, at least severely damaged,” he said. “These nice folks tracked me down a motel room for me and my dog.” Barger left the rest stop east of Goehner about 8 a.m. and within minutes, he came across a driver who’d stopped his Honda Civic along westbound I-80 because of the slippery conditions. Barger said he was helping the driver when a pair of trucks behind them started to jackknife, one going into the median and the other covering the roadway. A chain reaction crash resulted, ensnaring some 15 vehicles — at least, Barger said — but resulting in no major injuries that Barger was aware of after talking to rescue workers at the scene. State troopers still were assisting motorists and a Nebraska State Patrol spokeswoman wasn’t able to provide specifics on any crashes Sunday afternoon, but a dispatcher said she was unaware of any significant injuries or fatalities on the interstate between Lincoln and Waco. The closures left thousands of visitors stranded in Lincoln, either forced off the interstate at Northwest 48th Street or unable to leave after attended high school basketball tournament games.
A stream of semitrailers and family vehicles poured into west Lincoln for much of the day, with police working to keep things moving. Officers directed westbound traffic off West O Street at Northwest 48th in order to keep drivers off U.S. 6 and allow those on the interstate to spill into town, Lincoln Police Capt. David Beggs said. U.S. 6 was closed in both directions as far west as the Seward area. The state Department of Roads urged caution on almost all major roadways in Nebraska. A member of the public reported measuring 4 inches of snow in Lincoln at I-80 and Cornhusker Highway about 12:30 p.m., according to the National Weather Service. An additional 2 to 3 inches was in the forecast. Snow measurements varied across the region, with the heaviest amounts falling in a stretch north of Lincoln from Butler County through Saunders, Dodge, Burt and Washington counties and into Iowa, based on information from early Sunday posted Web page of the Weather Service office in Valley. Those counties were under a winter storm warning. Lancaster and Seward counties were also placed under winter storm warnings due to the near-blizzard conditions, said Scott Dergan, a meterologist in Valley.
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REBECCA S. GRATZ/THE WORLD-HERALD
Looking northbound on 132nd Street, south of Dodge Street, traffic moves slowly as snow blows back into the roadway Sunday morning.
A Sunday winter storm made driving conditions hazardous for a good chunk of the nearly 6,000 men’s basketball fans who had headed to St. Louis to cheer on the Creighton Bluejays.
Laura and Tom Walker of Omaha planned to spend the night in St. Joseph, Mo., not wanting to risk travel on Interstate 29. The Iowa Department of Transportation had advised against taking the highway because of low visibility and poor road conditions.
“We’ve been getting messages from all the kids’ friends saying how bad the weather is in Omaha,” said Laura Walker, who along with her husband had gone to St. Louis with their teenage son and daughter and two other kids. “We have a couple of my son’s friends with us, too, so their parents were leaning toward us spending the night.”
The storm ended up being much worse than initially forecast, dumping 6-10 inches of snow in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa, said Erik Pindrock, a meteorologist with AccuWeather, The World-Herald’s weather consultant.
Pindrock said Lincoln had reported 7 inches of snow late Sunday, while Fremont was near 9 inches.
Final totals for the Omaha metropolitan area were not immediately available, and the snow was expected to fall until as late as 1 this morning.
Poor conditions closed Interstate 80 between Lincoln and Grand Island for much of the day — the roadway had reopened by about 9 p.m. — and canceled a handful of flights in and out of Eppley Airfield at the height of the storm, between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
The decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline will be the first major climate change decision Obama will make during his second term. And given Obama’s strong comments on climate change during both his inaugural address and the State of the Union, Whitehouse said it’ll be hard for him to approve the project.
“It would create a huge credibility gap with the administration if they go that way,” he said.
The southern portion of the pipeline — from Oklahoma to Texas — is already under construction, and the 1,179-mile portion from Alberta to Nebraska is awaiting approval of a presidential permit from Obama. Last month, Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman approved a revised route for the pipeline after the state’s Department of Environmental Quality said the route avoided sensitive areas of the Sandhills region.
The State Department will incorporate the Nebraska evaluation into the supplemental environmental review that will help inform the recommendation Secretary of State John Kerry will make to the president. Kerry thus far hasn’t shown his hand on whether he supports the project or not, but has said that he is committed to studying the pipeline and finishing the process begun by his predecessor, Hillary Clinton.
Kerry’s first foreign guest in his new job was Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, and the two stressed that the economies of the two countries were inextricably linked and important to the other.
But to California billionaire investor Tom Steyer, the idea that investment in Canada should be the basis for economic growth in America is folly, and he said the investment will keep the U.S. economy dependent on oil for decades.
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration has delayed a decision on TransCanada Corp’s rerouted Keystone XL oil pipeline until after March, even though Nebraska’s governor on Tuesday approved a plan for part of the line running through his state.
“We don’t anticipate being able to conclude our own review before the end of the first quarter of this year,” said Victoria Nuland, a spokeswoman at the State Department, which had previously said it would make a decision by that deadline.
She said the department would take into consideration approval of the line by Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman.
Interest in the fate of the $5.3 billion pipeline that would link Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Texas has been heightened after President Barack Obama promised to fight climate change.
Obama said in his inaugural address on Monday the United States will respond to the threat of climate change and that failure to do so would “betray our children and future generations.
The Keystone pipeline is staunchly opposed by environmentalists, who say it will lock the United States for 50 years into dependence on fuel that has higher emissions than average crude oil refined in the United States.
They want the State Department to re-examine the climate impact of the line after it previously said the project would not result in additional emissions because the oil would find its way to market even if Keystone were not built.
An earthquake in Southern Maine reverberated all the way to the Boston metropolitan area at 7:12 p.m. Tuesday evening.
“Notice how it seemed to kind of ‘roll’ through, shaking momentarily but kind of coming in a wave,” New England Sports Network, based in Boston, reported of feeling the quake.
Registering at a 4.5 magnitude, the temblor was centered 3.7 miles Maine’s Lake Arrowhead, Reuters reported.
There were no reported injuries or damage.
Maine has experienced over 80 earthquakes since 1997, according to the state’s Bureau of Geology. The state’s most serious earthquake was in 1904. It registered as a 5.1 on the Richter scale, and was felt through most of New England and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) – An earthquake that hit southern Maine Tuesday night rattled nearby New England states as far as Connecticut, including the Boston area, but caused no injuries or apparent damage.
The U.S. Geological Survey at first estimated the 7:12 p.m. quake as a 4.6 magnitude, but later downgraded that to 4.0. The epicenter, about 3 miles west of Hollis Center, Maine, is about 3 miles deep. That location is about 20 miles west of Portland.
About 10 miles away in Waterboro, about 20 customers and staff at Waterboro House of Pizza ran outside when they heard a loud bang and the building shook.
“It was loudest bang you ever heard in your life. We actually thought it was an explosion of some type,” said owner Jessica Hill. “The back door and door to the basement blew open.”
In the same town, employees at the Milk Room said towels and other items started falling off shelves.
“I heard a bang, and it felt like the building was just shaking it went on for three seconds and then it started shaking again,” said George Moutsos, an employee.
In nearby Saco, Sue Hadiaris said, “The whole house shook. It felt like a train was coming right through the house. It was very unnerving because you could feel the floor shaking. There was a queasy feeling.”
Afterward, Hadiaris called her 15-year-old niece in Falmouth to make sure she was safe. “She said, `We can cross that off our bucket list. We’ve lived through an earthquake,”‘ Hadiaris said.
Lynette Miller, a spokeswoman for the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said her dogs started barking several seconds before the quake. “It was several seconds of good shaking but nothing falling down,” Miller said from her home in Readfield, about 60 miles north of Portland.
The Seabrook Station nuclear plant, about 63 miles away in New Hampshire, declared an unusual event — the lowest of four emergency classifications, but said it was not affected. The plant has been offline for refueling.
“There has been no impact at all to the plant from the earthquake and our refueling maintenance activities have not been affected,” said Alan Griffith, spokesman for Next EnergyEra Seabrook Station.
Jim Van Dongen, public information officer for the New Hampshire Department of Safety said New Hampshire 911 got about 1,000 calls in the first hour after the quake, but they later dropped off. He said no major damage was reported.
Brief, but noticeable shaking was felt in downtown Boston and the surrounding area.
In Melrose, just north of Boston, Peter Ward said the shaking he felt seemed to last about four seconds. “It felt like a big gust of wind shaking the house. I don’t want to overstate it, but the glass did rattle a little,” he said.
Former Maine resident Victoria Brett, who also has lived in San Francisco, felt the quake in Northampton, Mass.
“At first, it felt like something slowly wiggling the outside walls of the house. Then the table and floor started vibrating. I looked around and the water in the glass flower vase looked like a wave pool. I knew right away it was an earthquake,” she said.
Earthquakes are rare in New England but they’re not unheard of. In 2006 there was a series of earthquakes around Maine’s Acadia National Park, including one with a magnitude of 4.2 that caused boulders to fall from ledges onto Acadia National Park’s loop road. One of the park’s trails was closed for three years because of damage from the quake.
The strongest earthquake recorded in Maine occurred in 1904 in the Eastport area, near the state’s eastern border with Canada, according the Weston Observatory at Boston College. With a magnitude estimated at 5.7 to 5.9, it damaged chimneys and brick walls and could be felt in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
East Coast quakes are rarely strong enough to be felt over a wide area. A quake of magnitude 5.8 on Aug. 23, 2011, was centered in Virginia and felt all along the coast, including in New York City and Boston. Experts say the region’s geology can make the effects felt in an area up to 10 times larger than quakes of similar size on the West Coast.
RENO, Nev. (KRNV & MyNews4.com) — Some rattling and rolling in the area has earthquake experts on alert. In the past week more than 100 small earthquakes have shaken the earth beneath Spanish Springs.
So far they’ve been too small to feel, but quake experts want you to know they’re happening. There’s no reason to panic – but it’s a good reminder to make sure you’re prepared.
“People can consider certain mitigation steps in case these earthquakes increase in intensity and there’s a larger one,” said Ken Smith, associate director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory.
Smith says most injuries from earthquakes are caused by falling or flying objects – and you don’t want to wait for a big quake to get ready.
“Secure your water heaters. Secure your valuables. Secure your book cases,” Smith said.
It’s not strange for a dozen quakes this size to happen in a week, but there have been at least 115 since October 8, and about 60 of those have been since Thursday.
“These things are totally unpredictable,” Smith said. “It could stop today, or it could keep going at a level of very small events that no one would feel.”
Or they could get stronger. so far they’re small – with the biggest two quakes shaking at magnitude one – but there’s potential for one that really rocks Reno.
“We have faults around here that are capable of magnitude seven type events,” Smith said.
So this week the Great Nevada Shakeout will teach people to drop, cover and hold-on just in case there’s a big quake. It’s Nevada’s largest earthquake drill and it’s this Thursday, October 18 at 10:18 am.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) says an earthquake occurred Wednesday evening in Western Nebraska. About 1330 miles southeast of Rapid City.
The 3.6 magnitude earthquake occurred at 11:21 pm at a depth of about4 miles , 18 miles northwest of Hyannis, Nebraska.
Although not as common as in some other states earthquakes do occur in Nebraska. The strongest occurred on November 15, 1877 with a magnitude of 5.1. Two shocks 45 minutes apart rocked most of Nebraska and portions of surrounding states , including South Dakota.
In this Oct. 15, 2009 file photo, children participate in the “Great California ShakeOut” earthquake drill at the Para Los Ninos Elementary School in Los Angeles. Millions in the United States and several countries are set to participate in an earthquake preparedness drill, dubbed the “Great ShakeOut,” Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012.
LOS ANGELES — Get ready to rumble. Millions in the United States and several countries are set to participate in an earthquake preparedness drill Thursday.
Dubbed the “Great ShakeOut,” homeowners, schoolchildren and office workers across the West and Southeast will practice dropping to the ground, covering their heads and holding on to something sturdy – a technique that experts say minimizes injuries during strong shaking. Residents in British Columbia, Italy, Puerto Rico and Guam also signed up for the exercise.
Organizers estimated some 14 million people, including 9.3 million in California, will participate. Newcomers include Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where a magnitude-5.8 hit last year that was felt along the East Coast.
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Northeast Shaken by Quake
In Los Angeles, commuters at Union Station will be asked to duck and take cover. Subways and light-rail trains will slow down so that operators can visually inspect the tracks – a process that’s expected to take 15 minutes. In an actual quake, trains can be stopped. Transportation officials also planned to show the public tips to safely evacuate a train.
Southern California held the first safety drill in 2008 based on a fictional magnitude-7.8 event on the southern San Andreas Fault. The entire state participated the following year and the exercise has since spread around the world.
“It’s not looking at earthquakes as doom and gloom,” said organizer Mark Benthien. “It’s all about what we’re going to do as a community to be prepared so that when there’s an earthquake, we’ll get back on our feet and recover.”
Southern California has not experienced a seismic disaster since the 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 72 people and caused $25 billion in damage to the Los Angeles region.
Listado Terremotos últimos 10 días
List of Earthquakes For The Last 10 days
Terremotos de los últimos 10 días en las Islas Canarias de magnitud igual o superior a 1.5 o sentidos:
List of earthquakes for the last 10 days for the Canary Islands of magnitude equal to or greater than 1.5
La información de terremotos de magnitud inferior se puede obtener en Catálogo y boletines sísmicos. Information for earthquakes of lesser intensity can be obtained at Catálogo y boletines sísmicos.Esta información está sujeta a modificaciones como consecuencia de la continua revisión del análisis sísmico.This information is subject to modification as a consequence of continuous revision and analysis of seismic data.Event Date Time Lat. Long. Depth Mag. Location Info.
Chief of Police in Hvolsvöllur, a representative of the Icelandic Road Administration and geophysicist Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson will discuss at a meeting on Thursday whether the levees to the east of Vík, which lies across the Ring Road near the river Múlakvísl, must be raised to prove effective in case of a volcanic eruption in Katla.
Vík. Photo by Bernhild Vögel.
Geologist Ari Trausti Guðmundsson stated in an article in Morgunblaðið yesterday that it is important to raise the levees judging by the information available on the volume and depth of flooding from Katla, ruv.is reports.
The volcano lies underneath the Mýrdalsjökull icecap and a volcanic eruption is likely to cause a major glacier outburst.
The levees are the responsibility of the Icelandic Road Administration and according to a report conducted by Einar Hafliðason, a representative of the Road Administration, last spring there was no need to raise the levees given the conditions at hand.
The levees are now five meters high and 4,000-5,000 meters long.
Scientists are monitoring the volcano closely due to ongoing seismic activity.
An underwater volcanic eruption was detected Wednesday morning close to Minami-Iwoto island in the Pacific Ocean and an expert speculated that the eruption could form a permanent island. A coast guard vessel spotted a white plume of smoke rising from the sea about three miles north-northeast of the island. It was the first time since July 2005 that volcanic smoke had been detected in the area, which is located about 745 miles south of central Tokyo. According to an announcement by the 3rd Regional Coast Guard Headquarters of the Japan Coast Guard, based in Yokohama, the volcano spewed ash and smoke about 100 meters into the air, and the surrounding sea area changed to a yellowish-green color while other parts became a cloudy gray. According to the Meteorological Agency, the volcano, known as Fukutokuokanoba, has erupted seven times since 1904, when its activities were first recorded. On three occasions, land masses were formed, but all later sank below the waterline. Tokyo Institute of Technology Prof. Kenji Nogami, an expert in geoscience, said: “In the 1986 eruption, a new island appeared after lava accumulated. The island was washed away by waves, but seabed upheaval reduced the water depth to 22 meters in 1999. It’s possible that this (recent) volcanic activity could form a permanent island.”
The highest active volcano in Eurasia, Klyuchevskaya Sopka has started to erupt, officials with the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said. On the night of October 15, there was light seen over the summit of the volcano indicating a blowout of lava in its crater, Vesti.ru reports. Experts believe the release of ash to the height of 6 feet above sea level may start any moment. Lava flows on the slopes of the volcano are also expected. Yellow aviation color code has been assigned to the volcano to warn about the potential danger that the volcanic ash and gases may pose to aircraft engines. Nothing has been said about the possible threat to human settlements. The nearest settlement is 30 kilometers far from Klyuchevskaya Sopka. The last eruption of Klyuchevskaya Sopka took place from September 2009 to December 2010. In June this year, the giant began to wake up again.
disclaimer: image is for illustration purposes only
Increasing drought conditions across the planet are part of a “new normal” which oddly presents new business opportunities, a new Bank of America Merrill Lynch report says.
The report comes just after insurer Munich Re’s findings that North America has borne the brunt of weather-related natural catastrophes, with 30,000 deaths and insured losses of $510 billion in the 1980-2011 period.
The ongoing drought is the worst in the United States since at least 1956, with 63 percent of the lower 48 states suffering drought conditions in August, says the BofA Merrill Lynch report, “Global Drought — Opportunities and Risks.”
While conditions are far from those in the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, drought conditions are the new normal, the report said.
Previous reports in a series focused on obesity, energy efficiency and safety and security.
“Food, water and energy security are increasingly bigger issues, and as governments, businesses and other players struggle to adapt to and mitigate drought conditions, there will be an evolving set of opportunities and risks for investors,” the bankers said in their findings.
For investors interested in the fight against drought and in promoting food, water and energy security, the financial group has introduced a screen that identifies liquid stocks exposed to global drought-related themes under the Bloomberg ticker MLEIARID.
The stocks included in the screen are those that it considers to be long-term solution providers in such areas as water, fertilizers, crop science, energy efficiency, second-generation biofuels and renewables.
“The severity of the global drought underscores the long-term challenges for national and global economies,” said Sarbjit Nahal, a co-author of the report.
“Food, water and energy security are increasingly bigger issues, and as governments, businesses and other players struggle to adapt to and mitigate drought conditions, there will be an evolving set of opportunities and risks for investors.”
The Munich Re report also cited conditions in which North American stakeholders could benefit by learning about the weather risks.
The study was prepared in order to support underwriters and Munich Re clients in North America, the world’s largest insurance and reinsurance market.
“The North American continent is exposed to every type of hazardous weather peril — tropical cyclone, thunderstorm, winter storm, tornado, wildfire, drought and flood. One reason for this is that there is no mountain range running east to west that separates hot from cold air,” said the report.
Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America, it said.
Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research unit head Peter Hoppe called on all concerned to “collaborate and close ranks” to meet the situation.
Peter Roder, Munich Re board member with responsibility for the U.S. market, said, “We should prepare for the weather risk changes that lie ahead, and nowhere more so than in North America.”
Twenty-two houses at Kampung Sungai Burung and Jalan Baru Sungai Korok here were badly damaged during a severe thunderstorm today. In the noon incident, the winds blew away rooftops while falling trees compounded the destruction on the houses. Resident Zulkiflee Mat Yusof, 50, said many of the electrical items in his house were damaged by rain water, fanned by the winds into the house. A Bakso stall operator who only wanted to be identified as Anis, 31, said she was busy serving customers when the thunderstorm struck. “It was so sudden that I had no time to act,” she said, finding her stall and wares completely destroyed in the aftermath. Senior citizen Jamaludin Ahamad, 65, said he and his family were having their lunch in the living room when a tree at the back of the house fell and hit the kitchen roof.
Tropical Cyclone Anais is estimated to have a maximum wind of 115 mph as of early this morning, which is equivalent to a category 3 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean.
The southwestern Indian Ocean is prone to tropical cyclones but what makes Anais so rare is that it is occurring in October, which is early springtime in the southern Hemisphere.
The peak period for tropical events in this part of the world is normally during our winter months of January-March.
Anais is forecast to move southwest in the general direction of Madagascar for the next five days and weaken as it moves into cooler waters and unfavorable winds.
We rarely hear much about the southern Indian Ocean storms as the area has little land and the storms mostly stay at sea.
Occasionally Madagascar or the island nations of Mauritius and Reunion will take a hit, and more rarely a storm will reach mainland Africa.
Forecast responsibility for this region is through the French weather service, Meteo France, located in La Reunion to the east of Madagascar.
The countries in the Indian Ocean simply refer to these storms as Tropical Cyclones, regardless of intensity.
Tropical Cyclone Anais is the same thing as a hurricane in the Atlantic or typhoon in the western Pacific.
However, note that it rotates the opposite direction, clockwise, because it is in the southern Hemisphere.
To illustrate how unusual this event is, Anais is like having a Category 3 hurricane in the Caribbean in April.
Storm surges are considered to be the most dangerous and the most destructive aspect of tropical cyclones. The study shows that globally warm years has been associated with a significantly higher risk of extreme hurricane storm surges like the one that followed Katrina, which hit the New Orleans area in 2005 and caused devastating floods and thousands of deaths. Credit: Credit: LCDR Mark Moran, NOAA Corps, NMAO/AOC.
Are there more tropical cyclones now than in the past? – or is it just something we believe because we now hear more about them through media coverage and are better able detect them with satellites?
New research from the Niels Bohr Institute clearly shows that there is an increasing tendency for cyclones when the climate is warmer, as it has been in recent years. The results are published in the scientific journal PNAS.
How can you examine the frequency of tropical cyclones throughout history when they have not been systematically registered? Today cyclones are monitored from satellites and you can follow their progress and direction very accurately. But it is only the last approx. 40 years that we have been able to do this.
Previously, they used observations from ships and aircraft, but these were not systematic measurements. In order to get a long-term view of the frequency of cyclones, it is necessary to go further back in time and use a uniform reference.
Climate scientist Aslak Grinsted of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen therefore wanted to find some instruments that have stood and registered measurements continuously over a long period of time.
Correlation between sea levels and cyclones “Tropical cyclones typically form out in the Atlantic Ocean and move towards the U.S. East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico.
“I found that there were monitoring stations along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States where they had recorded the daily tide levels all the way back to 1923.
“I have looked at every time there was a rapid change in sea level and I could see that there was a close correlation between sudden changes in sea level and historical accounts of tropical storms,” explains Aslak Grinsted.
Aslak Grinsted now had a tool to create statistics on the frequency of cyclones that make landfall – all the way back to 1923. He could see that there has been an increasing trend in the number of major storm surges since 1923.
Correlation between cyclones and climate Together with colleagues in China and England, he then looked at the global temperatures over the period to see whether there was a trend for a higher frequency of cyclones in a warmer climate.
The global temperature has increased 0.7 degrees C since 1923, but there are variations. For example, there was a warm period in the 1940s but the temperature has really risen since 1980.
“We simply counted how many extreme cyclones with storm surges there were in warm years compared to cold years and we could see that there was a tendency for more cyclones in warmer years,” says Aslak Grinsted.
But not all cyclones are equally harmful and those with the highest storm surges tend to cause the most damage. Cyclones with a strength like Katrina, which hit the New Orleans area in 2005 and caused devastating floods and thousands of deaths, make landfall every 10-30 years on average.
“We have calculated that extreme hurricane surges like Katrina are twice as likely in warm years than in cold years. So when the global climate becomes 3 degrees warmer in the future, as predictions show, what happens then?,” reflects Aslak Grinsted.
At least eight people were injured as a round of severe storms, including a few tornadoes, swept through the Mississippi Valley and South Wednesday and Wednesday night.
A potent cold front moving across the Lower Mississippi Valley acted as the ignition for the thunderstorms. Enough humid air was in place to support the growth of severe thunderstorms capable of spawning tornadoes. Twisting winds in the atmosphere aided the rotation in thunderstorms, further aiding tornado development.
Strong winds, wind damage or hail was reported across a half dozen states in total, from Illinois to Mississippi.
One particularly damaging tornado tracked across Sharkey County, Miss., shortly before 11:00 p.m. local time, destroying numerous mobile homes and injuring five near the town of Louise, which sustained “heavy” damage according to local law enforcement.
The same tornadic thunderstorm narrowly missed nearby Yazoo City, which was devastated by a pair of tornadoes in 2010.
The towns of Clarendon and West Jericho, Ark., and Shelby, Miss., were also impacted by tornadoes Wednesday evening, according to various reports.
Severe storm reports from Wed., Oct. 17. Strong winds and wind damage incidents are indicated in blue, while tornadoes are plotted in red and hail in green. (SPC)
It is possible that more tornadoes will be confirmed to have touched down across the region as other incidents of wind damage are assessed by the National Weather Service over the next couple of days.
One such incident occurred in Scott County, Miss., where a person was injured when a tree fell onto their mobile home.
Strong thunderstorm winds heavily damaged about a dozen buildings in Bland, Mo., earlier in the day, including the town’s post office, where two people sustained minor injuries.
As of 4:30 a.m. EST Thursday, there were nearly 100 reports of severe weather and damage from the severe weather outbreak. Eighty of the reports alone were wind damage, ranging from downed trees and power lines to partially collapsed structures.
While not as prolific, a few storms produced one-inch diameter hail stones in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee.
The National Weather Service has confirmed that at least four tornadoes were part of the storm system that raked northern and central Mississippi on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. The biggest of the four storms was a twister that traveled 16 miles from Scott into Newton counties east of Jackson. With a half-mile-wide damage path, it was rated EF-3 on the Fujita scale, with peak winds estimated at 140 mph. That storm blew down trees as well as three electrical transmission towers. One person was injured when a tree fell through a roof. Authorities said Thursday that at least seven people were injured when a line of storms pushed across the state.
As severe storms pounded central and eastern Arkansas Wednesday evening, the Monroe County town of Clarendon experienced widespread power outages and heavy damage to some buildings. With most of the town without power for much of the night, several community members drove around town trying to offer help as best they could. Metal awnings from a building were ripped off and tossed across the street, and trees were downed, including one that hit a Clarendon video store just moments after the owner, Denise Davenport, left. Davenport said she left after friends called her and told her the storm was approaching. Shortly afterward, she says she heard the city’s weather sirens sound. Davenport also credits the support from the community for keeping her safe in a dangerous situation.
By John Breneman jbreneman@seacoastonline.com
SEABROOK — An “unusual event” indeed. The 4.0 magnitude earthquake that rumbled across the Seacoast and beyond Tuesday evening triggered normal safety protocols at the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission declared an “unusual event” — NRC-speak for the lowest of its four levels of emergency classifications — at 7:20 p.m. Tuesday. The declaration was prompted by on-site ground motion resulting from an earthquake centered near Hollis, Maine — about 50 miles from the plant.
“There was absolutely no impact to the plant from the earthquake,” said Al Griffith, spokesman for NextEra Energy, the plant’s owner. Griffith said a series of mandated safety checks were conducted at the plant, concluding at 1:49 a.m., some six and a half hours after the tremor.
Citing the “robustness” of the plant’s design, Griffith assured that it is capable of withstanding a far, far greater impact than Tuesday’s quake.
There are seismic monitors on site and Griffith said officials will be conducting “a very thorough examination and analysis of all of our data.”
An NRC resident inspector assigned to Seabrook responded to the site last night to confirm that there were no immediate safety issues at the plant, which is currently shut down for a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage.
“The reactor was fully shut down at the time the earthquake occurred,” said Neil Sheehan, regional public officer for the NRC.
“Following procedures used when there is seismic activity affecting the plant, NextEra personnel conducted initial walkdowns, i.e., visual inspections, and confirmed that all key safety systems were functioning properly and that there was no significant structural damage,” Sheehan said in a statement. “The company will subsequently gather more seismic data and perform more detailed inspections.”
Asked about the need to be vigilant in preparing for and reacting to any seismic activity, particularly in the wake of the March 2011 disaster following an earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, Sheehan said, “What happened at Fukushima served as a vivid reminder” of why the highest safety protocols are put in place and enforced.
Last April, NextEra Energy conducted a tsunami drill Tuesday at the Seabrook Station plant in order to identify strengths and weaknesses of the plant in case of such a disaster.
Health experts have confirmed an outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus in the western district of Kabale after samples from two relatives taken to the Uganda Virus Institute tested positive. Police Thursday stopped the burial of Boaz Turyahikayo a lecturer at Uganda Christian University and his sister Mildrid Asasira after it emerged that their family had lost four people from a mysterious disease in just a month. The other two are Lillian Banegura their mother and an elder brother Bernard Rutaro who passed away early this month. Dr. Patrick Tusiime the Kabale district health officer said a team from the Ministry of Health and World Health Organization is on its way to oversee the burial of the two victims. The Marburg virus was last reported in Uganda in 2008. It carries symptoms similar to those of Ebola that include fever, vomiting and internal bleeding.
Biohazard name:
Marburg virus disease (MVD)
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Eighteen people are confirmed to be suffering from dengue fever in the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira and another 191 probably have the mosquito-borne disease which is also called “breakbone fever” because of the severe pain it can cause. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC.L) which monitors disease in the European Union, said the outbreak was “significant but not entirely unexpected” given that the most efficient carriers of the disease, mosquitoes known as Aedes aegypti, have an established presence in Madeira. “Portuguese public health authorities are implementing control measures to reduce the risk of sustained transmission locally, the export of infected vectors from the island, and to minimise the impact on the affected population,” it said. The ECDC said the risk for tourists visiting Madeira and for residents of the island would “depend on the course of the outbreak in the coming weeks and the effectiveness of the control measures.” It did not recommend any restrictions on travel or tourism to Madeira, but advised people to protect themselves adequately against mosquito bites, particularly during the day which is when dengue-carrying mosquitoes are most active.
Biohazard name:
Dengue Fever
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
Symptoms:
The disease is a viral infection that can cause a range of symptoms, from mild flu-like illness to more serious illnesses including rashes and bone pain. Severe and potentially deadly forms develop in around 5 percent of patients.
The United Kingdomâs Health Protection Agency reported 18 confirmed cases of dengue fever on the Madeira archipelago in Portugal and 191 probable cases since early October. The reported cases mark the first time that the mosquito-borne viral infection has been reported in Madeira. Health authorities in Madeira are looking into the cases and are implementing prevention and control measures along with a public awareness campaign. âDengue fever cannot be passed from person to person and infection occurs after being bitten by the Aedes mosquito carrying the virus,â Jane Jones, a travel-associated infection expert at the HPA, said. âTo minimize the risk of being bitten it is advisable to wear appropriate clothing to cover up â such as long sleeve tops and trousers, and to use insect repellents.â Dengue can cause multiple clinical symptoms, including a mild flu-like illness. It can also cause more serious symptoms such as rash, bone pain and severe complications. âThere is no specific preventive medicine or vaccination against dengue fever and prevention relies on avoiding mosquito bites particularly around dusk and dawn when the day biting mosquitoes are most active,â Dipti Patel, the joint director of the National Travel Health Network and Center, said. âAnyone who develops a fever or flu-like symptoms within two weeks of returning from a trip to Madeira should seek medical advice from NHS Direct or their GP.â Approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide are at risk of acquiring dengue fever, according to the World Health Organization.
17.10.2012
Epidemic Hazard
Zambia
Central State, [Lukanga Swamps (Kapiri Mposhi district)]
The diarrhoeal disease which broke-out last week and has since claimed over 14 lives of fishermen in Lukanga Swamps in Kapiri Mposhi district has been confirmed to be cholera. Kapiri Mposhi District Medical Officer, Charles Mwinuna confirmed to ZANIS today that according to the second-round of tests conducted on the samples obtained from the patients admitted at Waya clinic in the area, the diarrheal disease was confirmed cholera. Over 20 patients are admitted to Waya clinic after experiencing severe diarrhoea and vomiting. Dr Mwinuna said officers from the District Health Management Team have since been dispatched to Lukanga Swamps and were treating people with cholera symptoms. He also said precautionary measures were being taken to ensure that the disease does not spread to other areas in the district. Dr Mwinuna said the health personnel dispatched to Lukanga Swamps are also conducting further tests and contact tracing of the origin of patients admitted to the clinic and were sensitizing the community on hygiene and providing chlorine to households to reduce the chances of spreading the diarrheal disease. Fourteen people have so far died of the disease which was earlier mistaken to be severe diarrhoea. The diarrhoea and vomiting disease broke out at Kaswende, Waya, Kabosha and Ngwenya fishing camps on Lukanga Swamps. The bodies of the deceased are being buried at a cholera designated graveyard in the area Meanwhile, a traditional leader has appealed to the Ministry of Health to open-up cholera Centres in all fishing camps to treat patients and reduce chances of further spreading the diarrheal disease. Headwoman Agnes Chimbuleni noted that the disease has claimed many lives in the area because of the distances patients had to cover to Waya clinic from the fishing camps for treatment.
Biohazard name:
Cholera
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
Scientists have found support for the controversial idea that global warming is causing more frequent and destructive hurricanes, a subject that has been hotly debated during the past decade.
Data gathered from tide gauges, which monitor the rapid changes to sea levels caused by storm surges, show a significant link between both the frequency and intensity of tropical storms and increases in annual temperatures since the tidal records began in 1923.
The study found that during the 90-year period, when the average global temperature has increased by 0.7C, extreme hurricanes similar to Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, were nearly twice as likely in warmer years as colder years.
Although scientists were not able to prove that climate change is causing more large hurricanes, they believe the study is consistent with the predictions that global warming and warmer seas could bring about more intense tropical storms.
Hurricanes form when the sea’s surface temperature increases above 26C. However, they result from a chaotic interaction between the difference in sea and air temperatures, humidity and wind, so there is disagreement about how frequent they will become in a warmer world.
Studying the link between global warming and tropical storms has been hampered by the lack of data on hurricanes before the satellite age. Many hurricanes out at sea were missed before the first weather satellites were launched about 40 years ago.
However, a network of tide gauges around the south-east coast of the US has produced a reliable record of the rapid changes to sea level caused by storm surges resulting from tropical cyclones, said Aslak Grinsted of the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University.
“I found that there were monitoring stations along the eastern seaboard of the United States where they had recorded the daily tide levels all the way back to 1923. I have looked at every time there was a rapid change in sea level and I could see there was a close correlation between sudden changes in sea level and historical accounts of tropical storms,” Dr Grinsted said.
Once the correlation between storm surges and tropical storms was established, the researchers analysed global temperature records to compare the number of storm surges in warm years with the number observed in cold years.
“We simply counted how many extreme cyclones with storm surges there were in warm years compared with cold years and we could see that there was a tendency for more cyclones in warmer years,” Dr Grinsted said.
Storms of destruction: devastating weather
Wilma (2005)
The most intense Atlantic hurricane on record started in the Caribbean Sea near Jamaica, moving across the Gulf of Mexico to Cancun where it hit land with devastating consequences.
Katrina (2005)
The most costly hurricane in history caused damages of $85bn. The category-3 storm formed over the Bahamas crossed Florida and the Gulf of Mexico before striking New Orleans.
Gilbert (1988)
The second most intense hurricane observed in the Atlantic. It began to the east of Barbados before hitting Jamaica and the Gulf of Mexico. It raged for nine days, killing 433 people.
Global temperatures directly affect the acidity of the ocean, which in turn changes the acoustical properties of sea water. New research suggests that global warming may give Earth’s oceans the same hi-fi sound qualities they had more than 100 million years ago, during the Age of the Dinosaurs.
The reason for this surprising communication upgrade is that whales vocalize in the low-frequency sound range, typically less than 200 hertz, and the new research predicts that by the year 2100, global warming will acidify saltwater sufficiently to make low-frequency sound near the ocean surface travel significantly farther than it currently does – perhaps twice as far.
Rhode Island acoustician David G. Browning, lead scientist on the research team, will present his findings at the 164th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), held Oct. 22 – 26 in Kansas City, Missouri.
He explains the sea change this way: “We call it the Cretaceous acoustic effect, because ocean acidification forced by global warming appears to be leading us back to the similar ocean acoustic conditions as those that existed 110 million years ago, during the Age of Dinosaurs.”
Their work builds on the recent investigation by other researchers who analyzed historic levels of boron in seafloor sediments to reconstruct ocean acidity for the past 300 million years.
Using boron’s sound absorption traits and impact on low-frequency transmission, Browning and his colleagues were able to predict the soundscape of ancient oceans to conclude that 300 million years ago, during the Paleozoic, the low frequency sound transmission in the ocean was similar to conditions today.
They also found that transmission improved as the ocean became more acidic, reaching its best transmission value around 110 million years ago – allowing low frequency sound to travel twice as far.
“This knowledge is important in many ways,” notes Browning.
“It impacts the design and performance prediction of sonar systems. It affects estimation of low frequency ambient noise levels in the ocean. And it’s something we have to consider to improve our understanding of the sound environment of marine mammals and the effects of human activity on that environment.”
If further work validates this model, future SCUBA divers might hear in the oceans with the same clarity as the dinosaurs.
Scientists have discovered why the ‘broken world’ following the worst extinction of all time lasted so long – it was simply too hot to survive.
The end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred around 250 million years ago in the pre-dinosaur era, wiped out nearly all the world’s species. Typically, a mass extinction is followed by a ‘dead zone’ during which new species are not seen for tens of thousands of years. In this case, the dead zone, during the Early Triassic period which followed, lasted for a perplexingly long period: five million years.
A study jointly led by the University of Leeds and China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), in collaboration with the University of Erlangen-Nurnburg (Germany), shows the cause of this lengthy devastation was a temperature rise to lethal levels in the tropics: around 50-60 degrees C on land, and 40 degrees C at the sea-surface.
Lead author Yadong Sun, who is based in Leeds while completing a joint PhD in geology, says: “Global warming has long been linked to the end-Permian mass extinction, but this study is the first to show extreme temperatures kept life from re-starting in Equatorial latitudes for millions of years.”
It is also the first study to show water temperatures close to the ocean’s surface can reach 40 degrees C – a near-lethal value at which marine life dies and photosynthesis stops. Until now, climate modellers have assumed sea-surface temperatures cannot surpass 30 degrees C. The findings may help us understand future climate change patterns.
The dead zone would have been a strange world – very wet in the tropics but with almost nothing growing. No forests grew, only shrubs and ferns. No fish or marine reptiles were to be found in the tropics, only shellfish, and virtually no land animals existed because their high metabolic rate made it impossible to deal with the extreme temperatures. Only the polar regions provided a refuge from the baking heat.
Before the end-Permian mass extinction the Earth had teemed with plants and animals including primitive reptiles and amphibians, and a wide variety of sea creatures including coral and sea lillies.
This broken world scenario was caused by a breakdown in global carbon cycling. In normal circumstances, plants help regulate temperature by absorbing Co2 and burying it as dead plant matter. Without plants, levels of Co2 can rise unchecked, which causes temperatures to increase.
The study, published [19 October 2012] in the journal Science, is the most detailed temperature record of this study period (252-247 million years ago) to date.
Sun and his colleagues collected data from 15,000 ancient conodonts (tiny teeth of extinct eel-like fishes) extracted from two tonnes of rocks from South China. Conodonts form a skeleton using oxygen.
The isotopes of oxygen in skeletons are temperature controlled, so by studying the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the conodonts he was able to detect temperature levels hundreds of millions of years ago.
Professor Paul Wignall from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, one of the study’s co-authors, said: “Nobody has ever dared say that past climates attained these levels of heat.
Hopefully future global warming won’t get anywhere near temperatures of 250 million years ago, but if it does we have shown that it may take millions of years to recover.”
The study is the latest collaboration in a 20-year research partnership between the University of Leeds and China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. It was funded by the Chinese Science Foundation.
‘Lethally hot temperatures during the early Triassic greenhouse’ by Yadong Sun (University of Leeds and China University of Geosciences), Michael Joachimski (University Erlangen-Nurnberg, Germany), Paul B. Wignall (University of Leeds), Chunbo Yan (China University of Geosciences), Yanlong Chen (University of Graz, Austria), Haishui Jiang (China University of Geosciences, Lina Wang (China University of Geosciences) and Xulong Lai (China University of Geosciences) is published in Science on 19 October 2012.
A large solar flare has burst forth from the sun, showcasing the awesome scale in the universe.
A gigantic solar flare, 100,000 miles across, has erupted from the sun, showcasing how truly great the scale of things can be in the universe. In comparison, the Earth only has a diameter of roughly 7926 miles.
An image of the solar flare. Earth would fit more than ten times along the length of the flare.
Solar flares are a massive energy release of the sun, sometimes up to a sixth of the sun’s total energy output, or 160,000,000,000 megatons of TNT, which can be seen as a sudden brightening in the sun and is often followed by a coronal mass ejection (CME), essentially a burst of solar material being flung out into the solar system.
These CMEs usually reach earth about one or two days later, and it is the earth’s interaction with these ionized particles which, together with regular solar winds, are the cause of auroras. If a solar flare is powerful enough though, they may cause damage, disturbing power grids and radio systems. A particularly disastrous solar flare may even permanently disable many electronic components, such as transformers, leading to widespread power outages.
Solar flares affect the entire solar system though; one hazard that would be encountered during a manned missions to Mars for example, would be the radiation emitted from solar winds, which the astronauts would somehow have to shield against during the entire flight.
The Bay Area was buzzing Wednesday night after a bright streak moved across the sky. It was accompanied by a loud boom.
This happened around 7:40 p.m.
Early bets said it was a meteor. The Orionids meteor shower is happening right now, but experts told NBC Bay Area that Wednesday’s streak was not from Orion because the earth is shielding us from those meteors tonight.
Whatever it was, it caught the attention of hundreds, if not thousands of people.
NASA Ames astronomer Peter Jennikens helped us get the photo at the top of this article and below. Jennikens said he will be up all night researching where the meteor may have landed. He will be out early Thursday morning looking for remnants. He’s hoping to get more video from security cameras that might have been rolling when the meteor hit.
Beppy Tobeler told us on our Facebook page that she saw it from Dublin Security Storage. “It was so low and close I thought it was someone setting off fireworks,” Tobeler said. She said it sailed across the sky and broke up in several pieces.
Steve Siegel said he saw it from Sunnyvale. He described it as a super bright streak going north about 30 degrees into the sky. He said it lasted for 7 or 8 seconds.
”I saw one giant, bright as close as a firework ball of light with long tail out visiting my parents in Forestville. One of the coolest things I’ve ever seen nothing at all like a shooting star,” Jessica Collins said on our Facebook page.
People at the Lick Observatory posted two raw clips of the what they said was a meteor breaking up over San Jose. It was taken by a security camera from the top of the observatory.
NASA posted on a science Website earlier this week that said this is the week to watch for the Orionid meteor shower caused by Halley’s Comet.
An article on NASA Science News said that every year in mid-to-late October, the Earth passes through a stream of dusty debris from Comet Halley. It promised sightings in the pre-dawn hours. Wednesday night’s streak was in the evening hours. Also, usually the meteor showers related to Hailey’s Comet are much smaller than what is being described.
NASA said that the highlight of the Orionid meteor shower is coming this weekend
“We expect to see about 25 meteors per hour when the shower peaks on Sunday morning, Oct 21st,” says Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.
An extremely brief reversal of the geomagnetic field, climate variability and a super volcano
41,000 years ago, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occured. Magnetic studies of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on sediment cores from the Black Sea show that during this period, during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed to the south instead of north. Moreover, data obtained by the research team formed around GFZ researchers Dr. Norbert Nowaczyk and Prof. Helge Arz, together with additional data from other studies in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and Hawaii, prove that this polarity reversal was a global event. Their results are published in the latest issue of the scientific journal “Earth and Planetary Science Letters“.
What is remarkable is the speed of the reversal: “The field geometry of reversed polarity, with field lines pointing into the opposite direction when compared to today’s configuration, lasted for only about 440 years, and it was associated with a field strength that was only one quarter of today’s field,” explains Norbert Nowaczyk. “The actual polarity changes lasted only 250 years. In terms of geological time scales, that is very fast.” During this period, the field was even weaker, with only 5% of today’s field strength. As a consequence, the Earth nearly completely lost its protection shield against hard cosmic rays, leading to a significantly increased radiation exposure.
This is documented by peaks of radioactive beryllium (10Be) in ice cores from this time, recovered from the Greenland ice sheet. 10Be as well as radioactive carbon (14C) is caused by the collision of high-energy protons from space with atoms of the atmosphere.
The Laschamp event
The polarity reversal now found with the magnetisation of Black Sea sediments has already been known for 45 years. It was first discovered after the analysis of the magnetisation of several lava flows near the village Laschamp near Clermont-Ferrand in the Massif Central, which differed significantly from today’s direction of the geomagnetic field. Since then, this geomagnetic feature is known as the ‘Laschamp event’. However, the data of the Massif Central represent only some point readings of the geomagnetic field during the last ice age, whereas the new data from the Black Sea give a complete image of geomagnetic field variability at a high temporal resolution.
Abrupt climate changes and a super volcano
Besides giving evidence for a geomagnetic field reversal 41,000 years ago, the geoscientists from Potsdam discovered numerous abrupt climate changes during the last ice age in the analysed cores from the Black Sea, as it was already known from the Greenland ice cores. This ultimately allowed a high precision synchronisation of the two data records from the Black Sea and Greenland. The largest volcanic eruption on the Northern hemisphere in the past 100 000 years, namely the eruption of the super volcano 39400 years ago in the area of today’s Phlegraean Fields near Naples, Italy, is also documented within the studied sediments from the Black Sea. The ashes of this eruption, during which about 350 cubic kilometers of rock and lava were ejected, were distributed over the entire eastern Mediterranean and up to central Russia. These three extreme scenarios, a short and fast reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, short-term climate variability of the last ice age and the volcanic eruption in Italy, have been investigated for the first time in a single geological archive and placed in precise chronological order.
DEDICATED
~October.15.2012~ You were a wonderful pet. I miss you already.
Information courtesy of NASA, NOAA, the US Library, the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Jet Propulsion Lab, the Environmental Visualization Laboratory, the NASA Earth Observatory, SDO, SOHO, Stereo, ISWA, SSEC, HAARP, and SolarIMG – Your information, images, and videos were essential to this video.
A massive fish kill on the Neuse River Tuesday washed up on the beach by Neuse Harbor. Mitch Blake, Neuse Riverkeeper, viewed the fish kill Tuesday afternoon, saying there were several hundred thousand washed up on the beach and in the river. For 21 days, mostly Atlantic menhaden have been dying over a large portion of the river from New Bern to Hancock Creek, Blake said.
Chuck Beckley/Sun Journal
By Eddie Fitzgerald, Sun Journal Staff
Published: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 at 15:35 PM.
A massive fish kill on the Neuse River that has been ongoing for nearly a month has resulted in thousands of menhaden washed up on beaches near Neuse Harbor.
Mitch Blake, Neuse Riverkeeper, viewed the area Tuesday afternoon, saying there were several hundred thousand dead fish washed up on the beach and in the river.
For 21 days, mostly Atlantic menhaden have been dying over a large portion of the river from New Bern to Hancock Creek, Blake said in an email.
Some of the dead menhaden have ulcers that National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials have identified as Aphanomyces invadans from six samples analyzed in Beaufort. Fish samples were taken from the Neuse River in an impaired region by the Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation at the first sign of menhaden showing problems, Blake said.
“Over the 21-day period fish have been reported dead from New Bern to Hancock Creek and include areas in Slocum, Beard, Goose, Upper Broad, Northwest and Duck Creek,” he said.
Very few other species have been reported dead during the fish kill, except for isolated spots around Bay Point, which also had red drum, striped bass and spot.
“At this time we continue to see large schools of Atlantic menhaden, some floating, some are sinking to the bottom upon death,” Blake said. “An accurate count has not been totaled due to the massive area but just (Tuesday) I counted areas that were over 500 yards in length with approximately 90 dead fish per foot. With numbers like this it could easily go into the millions. In these areas there are dead, decaying, and in some cases just bones to reveal the timeline and magnitude of the kill.”
Joe Freemon, who lives in Neuse Harbor, said that on Tuesday there was a solid belt of dead fish on the beach of the river that bordered his property.
“You could stand there and see lots of others floating on top of the water,” Freemon said. “It’s the biggest (fish kill) I’ve seen and I’ve been on the water here over 50 years. You could smell it a couple of hundred feet away. … It’s a bad situation and unfortunate. ”
Blake said experts have told him the fish kill may continue due to the complexity of the area and lack of funding to run the proper analyzing equipment.
“There have been issues with oxygen, phytoplankton, stratification, nitrogen, pollutants among others, so the exact cause of death in the areas listed, has been complex to say the least,” he said.
Blake said he has been talking to a lot of people in the scientific community about what is causing the fish to die.
“I’m trying to put together a team to analyze it better,” Blake said.
As a nonprofit and staff of three to cover the Neuse Basin, The Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation depends on community support and volunteers.
“I’ve been working diligently to get information to the scientific community, the translation that comes from that is very important to the communities and people along the Neuse,” Blake said. “I think these menhaden stocks are extremely important to the dynamics of the estuary and millions of dead fish adding to the nutrient load creates its own set of concerns. As a community we have to address the impacts we have on the basin and we deserve to know where these impacts are coming from.”
Jill Paxson, environmental senior specialist with the N.C. Division of Water Quality, said for the past three weeks her office has been inundated with calls about menhaden fish kills, and not only in the Neuse River. There has been large kills in the Pamlico Sound also, she said.
Paxson said menhaden have a tough time living in a fresh and salt water estuary like the Neuse River. Some of the tributaries are shallow and the water can cool or warm up fast, causing a strain for the fish, she said.
“It is a very difficult place if you are a fish,” she said.
Paxson said as a precaution people should not go in the water around the fish or let their pets in the water and should wash if they do come in contact with the fish or water.
People usually don’t eat menhaden. They are on the bottom of the food chain and are eaten by larger fish like tuna and sharks, Paxson said.
Eddie Fitzgerald can be reached at 252-635-5675 or at eddie.fitzgerald@newbernsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @staffwriter3.
Today
Biological Hazard
Vietnam
Province of Dien Bien , Noong Luong Commune [Dien Bien District]
Cases of bird flu have been reported in Noong Luong Commune, Dien Bien District in the northern mountainous province of Dien Bien. Director of the provincial Department of Animal Health Cao Thi Tuyet Lan said bird flu outbreaks were discovered last Friday in two households in the commune’s Village 12, with nearly 720 livestock suffering from the disease. Three days later, local authority discovered nearly 400 other livestock infected with the H5N1 virus in Village 15. Since the outbreak, authorities have detected and culled more than 1,000 sick livestock in the commune. The province banned sick livestock from being transported, processed and traded out of the affected area, and closely supervised slaughter and trade in other districts and communes of the province. The provincial People’s Committee also quarantined the affected areas, and counted the number of livestock, especially ducks in Noong Luong Commune and Muong Thanh District, to ensure that a bird flu epidemic does not spread. The Department of Agriculture and Rural Development also gave guidance on carrying out preventive measures such as sterilisation of farms where infected poultry have been reported.
Biohazard name:
H5N1 – Highly pathogenic avian influenza virus
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Officials closed beaches around Kanaha Beach Park Thursday morning after a shark bit a stand-up paddle board around 7:30 a.m. off of an area known as “Kite Beach,” or Kaa Point. Stand-up paddle boarder David Peterson of Pukalani was not injured, officials said. The 55-year-old paddle board and surfboard shaper said he was standing on his board waiting for waves to come in and “all of a sudden (I get) knocked off my board. I didn’t see anything.” He said the shark had a hold of his board and would not let go of it, so Peterson hit the shark with his paddle as he was in the water. The shark let go but then came between him and the board and with his hands Peterson pushed the shark away and jumped back on his board. Peterson said he suffered some scrapes from getting back onto the damaged board. Otherwise, he wasn’t hurt. The shark is estimated to be 6 to 8 feet long. Staff officials said it is unknown what type of shark was involved. Shark warning signs were to be posted, according to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
Biohazard name:
Shark attack (non-fatal)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Authorities in Bhaktapur’s Bode have culled more than 1500 chickens following a suspected outbreak of bird flu, health officials said. The outbreak of avian influenza initially killed 500 chickens out of 2000 at the poultry farm of a local Om Khadka. A meeting of health officials is underway at Bhaktapur to confirm whether the reported case is of bird flu.
Biohazard name:
H5N1 – Highly pathogenic avian influenza virus
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Hundreds of birds have been culled in central Nepal following confirmation of a highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak on a poultry farm. Animal health officials decided to cull all birds and destroy eggs suspected to be infected with a strain of H5N1 virus in Bhaktapur district, 15 km east of the capital Kathmandu. The Directorate of Animal Health killed 780 chickens at the poultry farm following the confirmation and around 150 crates of eggs and six sacks of feeds stored at the farm were also destroyed as part of preventive measures. Samples were sent to an animal health laboratory for examination after a sudden spurt in deaths at the farm. According to officials out of 2,500 chickens at the farm, 1,200 had already died of infection from the virus. “Surveillance will be intensified and veterinary officials deployed to monitor other poultry farms in the area,” said Dr Narayan Prasad Ghimire, a senior veterinary officer at Department of Animal Health. High alert was issued in and around Kathmandu to prevent the spreading of the virus.
A grenade left over from the second World War left 13 people needing hospital treatment in England. The casualties were exposed to toxic fumes after workmen disturbed the stockpile of phosphorous grenades left in the sealed-up cellar of a property in Bamber Bridge near Preston, Lancashire. It is thought one of the grenades, issued to members of the Home Guard during the war, was dislodged and cracked, Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service said. The devices, glass bottles about eight inches long, were intended to release a highly flammable mixture of phosphorus and benzene after being thrown, self-igniting on exposure to air. They were to be used by reservists against Nazi occupiers if Britain had fallen to German invasion, but had lain forgotten for almost 70 years in the sealed-off cellar of a former fire station, now used as a printing firm premises. A further six such devices were found in cellar space which had been bricked up for some years.
Firefighters were first called to reports of a fire at the premises of Sprint Print on Station Road in Bamber Bridge at 12.23pm yesterday. On arrival they established the smoke was in fact chemical fumes from what was thought to be a small container or bottle of acid in the cellar. Two drainage company employees investigating a report from the occupier of damp masonry are thought to have inadvertently dislodged one of the bottles in the stockpile, causing it to leak. They were exposed to the fumes and were injured along with three workers at Sprint Print. Of these five casualties, two suffered chemical burns and three experienced breathing problems. Two paramedics and six hospital staff at the Royal Preston Hospital – where the casualties had been taken – subsequently also complained of breathing difficulties. All 13 casualties responded well to treatment and have been allowed home. The cracked grenade was made safe and removed for disposal by an army disposal team and the rest of the stockpile will be disposed of in a controlled explosion, the fire service said.
Winds gusting up to 52 miles per hour and transformer fires were blamed for power outages Thursday that affected more than 2,000 homes and businesses in Sioux City. Service was restored to many of the homes within a few hours. The first outages were reported at 5:47 a.m. near 15th and Pierce streets. Outages caused by transformer fires were reported at 10:17 a.m. at 4105 Gordon Drive and about 12:30 p.m. at 2116 W. Third St. Officials at MidAmerican Energy Co. aren’t sure what caused the transformer fires but suspect the weather was a factor, company spokeswoman Tina Potthoff said. The company’s transmission system had been trouble-free before the powerful wind gusts arrived, she said. The top of a power pole exploded with a bang at Ultra No Touch Car Wash at 4105 Gordon Drive, said manager Brandon Swift. The flash was so intense, he thought something at the business had been struck by lighting.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
The U.S. Geological Survey reports that early Tuesday morning local time, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake hit off of Japan’s eastern coast. Originating from a depth of 9.7 kilometers (6 miles), it was centered about 96 kilometers (60 miles) off the coast of Miyako, Iwate Prefecture, in the northeast region of the country that was struck by the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11th, 2011. There have been no reports of damages or signs of approaching tsunami.
In comparison from Tokyo, the 6.2 magnitude quake was about 550 kilometers (342 miles) from the capital city. Neither the Japan Meteorological Agency or the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued tsunami warnings or advisories on Tuesday as it wasn’t necessary. Geophysicist Gerard Fryer, with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, says the quake was too small to generate any kind of tsunami, but the residents of northeastern Japan would surely have felt it.
The quake probably gave some frightful flashbacks to those of Japan’s Tohoku region who survived last year’s disaster. The tsunami disaster that took tens of thousands of lives and washed away entire coastal cities was caused by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake just over a year and a half ago, and led to the world’s worst nuclear crisis in 25 years in Fukushima Prefecture.
MODIS hotspots at Heard Island during 17-24 Sep 2012 (Univ. of Hawai’i)
MODIS satellite data showed hotspots at Heard Island volcano on 21 and 24 September 2012. This suggests that there was or perhaps still is some new activity at the volcano.
No further hotspots appeared on satellite data since 24 Sep.
Blazing temperatures are set to hit the Los Angeles area Monday as numbers may climb to the triple digits in several areas of the city. Officials from the National Weather Service predict temperatures to peak around 100 degrees in downtown L.A., 104 degrees in the Hollywood Hills and a potentially record-breaking 110 degrees in inland and valley areas. The projected temperatures are expected to match heat records set in Southern California in 2008. The combination of intense heat, high winds, and low humidity levels has even prompted the National Weather Service to issue Red Flag warnings, indicating a high risk of wildfires in both the Santa Clarita Valley and the San Gabriel Mountains. “Fire danger is expected to peak on Monday,” NWS officials said, “when record-breaking triple digit heat and widespread single-digit humidities will combine with very dry fuels.” The Red Flag warnings are currently in effect until 6:00pm on Tuesday. People are advised to avoid strenuous activity in the heat, wear loose light clothing and drink plenty of non-alcoholic and non-caffeinated beverages.
JAPAN – Typhoon No. 17 moved out into the Pacific Ocean from southeast Hokkaido via the Sanriku region early Monday after making its way across the country and causing at least 1 death and dozens of injuries.
A 56-year-old man was found dead at a rice paddy in Suzuka, Mie Prefecture. The man was believed to have been swept away by a swollen river.
According to figures compiled by The Yomiuri Shimbun, 23 people in eastern Japan, including 12 in Kanagawa Prefecture, suffered minor or serious injuries due to the typhoon. Injuries, including falls caused by strong winds, were also reported in the Tokai and Kanto-Koshinetsu regions, where the typhoon hit from late Sunday to early Monday.
Airline disruptions continued Monday, affecting 8,000 passengers. Japan Airlines cancelled 54 flights, including those between Haneda and Chitose airports, while All Nippon Airways cancelled 16 flights, including those between Sendai and Itami airports.
Temperatures exceeding 30 C were recorded in many areas following the typhoon. The mercury rose as high as 30.7 C shortly after 10 a.m. in Kasama, Ibaraki Prefecture, with temperatures reaching 30.5 C in Isesaki, Gunma Prefecture, and 30.3 C in Nerima Ward, Tokyo.
An official in Nepal says a landslide has swept several vehicles off a mountain highway. Four people are confirmed dead and nine others have been reported missing. Government administrator Purushottam Ghimire says the landslide Sunday night swept away five vehicles traveling on the Mechi highway near Kilbung village in eastern Nepal. He says eight people have been rescued, four bodies have been pulled out and people remain missing. Details were still sketchy Monday morning but rescue teams have reached the area.
South Korea shut down one of its nuclear reactors Tuesday following a malfunction in its control system but there was no risk of a radiation leak, plant operators said. The 1,000-megawatt Shingori 1 reactor near the southern city of Busan was shut down after a warning signal at 8:10 am (2310 GMT Monday), the state-run Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP) said. “There was a malfunction in the reactor’s control rod, but the reactor is now stable with no danger of a radiation leak,” a KHNP spokesman said. It is the first time the reactor has been shut down since it began operations in February last year. South Korea operates 23 nuclear power plants which meet more than 35 percent of the country’s electricity needs. In July, another 1,000-megawatt reactor at Yeonggwang — some 260 kilometres (156 miles) south of Seoul — went into automatic shutdown after a malfunction.
University of Notre Dame entomologists are part of a team of researchers that recently discovered a potentially dangerous new malaria-transmitting mosquito. The as yet unnamed, and previously unreported, mosquito breeds in the western areas of Kenya and has an unknown DNA match to any of the existing malaria-transmitting species.
The Anopheles species of mosquitoes which transmits malaria in Africa is already widely studied by researchers. It prefers to rest indoors during the day and feed on humans during the night. Current malaria control programs, including spraying of insecticides and using insecticide-treated bed nets, are designed with these behaviors in mind.
Although the new species has never been implicated in the transmission of malaria, new discoveries in its biting habits pose a threat because it was found to be active outdoors and prefers to bite people earlier in the evening, soon after sunset, when people are not protected by current malaria control techniques.
Neil Lobo, a Notre Dame research associate professor and Brandy St. Laurent, a former Notre Dame doctoral student, joined forces on the team of researchers that made the discovery. y Frank Collins, Notre Dame’s George and Winifred Clark Professor of Biology, Collins was principal investigator of the Malaria Transmission Consortium effort funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The discovery was announced in a paper whose lead author was Jennifer Stevenson of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Changes in ocean and climate systems could lead to smaller fish, according to a new study led by fisheries scientists at the University of British Columbia.
The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, provides the first-ever global projection of the potential reduction in the maximum size of fish in a warmer and less-oxygenated ocean. The researchers used computer modeling to study more than 600 species of fish from oceans around the world and found that the maximum body weight they can reach could decline by 14-20 per cent between years 2000 and 2050, with the tropics being one of the most impacted regions. “We were surprised to see such a large decrease in fish size,” says the study’s lead author William Cheung, an assistant professor at the UBC Fisheries Centre. “Marine fish are generally known to respond to climate change through changing distribution and seasonality. But the unexpectedly big effect that climate change could have on body size suggests that we may be missing a big piece of the puzzle of understanding climate change effects in the ocean.” This is the first global-scale application of the idea that fish growth is limited by oxygen supply, which was pioneered more than 30 years ago by Daniel Pauly, principal investigator with UBC’s Sea Around Us Project and the study’s co-author. “It’s a constant challenge for fish to get enough oxygen from water to grow, and the situation gets worse as fish get bigger,” explains Pauly. “A warmer and less-oxygenated ocean, as predicted under climate change, would make it more difficult for bigger fish to get enough oxygen, which means they will stop growing sooner.” This study highlights the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions and develop strategies to monitor and adapt to changes that we are already seeing, or we risk disruption of fisheries, food security and the way ocean ecosystems work.
Combine the tree-ring growth record with historical information, climate records, and computer-model projections of future climate trends, and you get a grim picture for the future of trees in the southwestern United States. That’s the word from a team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Arizona, and other partner organizations.
If the Southwest is warmer and drier in the near future, widespread tree death is likely and would cause substantial changes in the distribution of forests and of species, the researchers report this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. Southwestern forests grow best when total winter precipitation is high combined with a summer and fall that aren’t too hot and dry. The team developed a Forest Drought-Stress Severity Index that combines the amount of winter precipitation, late summer and fall temperatures, and late summer and fall precipitation into one number. “The new ‘Forest Drought-Stress Index’ that Williams devised from seasonal precipitation and temperature-related variables matches the records of changing forest conditions in the Southwest remarkably well,” said co-author Thomas W. Swetnam, director of the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. “Among all climate variables affecting trees and forests that have ever been studied, this new drought index has the strongest correlation with combined tree growth, tree death from drought and insects, and area burned by forest fires that I have ever seen.” A. Park Williams of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is the lead author of the paper, “Temperature as a potent driver of regional forest drought stress and tree mortality.” Six of the paper’s 15 authors are at the UA. A complete list of authors is at the bottom of this release. To figure out which climate variables affect forests, the researchers aligned some 13,000 tree core samples with known temperature and moisture data. The team also blended in events known from tree-ring, archaeological and other paleorecords, such as the late 1200s megadrought that drove the ancient Pueblo Indians out of longtime settlements such as those at Mesa Verde, Colo. By comparing the tree-ring record to climate data collected in the Southwest since the late 1800s, the scientists identified two climate variables that estimate annual southwestern tree-growth variability with exceptional accuracy: total winter precipitation and average summer-fall atmospheric evaporative demand, a measure of the overall dryness of the environment.
Williams said, “Atmospheric evaporative demand is primarily driven by temperature. When air is warmer, it can hold more water vapor, thus increasing the pace at which soil and plants dry out. The air literally sucks the moisture out of the soil and plants.” Finding that summer-fall atmospheric evaporative demand is just as important as winter precipitation has critical implications for the future of southwestern forests, he said.
This Douglas-fir sample from the Southwest has annual tree rings dating back to the year 1527. The narrowing of the rings that formed from the 1560s through the 1590s indicates that the tree grew little during the 16th century megadrought. Credit: Copyright Daniel Griffin. These trends, the researchers noted, are already occurring in the Southwest, where temperatures generally have been increasing for the past century and are expected to continue to do so because of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. There still will be wet winters, but increased frequency of warmer summers will put more stress on trees and limit their growth after wet winters, the study reports. “We can use the past to learn about the future,” Williams said. “For example, satellite fire data from the past 30 years show that there has been a strong and exponential relationship between the regional tree-ring drought-stress record and the area of southwestern forests killed by wildfire each year. This suggests that if drought intensifies, we can expect forests not only to grow more slowly, but also to die more quickly.” The study points out that very large and severe wildfires, bark-beetle outbreaks and a doubling of the proportion of dead trees in response to early 21st-century warmth and drought conditions are evidence that a transition of southwestern forest landscapes toward more open and drought-tolerant ecosystems may already be underway. And while 2000s drought conditions have been severe, the regional tree-ring record indicates there have been substantially stronger megadrought events during the past 1,000 years. The strongest megadrought occurred during the second half of the 1200s and is believed to have played an important role in the abandonment of ancient Puebloan cultural centers throughout the Southwest. The most recent megadrought occurred in the late 1500s and appears to have been strong enough to kill many trees in the Southwest. “When we look at our tree-ring record, we see this huge dip in the 1580s when all the tree rings are really tiny,” Williams said. “Following the 1500s megadrought, tree rings get wider, and there was a major boom in new trees. Nearly all trees we see in the Southwest today were established after the late-1500s drought, even though the species we evaluated can easily live longer than 400 years. So that event is a benchmark for us today. If forest drought stress exceeds late 1500 levels, we expect that a lot of trees are going to be dying.” Will future forest drought-stress levels reach or exceed those of the megadroughts of the 1200s and 1500s? Using climate-model projections, the team projected that such megadrought-type forest drought-stress conditions will be exceeded regularly by the 2050s. If climate-model projections are correct, forest drought-stress levels during even the wettest and coolest years of the late 21st century will be more severe than the driest, warmest years of the previous megadroughts. The study forecasts that during the second half of this century, about 80 percent of years will exceed megadrought levels. The current drought, which began in 2000, is a natural case study about what to expect from projected climate scenarios. While average winter precipitation totals in the Southwest have not been exceptionally low, average summer-fall evaporative demand is the highest on record. And trees, Williams says, are paying the price. The team concluded forest drought stress during more than 30 percent of the past 13 years, including 2011 and 2012, matched or exceeded the megadrought-type levels of the 1200s and 1500s. The only other 13-year periods when megadrought-type conditions were reached with such frequencies in the past 1,000 years were during the megadroughts themselves. UA co-author Daniel Griffin said, “This research is distinctly different from work done in a similar vein in two ways: One, it puts these projections for the future in a concrete historical context, and two, it shows that the impacts on the forests will not be restricted to one species or one site at low elevation, but in fact will take place at forests across the landscape.” Griffin is a doctoral candidate in the UA School of Geography and Development. Co-author Craig D. Allen, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said, “Consistent with many other recent studies, these findings provide compelling additional evidence of emerging global risks of amplified drought-induced tree mortality and extensive forest die-off as the planet warms.” More information: The article, “Temperature as a potent driver of regional forest drought stress and tree mortality,” is written by A. Park Williams (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Craig D. Allen (U.S. Geological Survey), Alison K. Macalady (University of Arizona), Daniel Griffin (UA), Connie A. Woodhouse (UA), David M. Meko (UA), Thomas W. Swetnam (UA), Sara A. Rauscher (LANL), Richard Seager (Columbia Univ.), Henri D. Grissino-Mayer (Univ. of Tennessee), Jeffrey S. Dean (UA), Edward R. Cook (Columbia Univ.), Chandana Gangodagamage (LANL), Michael Cai (LANL) and Nate G. McDowell (LANL).
This photo shows researchers studying exposures of the Doushanto Formation. Located in China, the formation is most notable for its scientific contributions in the hunt for Precambrian life. Credit: M. Kennedy.
An international team of scientists, including geochemists from the University of California, Riverside, has uncovered new evidence linking extreme climate change, oxygen rise, and early animal evolution.
A dramatic rise in atmospheric oxygen levels has long been speculated as the trigger for early animal evolution. While the direct cause-and-effect relationships between animal and environmental evolution remain topics of intense debate, all this research has been hampered by the lack of direct evidence for an oxygen increase coincident with the appearance of the earliest animals – until now.
In the Sept. 27 issue of the journal Nature, the research team, led by scientists at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, offers the first evidence of a direct link between trends in early animal diversity and shifts in Earth system processes.
The fossil record shows a marked increase in animal and algae fossils roughly 635 million years ago. An analysis of organic-rich rocks from South China points to a sudden spike in oceanic oxygen levels at this time – in the wake of severe glaciation. The new evidence pre-dates previous estimates of a life-sustaining oxygenation event by more than 50 million years.
“This work provides the first real evidence for a long speculated change in oxygen levels in the aftermath of the most severe climatic event in Earth’s history – one of the so-called ‘Snowball Earth’ glaciations,” said Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at UC Riverside.
The research team analyzed concentrations of trace metals and sulfur isotopes, which are tracers of early oxygen levels, in mudstone collected from the Doushantuo Formation in South China. The team found spikes in concentrations of the trace metals, denoting higher oxygen levels in seawater on a global scale.
“We found levels of molybdenum and vanadium in the Doushantuo Formation mudstones that necessitate that the global ocean was well ventilated. This well-oxygenated ocean was the environmental backdrop for early animal diversification,” said Noah Planavsky, a former UCR graduate student in Lyons’s lab now at CalTech.
The high element concentrations found in the South China rocks are comparable to modern ocean sediments and point to a substantial oxygen increase in the ocean-atmosphere system around 635 million years ago.
According to the researchers, the oxygen rise is likely due to increased organic carbon burial, a result of more nutrient availability following the extreme cold climate of the ‘Snowball Earth’ glaciation when ice shrouded much of Earth’s surface.
Lyons and Planavsky argued in research published earlier in the journal Nature that a nutrient surplus associated with the extensive glaciations may have initiated intense carbon burial and oxygenation. Burial of organic carbon – from photosynthetic organisms – in ocean sediments would result in the release of vast amounts of oxygen into the ocean-atmosphere system.
“We are delighted that the new metal data from the South China shale seem to be confirming these hypothesized events,” Lyons said.
The joint research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the NASA Exobiology Program, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Besides Lyons and Planavsky, the research team includes Swapan K. Sahoo (first author of the research paper) and Ganqing Jiang (principal investigator of the study) of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Brian Kendall and Ariel D. Anbar of Arizona State University; Xinqiang Wang and Xiaoying Shi of the China University of Geosciences (Beijing); and UCR alumnus Clint Scott of United States Geological Survey.
A dozen people have been sickened and two have died after an outbreak of fungal meningitis tied to injections given at outpatient surgical centers in Tennessee and North Carolina, health officials said. At least 737 people who received lumbar epidural steroid injections between July 30 and Sept. 20 have been notified of the cluster of rare aspergillus meningitis infections, which attack the central nervous system, said Curtis Allen, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Aspergillus is a mold present in the environment, and the meningitis is not related to the more common bacterial or viral types of meningitis. “The main thing is that it’s not transmissible person-to-person,” said Allen. Federal, state and local health officials are investigating the source of the outbreak. Eleven of the victims received injections at the Saint Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgery Center in Nashville. Another patient received an injection at an unidentified clinic in North Carolina. The Tennessee clinic was closed Sept. 20 and has been shuttered until further notice, officials said. The patients were older people, between the ages of 40 and 80, who were receiving the steroid injections as treatment for musculoskeletal disorders, said Woody McMillin, spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Health. Neither federal nor state health officials would identify the brand of epidural steroids given to the patients nor the manufacturer of the drugs. Asked whether the drugs themselves could have been contaminated, McMillin said that’s one possibility. “Right now, we’re not taking anything off the table,” he said. Erica Jefferson, a spokeswoman for the federal Food and Drug Administration, said that it’s too soon to speculate about that because the investigation is still “evolving.” Meningitis caused by aspergillus is very rare, according to the Journal of Microbiology. Symptoms often include a fever and headache that might be present for weeks before a diagnosis is made.
Biohazard name:
Meningitis (fungal)
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
Symptoms:
Status:
confirmed
Today
HAZMAT
USA
State of Nebraska, Lincoln [Near to 56th and Highway 2]
Nuclear waste travels through Nebraska almost daily. On Saturday, a bit of scare here in Lincoln. Officials say the incident at 56th and Highway 2 could have been worse. The truck was carrying low-level waste, but thankfully it didn’t end up causing any harm. Emergency vehicles swarm a flatbed semi Saturday after it stopped too quickly, causing its load to shift, it happened near 56th and Highway 2. That load contained low-level nuclear waste. “The public should stay away from anything labeled radioactive material,” Environmental Health Specialist Ralph Martin said. Ralph Martin is an Environmental Health Specialist who works closely on these types of events. He says in this instance, the low-level waste never left its container, which was a very good thing. “Well, anytime you have radioactive material in a place it’s not meant to be, you would have concern. The levels of this material would be unlikely that anybody could be injured,” Martin said. So we asked the question, what exactly is low-level Nuclear waste? Here’s how the U.S. Nuclear regulatory commission defines it. Items that have been contaminated with radioactive material or that have been exposed to radiation. These items usually include shoe covers and clothing, rags, equipment and syringes. The radioactivity of the items ranges from levels found in nature, to sometimes, highly radioactive. Martin says items like these travel through Nebraska almost daily. But don’t be alarmed, he says, there are strict rules when it comes to transporting it. Low-level waste is usually stored and stabilized in solid containers. Once the radioactivity wears off, officials say it can then be taken to your typical landfill or trash site.
Scientists developed a computer model to identify four possible instances of true polar wander in the past. And, they say, true polar wander is happening now.
Scientists based in Germany and Norway today published new results about a geophysical theory known as true polar wander. That is a drifting of Earth’s solid exterior – an actual change in latitude for some land masses – relative to our planet’s rotation axis. These scientists used hotspots in Earth’s mantle as part of a computer model, which they say is accurate for the past 120 million years, to identify four possible instances of true polar wander in the past. And, they say, true polar wander is happening now. These scientists published their results in the Journal for Geophysical Research today (October 1, 2012).
The scientists – including Pavel V. Doubrovine and Trond H. Torsvik of the University of Oslo, and Bernhard Steinberger of the Helmholtz Center in Potsdam, Germany – established what they believe is a stable reference frame for tracking true polar wander. Based on this reference frame, they say that twice – from 90 to 40 million years ago – the solid Earth traveled back and forth by nearly 9 degrees with respect to our planet’s axis of rotation. What’s more, for the past 40 million years, the Earth’s solid outer layers have been slowly rotating at a rate of 0.2 degrees every million years, according to these scientists.
Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. This diagram is greatly exaggerated. According to Doubrovine and his team, Earth’s solid outer layers have been slowly rotating at a rate of 0.2 degrees every million years. Diagram via Wikimedia Commons.
True polar wander is not:
A geomagnetic reversal, or reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, known to have happened before in Earth history.
Plate tectonics, which describes the large-scale motions of great land plates on Earth and is thought to be driven by the circulation of Earth’s mantle.
Precession of the Earth, whereby our world’s axis of rotation slowly moves, tracing out a circle among the stars, causing the identity of our North Star changes over time.
True polar wander is a geophysical theory, a way of thinking about Earth processes that might happen and that these scientists believe do happen. The theory suggests that if an object of sufficient weight on Earth – for example, a supersized volcano or other weighty land mass – formed far from Earth’s equator, the force of Earth’s rotation would gradually pull the object away from the axis around which Earth spins. A supersized volcano far from Earth’s equator would create an imbalance, in other words. As explained at Princeton.edu:
If the volcanoes, land and other masses that exist within the spinning Earth ever became sufficiently imbalanced, the planet would tilt and rotate itself until this extra weight was relocated to a point along the equator.
That’s the theory of true polar wander. It would cause a movement of Earth’s land masses, but for a different reason than the reason the continents drift in the theory of plate tectonics (formerly called “continental drift”). In the theory of plate tectonics, the continents drift because Earth’s the layer of Earth underlying our planet’s crust, called the mantle, is convective. That is, it circulates, slowly – like water about to boil. In true polar wander, on the other hand, a similar-seeming movement of land masses on Earth’s crust happens in order to correct an imbalance of weight with respect to Earth’s spin.
Scientists’ understanding of true polar wander overlaps with their understanding of plate tectonics in various ways. That’s understandable, since it’s all the same Earth.
Scientists delving into true polar wander want to know when, in which direction, and at what rate the Earth’s solid exterior might be rotating due to true polar wander. To sort it out, they say, you would need a stable frame of reference to which observations of relative motion might be compared. Doubrovine and his team say they found one: volcanic hotspots.
Hotspot forming an island chain. As land plates drift, a successive of volcanoes form over the hotspot. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
In geology, hotspots are volcanic regions fed by Earth’s underlying mantle. For example, the Hawaiian islands are believed to have formed over a hotspot in the mantle. The hotspot created a volcano, but then – as that land plate drifted over time, as described by the theory of plate tectonics – the volcano drifted, too, and was eventually cut off from the hotspot. Gradually, another volcano begins to form over the hotspot, right next to the first one. And then it moves on … and another one forms … and so on … and so on. Earth’s crust produces first one, then another volcano over the hotspot until a long chain of volcanoes forms, such as in Hawaii. Hotspots have long been used to understand the motion of tectonic plates.
Doubrovine and colleagues went a step further in order to understand true polar wander. Instead of treating the hot spots as static – frozen in place at one spot above Earth’s mantle – their computer model let the hotspots’ positions drift slowly. According to these scientists, this drifting is what produced a model of a stable reference frame, which in turn let them draw conclusions about true polar wander.
They say their model does a good job of matching observations of real hotspot tracks on Earth – the path drawn by each hotspot’s island chain – which gives them confidence their results about true polar wander are accurate.
The Hawaiian islands are believed to have formed over a hotspot – a particularly hot place in Earth’s underlying mantle. Scientists expanded on previous thinking about hotspots to suggest that Earth’s solid surface is drifting, minutely, with respect to our planet’s rotation axis.
Bottom line: German and Norwegian scientists have incorporated hotspots in Earth’s mantle into a computer model being used to study true polar wander. They say their work established a stable reference frame for this study that lets them conclude Earth is undergoing true polar wander today.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
A 6.3-magnitude quake struck off Indonesia’s Sumatra island on Friday, the US Geological Survey said, but no tsunami warning was issued and there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
The epicenter of the quake, which struck at 11:51 am (0451 GMT) at a depth of 25 kilometers (15.5 miles), was 190 kilometers northwest of the town of Bengkulu.
Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency measured the magnitude at 6.1.
The Indonesian agency said the earthquake was felt in the cities of Padang and Bengkulu and along the southern coast of Sumatra.
“There are no reports of damage so far. The quake happened in the sea close to Mentawai island, but no tsunami warning has been issued,” the agency’s duty officer, Koko Widyatmoko, told AFP.
FORTUNA, Calif. — There are no damage reports after an earthquake jolted rural areas of Northern California near the Oregon border.
A U.S. Geological Survey computer generated report says the magnitude-4.3 quake struck at 4:53 a.m. Friday and was centered 10 miles south of Fortuna. The area is about 270 miles northwest of Sacramento.
Fortuna police dispatcher Tanya Kadle says she felt a quick jolt.
She says there have been no reports of damage or injury.
At least 17 villages near the Volcan del Fuego, six miles from the colonial city of Antigua, are being evacuated. The eruption of the volcano could cause a disruption in airline flights in and out of Guatemala. A long-simmering volcano outside one of the Guatemala’s most famous tourist attractions exploded into a series of powerful eruptions Thursday, hurling thick clouds of ash nearly two miles (three kilometers) high, spewing rivers of lava down its flanks and forcing the evacuation of more than 33,000 people from surrounding communities. Guatemala’s head of emergency evacuations, Sergio Cabanas, said the evacuees were leaving some 17 villages around the Volcan del Fuego, which sits about six miles southwest (16 kilometers) from the colonial city of Antigua. The ash was blowing south and authorities said Antigua was not currently in danger, although they expected the eruption to last for at least 12 more hours.The agency said the volcano spewed lava nearly 2,000 feet (600 meters) down slopes billowing with ash around Acatenango, a 12,346-foot-high (3,763-meter-high) volcano whose name translates as “Volcano of Fire.” “A paroxysm of an eruption is taking place, a great volcanic eruption, with strong explosions and columns of ash,” said Gustavo Chicna, a volcanologist with the National Institute of Seismology, Vulcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology. He said the cinders spewing from the volcano were settling a half-inch thick in many places. He said extremely hot gases were also rolling down the sides of the volcano, which was entirely wreathed in ash and smoke. The emergency agency warned that flights through the area could be affected. There was a general orange alert, the second-highest level, but a red alert south and southeast of the mountain, where, Chicna said, “it’s almost in total darkness.” Teresa Marroquin, disaster coordinator for the Guatemalan Red Cross, said the organization had set up 10 emergency shelters and was sending hygiene kits and water. “There are lots of respiratory problems and eye problems,” she said.
Gardeners and landscapers may want to rethink their fall tree plantings. Warming temperatures have already made the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new cold-weather planting guidelines obsolete, according to Dr. Nir Krakauer, assistant professor of civil engineering in The City College of New York’s Grove School of Engineering.
Professor Krakauer developed a new method to map cold-weather zones in the United States that takes rapidly rising temperatures into account. Analyzing recent weather data, he overhauled the Department of Agriculture’s latest plant zone map released in January. The new USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, which predicts which trees and perennials can survive the winter in a given region, was a long time coming. Temperature boundaries shown in the latest version have shifted northward since the last one appeared in 1990. But the true zones have moved even further, according to Professor Krakauer’s calculations. “Over one-third of the country has already shifted half-zones compared to the current release, and over one-fifth has shifted full zones,” Professor Krakauer wrote this summer in the journal Advances in Meteorology. This means that fig trees, once challenged by frosty temperatures above North Carolina, are already weathering New York City winters thanks to changing temperatures and the insulating effect of the metropolis. Camellias, once happiest south of Ohio, may now be able to shrug off Detroit winters. The USDA divides the country into zones based on their annual minimum temperatures – frigid dips that determine which plants perish overnight or live to flower another day. (Each zone has a minimum temperature range of 10 degrees Fahrenheit; half zones have a 5-degree range.) Professor Krakauer found a weakness in how the agency came up with the zones, however. The USDA averaged annual minimum temperatures over a 30-year span, from 1976 to 2005, but winters have warmed significantly over that period. Zones now average about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the USDA’s 30-year average. “What is happening is that the winter is warming faster than the summer. Since [my] hardiness temperatures are based on minimum temperatures each year, they are changing faster than the average temperatures,” Professor Krakauer said. He found that these lowest yearly temperatures warmed roughly two and a half times faster than the average temperatures. His analysis also showed that the country is changing unevenly; more warming is occurring over the eastern interior and less in the Southwest. Professor Krakauer’s technique will allow gardeners and farmers to reassess what will survive the next year’s winter more frequently than the USDA can produce a new map. “The idea is that you could use this method to keep updating the zone map year by year instead of waiting for the official map – just keep adding new data and recalculate.” He noted that similar analyses could distinguish long-lasting climate trends – in wind or rainfall, for example – from year-to-year weather variations to distinguish between what some are calling the recent “weird weather” and the natural variations in global weather. More information: Nir Y. Krakauer. Estimating Climate Trends: Application to United States Plant Hardiness Zones. Advances in Meteorology, Vol. 2012 (2012), Article ID 404876, doi:10.1155/2012/404876 USDA Plant Hardiness Interactive Map planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/phzmweb/interactivemap.aspx Calculator for Regional Warming (by Nir Krakauer) www-ce.ccny.cuny.edu/nir/sw/hardiness-change.html Hardiness Zone Change Calculator, USDA vs. Krakauer www-ce.ccny.cuny.edu/nir/sw/hardiness-stations.html Provided by City College of New York search and more info website
Queensland’s southeast coast has remained very dry over the last two months with Coolangatta recording its longest dry spell in over 27 years.
It has been 49 days since the Gold Coast town has recorded rain in the gauge, making it the longest dry spell since records began in 1985. Brisbane has also been very dry with only 0.2mm of rain in the last 56 days, its driest period in over a decade.
The prolonged dry period has been due to a number of factors. During the past two months, there have been few strong fronts, with nothing in the way of rain. Conditions have also been trending towards an El Niño weather pattern, which is associated with lower than usual rainfall.
The dry spell is set to continue on Saturday with only a low chance of rain on Sunday, giving Coolangatta a good chance to exceed 50 days without rain. It will be a beautiful, mostly sunny weekend with only the chance of a light shower or two near the coast on Sunday.
On Monday a low pressure trough will develop over Queensland, bringing showers to much of the state’s southeast. However there is still an even chance that Coolangatta will go another day without rain.
Tuesday is looking more certain to end Coolangatta’s dry spell as the trough deepens, bringing showers and the chance of storms. There will be widespread falls of 5-10mm across Queensland’s southeast on Tuesday with isolated areas likely to get more than 15mm.
The much needed rain will bring relief to parched gardens and lawns. The rain will also remind people that the wetter months of the year are just around the corner.
Four persons died after being swept away by flash floods triggerred by incessant rains in Kapkot area of Uttarakhand’s Bageshwar district, officials said on Friday. Madhuri Devi and her husband Bishan Singh were swept away after a flash flood occurred in Kapkot last night following torrential rains, Disaster Management and Mitigation department officials said. Another man Dhumar Singh is also feared to have been swept away in the flash flood that hit Kapkot but his body is yet to be recovered, they said. Flash floods also occurred at Jagthana and Kahark Tana Toli villages in the district claiming the lives of a 20-year-old woman and a man respectively, they said.
A flash flood following incessant rain struck parts of Padang in West Sumatra on Wednesday night, killing four people and making dozens of others homeless. Idel, 30, a local resident involved in the search and rescue, said on Thursday that the four were buried by landslides at Kampong Ubi, Pauh district. “When we heard about the incident, lots of us rushed to the spot and at about 9 p.m. members of the search and rescue team arrived,” Idel said. The SAR team found the body of a six-year-old girl, Najwa, at around 1 a.m. on Thursday and the body of Jamaris, 50, one hour later. The bodies were taken to a house of their relatives about a one-hour walk from the incident site. Around 7 a.m. the SAR team found another body, identified as Nila, 20, disinterred by local residents using hoes and other makeshift rescue equipment. Several hours later the body of the fourth victim, two-year-old Salva, was also found. Head of the West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency’s logistic and emergency unit Ade Edward said that the landslide took place at 5 p.m. after three hours of heavy rain. The two houses of the victims very engulfed in mud, Ade said, adding that three others living in the ill-fated houses had managed to flee in time.“The SAR team managed to arrive at the location several hours later as many parts of the roads leading to the location were flooded,” Ade said. He explained that the search was halted after finding the four victims. However, 24 families have been forced to live in temporary accommodation centers. Heavy machinery was used on Thursday to clean the rubble. The landslide occurred five kilometers from Andalas University campus in Lamau Manis on the slopes of Bukit Barisan by the Batang Kuranji river, one of the major rivers dividing Padang. No official data on damage to buildings and public infrastructure have yet been released, but at least seven houses in a number of locations were washed away. The heavy rain had caused Batang Kuranji river to overflow, inundating dozens of houses by up to two meters. Meanwhile, a sedan was trapped in floodwaters not far from Semen Padang cement factory. Both Batang Kuranji and Batang Arau rivers also overflowed on July 24, 2012, damaging 33 houses in eight subdistricts.
43.7% of children turned out to have nodules or cysts in Fukushima city.
Fukushima local government conducted thyroid test for under 18 living in Fukushima city.
The target persons were 53,619 and 44,959（83.8%）had the test. The test was conducted from 5/14 to 8/31/2012.
On 9/11/2012, they released the result of 42,060 of them, which they finished the test with by 8/24/2012. (The results from 8/25 to 8/31/2012 are not published yet.)
The result showed 18,119 (43.1%) of them have thyroid nodules (≦5.0mm) or cysts (≦20.0mm) and 239 (0.6%) of them have thyroid nodules (≧5.1mm) or cyst (≧20.1mm). In total, 43.7% of the children who had the test in Fukushima city turned out to have nodules and cysts.
Cesium is penetrating into ground water. People are having less and less safe water.
88 Bq/Kg of cesium was measured from well water in Fukushima.
On 9/11/2012, ministry of the environment announced they measured 88 Bq/Kg of cesium from well water in Odaka Minamisoma city, Fukushima.
The sample was taken in June and July of 2012. The safety limit is 10Bq/Kg. They measured cesium more than 10 Bq/Kg at 2 of 436 locations. They also measured cesium less than 10Bq/Kg from 4 of 436 locations.
They commented, they found something like mud in the well water that they measured 88 Bq/Kg of cesium from.
It’s not only cesium, not even only strontium, but also radioactive silver is leaked from Fukushima plant.Radioactive silver, 110mAg was detected in Gunma, Tochigi and Ibaraki.On 9/12/2012, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology published their latest radiation monitoring map.The measurement was conducted from 12/13/2011 to 5/29/2012.
Because the half-life is 249.95 days, it’s re-calculated to be the amount of 3/1/2012.
The map shows 110mAg (≦ 100 Bq/m2) scattered in Gunma, Tochigi, and Ibaraki prefecture.
Floods in Niger have killed 81 people since July, the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs announced Thursday, adding cholera outbreaks have killed a further 81 people.
“The last update of the toll of the floods dating from September 11 indicates that 527,471 people have been affected by the bad weather and 81 people have lost their lives,” OCHA said in a statement in Niamey.
The previous toll established by the authorities was 68 dead and 485,000 people affected in the Sahel nation in west Africa.
Thousands of homes, schools, health centres and mosques have been destroyed, along with large quantities of food supplies, according to the authorities.
The UN office also reported outbreaks of cholera, which have claimed 81 lives since the start of the year, mainly in the west of the country.
Cholera is spreading fast in at least four places, making 3,854 people sick and notably affecting the Tillaberi regions lying by the Niger river and close to the border with Mali, OCHA said.
In the provinces and in the capital, where the Niger river level is rising significantly, most of the people stricken by flooding are being housed mainly in schools, as well as mosques and public buildings.
While preparing to move flood victims to more appropriate accommodation, the government has postponed the start of the school year from October 17 until October 27.
In neighbouring Burkina Faso, heavy rains have killed 18 people and made 21,000 homeless since June. Senegal and Nigeria have also been affected by the bad weather.
The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission says a viral disease has spread to deer populations across much of Nebraska. Epizootic hemorrhagic disease spreads from deer to deer by the bite of a small insect known as a midge. Game and Parks says the virus is suspected in the reported deaths of more than 2,200 Nebraska deer this year. The disease causes hemorrhaging within the deer’s body. Deer suffering from the virus may develop a high fever and seek water, which is why many deer killed by the disease are found in or near water. The disease is not a threat to humans. The commission wants people to report to their nearest Game and Parks office any deer deaths that may be attributed to this disease.
Biohazard name:
EHD (epizootic hemorrhagic disease)
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
The Texas Department of State Health Services is looking for piece of equipment containing potentially dangerous radioactive material that was lost Tuesday by an oil and gas crew in a rural part of West Texas. The sealed radioactive source, a small stainless steel cylinder approximately 7 inches long and an inch across, contains Americium-241/Beryllium….The cylinder is stamped with the words “danger radioactive” and “do not handle” along with a radiation warning symbol. Anyone who sees it should stay at least 25 feet away and notify local law enforcement. This type of device is used to evaluate oil and gas wells and is usually stored in a protective shielding. A Halliburton crew was transporting it from a well outside of Pecos to another well south of Odessa. On arrival, the crew noticed the shielding was not locked and the device was missing. DSHS is assisting law enforcement with the search and investigating the loss of the radioactive material.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
Illinois has been hard hit by the cantaloupe Salmonella outbreak that has sickened 204 people in 22 states, according to the latest update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Illinois residents account for about 12 percent of all reported cases nationwide. So far, 24 people from 11 counties in that state have confirmed cases of Salmonella poisoning. And at least eight of them had cases so severe that they needed to be hospitalized.
The tainted cantaloupes were grown on Chamberlain Farms Produce, Inc. of Owensville, Indiana and were distributed throughout the country. Retailers who reported removing cantaloupes from their shelves include Walmart, Krogers, Schnucks, Meijer and Marsh.
“Illinois consumers should check for and ask about the origin of recently purchased cantaloupe, and discard any cantaloupe grown in southwestern Indiana,” said Dr. LaMar Hasbrouck, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. “Anyone who becomes ill after eating cantaloupes grown in southwestern Indiana should seek medical attention immediately.”
Symptoms of a Salmonella infection include diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps developing 12 to 72 hours after exposure and lasting up to seven days. For some people, the diarrhea may be so severe that hospitalization is required. Those most at risk include older adults, infants, and those with impaired immune systems. Infections that travel from the GI tract to the bloodstream can be fatal id they are not treated quickly with antibiotics. In this outbreak 78 people have been hospitalized, and two people from Kentucky have died.
Case counts by state are as follows: Alabama (13), Arkansas (5), California (2), Florida (1), Georgia (4), Illinois (24), Indiana (22), Iowa (8), Kentucky (63), Massachusetts (2), Michigan (6), Minnesota (5), Mississippi (5), Missouri (13), New Jersey (2), North Carolina (5), Ohio (5), Pennsylvania (2), South Carolina (3), Tennessee (8), Texas (2), and Wisconsin (4).
The Ohio Department of Health (ODH) Friday announced the nation’s first known H3N2v-associated (swine flu) death.
Testing involving a 61-year-old Madison County woman at the Ohio Department of Health Laboratory confirmed that the individual had been infected with the H3N2v influenza virus.
The patient had multiple other underlying medical conditions, but the influenza virus may have contributed to the death.
The deceased woman is known to have had direct contact with swine at the Ross County fair before becoming ill.
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the main risk factor for infection is direct exposure to swine. CDC points out that the virus does not spread easily from person-to-person, but limited human-to-human infection has occurred.
Swine influenza has not been shown to be transmissible to people through eating properly handled and prepared pork (pig meat) or other products derived from pigs, according to CDC.
”H3N2v, like many other viruses, has the greatest potential to impact those with weakened immune systems,” said Dr. Ted Wymyslo, Director of ODH. “We have been seeing a mild illness in most individuals infected with the H3N2v virus, so there’s no need for alarm. However, it is important for those at-risk individuals to take extra precautions like avoiding swine exhibits to protect themselves.”
Ohio is currently reporting 102 cases of H3N2v statewide. Those with confirmed cases of H3N2v are between the ages of 6 months and 61 years old. Most ill individuals have recovered on their own or were treated and released after a short stay in the hospital.
At this time, surveillance indicates that the individuals most likely became ill with the flu virus after exposure to swine. At-risk individuals (children younger than 5 years old, people 65 years and older, pregnant women, and people with certain chronic conditions such as asthma and other lung diseases, diabetes, heart disease, weakened immune system, and neurologic or neurodevelopmental disorders) should avoid exposure to pigs and swine barns during this fair season.
Those attending fairs should remember:
- Wash your hands frequently with soap and running water before and after exposure to animals;
- Never eat, drink or put things in your mouth in animal areas, and don’t take food or drink into animal areas;
- Leave baby strollers parked outside of areas with pigs;
- Young children, pregnant women, people 65 and older and people with weakened immune systems should be extra careful around animals;
- If you have animals – including swine – watch them for signs of illness and call a veterinarian if you suspect they might be sick;
- Avoid close contact with animals that look or act ill, when possible;
- Avoid contact with swine if you are experiencing flu-like symptoms.
If you are sick:
- If you are at high risk and you get flu symptoms, call a health care provider. Tell them about your risk factor, other medical conditions and your flu symptoms. If you have recently been exposed to swine, tell them about that too.
- If you are not at high risk and you get flu symptoms after exposure to pigs, seek medical care as you normally would.
World Foods is recalling products it distributes to retail supermarkets that contain Daniella mangoes recalled by Splendid Products. The mangoes may be contaminated with Salmonella Braenderup that are linked to a nationwide outbreak. The products were distributed to stores in central and south Florida.
The recalled products include: Garden Highway Tropical Salsa in 11 ounce packages, with UPC code 8.26766-42210.4 and code dates 8/31/2012 and 9/1/2012. Generic/Winn Dixie Stores brand Fresh Island Medley in 1 pound pack, with UPC number 0.21140-01696.6 and code dates 8/30/2012 and 8/31/2012. Also recalled are Generic/Winn-Dixie Stores brand Fresh Fruit Burst Bowl in 1 pound pack, with UPC number 0.21140-01701.7 and code dates 8/30/2012 and 8/31/2012. And finally, Generic/Winn-Dixie Stores brand Fresh Fruit Burst Bowl in 1.5 pound pack is recalled, with UPC number 0.21140-01707.9 and code dates 8/30/2012 and 8/31/2012.
All affected products have a plant code P-009 on the label next to the UPC bar code. No other World Foods LLC products or code dates are affected by this recall. If you have purchased these products, discard them. For questions, call the company at 1-407-851-4504 Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm ET.
Hannaford Bros. Co. is recalling several products made with recalled Daniella mangoes. The fruit may be contaminated with Salmonella Braenderup and may be linked to a nationwide outbreak that has sickened 105 people in 16 states.
Hannaford Mango Spears in 16 ounce packages with Sell by date of August 28, 2012 are recalled. In addition, Hannaford Fruit Burst in 10 ounce, 20 ounce, and 4-pound packages, with Sell by date of August 28, 2012 is recalled. And finally, Hannaford Tropical Medley in 16 ounce packages, with Sell by date of August 28, 2012 is recalled.
The store has also removed Daniella brand mangoes with PLU #4051 from its stores as part of a larger recall by Splendid Products. Do not eat these products if you have purchased them. Return them to the place of purchase for a full refund. Or dispose of the product in a sealed container and bring the receipt or sticker back to the store for a refund.
Brand new Energy re-sale distributor is recalling all lot codes of EphBurn 25. The FDA has notified them that one lot of EphBurn 25 was sampled and found to contain ephedrine alkaloids, making it an unapproved drug.
Ephedrine is a stimulant, appetite suppressant, concentration aid, and decongestant. Adverse effects of this drug include elevated blood pressure, rapid heartbeat, nerve damage, muscle injury, psychosis, and memory loss. More serious side effects include heart attack, stroke, seizure, and death. But there have been no reports of adverse events associated with the consumption of this product.
The recall affects all lot codes and use-by dates of EphBurn 25. The product is a 90-count bottle with red capsules. It displays the product name “ephBURN 25″ in white letters on a red label. There is no UPC code. EphBurn 25 was discontinued on or about May 2012.
If you have purchased this product, immediately discontinue use. Contact your healthcare provider if you have experienced any problems. Report adverse side effects at Medwatch. For questions, call 1-888-234-2595 from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm PT.
Klement Sausage Company of Wisconsin is recalling about 2,920 pounds of frozen bratwurst patties because they may contain pieces of ap lstic pen. The product is 10-pound cases containing 4-ounce patties of Klement Sausage Co. Bratwurst Patty.
The products were produced on July 6, 2012. The packages have the establishment number “EST. 2426B” in the USDA mark of inspection. Each case label has the batch number “21097″. The products were distributed for foodservice use in Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
The problem was discovered when food preparation personnel discovered the foreign matter while cooking the product. There have been no reports of injury or illness associated with the consumption of this product. If you have questions, call Jeff Klement, the company’s vice president of special products, at 414-744-2330 extenion 244.
The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC is recalling Daniella mangoes it received from Splendid Products for possible Salmonella Braenderup contamination. The mangoes were purchased between July 12, 2012 and August 24, 2012. The mangoes have PLU #4959.
Stop & Shop says it is aware of illnesses reported in Canada and associated with this recall. If you have purchased this product, discard it and bring the receipt to Stop & Shop for a full refund. You can call Stop & Shop Customer Service at 800-767-7772 Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm for more information. Stop & Shop stores are located in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey.
These mangoes may be linked to a nationwide outbreak of Salmonella Braenderup that has sickened 105 people in 16 states. The FDA and CDC are still investigating this outbreak and they may announce other products linked to the outbreak.
BI-LO is recalling whole Daniella brand mangoes for possible Salmonella Braenderup contamination. The mangoes, imported from Mexico, were sold in stores between July 12, 2012 and August 27, 2012. The fruit was sold as individual fruit and can be identified by the Daniella brand sticker and UPC number 0-00000-04051.
The recall is for fruit sold in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The company has received no reports of illness associated with this product, but the mangoes are linked to a nationwide outbreak that has sickened 105 people in 16 states. Do not eat the mangoes; discard them, or return to BI-LO for a refund. You must have proof of purchase to receive a refund.
For questions, call BI-LO customer relations department at 1-800-862-9293. Hours of operation are Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm and Saturday from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm ET. If you have purchased mangoes that do not have a sticker, consult the store to find out where they came from.
Irwindale, CA-based Ready Pac Foods Inc. Saturday recalled about 30 package fruit products containing mangoes, distributed through Aug. 30, 2012, for potential Salmonella Braenderup contamination.
The package fruit products contain Daniella Brand mangoes previously recalled by Splendid Products, the supplier.
The Ready Pac recall is part of an ongoing food safety investigation in the United States and Canada.
There have been several confirmed illnesses associated with the consumption of Daniella brand mangoes contained in the Ready Pac fruit products.
The Ready Pac Foods fruit products were distributed in Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Washington D.C., Florida,
Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Canada.
Consumers who may have purchased the products should check the Ready Pac website for a complete list of products, use-by dates, and UPC codes.
Ready Pac is asking retailers to check their inventories and store shelves to confirm that none of the products are present or available for purchase by consumers or in warehouse inventories.
Customer service representatives are contacting all the retail stores impacted and are in the process of confirming that the recalled products are not in the stream of commerce.
Consumers with questions may contact Ready Pac at 1-800-800-7822 M-F 8am-pm PDT.
More Mexican grown mangoes have been recalled, this time by New Jersey’s F&S Produce Co. Inc., which distributes in the Northeast U.S.
The company recalled products containing fresh cut mangoes for possible Salmonella Braenderup contamination. Several brand names, some familiar, are involved. F&S said the recalled products have an expiration date of Aug. 28.
The F&S recall is part of an ongoing food safety investigation by both the United States and Canada.
There have been more than 100 confirmed illnesses associated with the consumption of Daniella brand mangoes from Mexico. None of the illnesses have yet been connected to F&S products.
Five lots of Daniella brand mangoes have been recalled in the U.S. and Canada while officials in the two counties try to pin point the problem. No deaths have yet been connected to the outbreak.
F&S said its products with mangoes that fall under the various recalls were distributed to grocery and convenience stores in the Northeast and were processed between Aug. 9 and 19. F&S switched to using mangoes from Brazil for packages with use or sell-by dates on or after Aug. 29.
The company has asked retailers to remove the recalled products from store shelves. The F&S recalled products by label, all with an expiration date of Aug. 28, unless otherwise noted include:
The CFIA and Continental Strictly Kosher Meat, Poultry and Delicatessen Products are recalling ground beef and ground veal products because they may be contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. The following Glatt’s brand products are being recalled: lean ground veal, lean ground beef, medium ground beef, and medium ground beef club pack.
You can see where these products were sold at the CFIA web site. You can also see label photos at that web site. If you have purchased these products, discard them. Please check your home freezers to see if you have the products. And if you’re not sure if you purchased these products or not, check with your retailer.
There have not been any confirmed illnesses associated with the consumption of these products. For more information, call Continental at 514-522-1196, or the CFIA at 1-800-442-2342.
Newark, NJ-based Manna Organics, Inc. on Sunday recalled various soybean sprouts and tofu products listed because they have the potential to be contaminated with potentially deadly Listeria monocytogenes.
No illnesses have yet been associated with the recall.
Manna Organics became concerned about possible contamination after random testing by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets discovered Listeria in a 16 oz. package of of SOONYEOWON SOYBEAN SPROUTS.
Not known is whether New York’s testing was done under USDA’s 11-year old Microbiological Data Program (MDP), which the Obama Administration is ending at the end of this growing season at the behest of the produce industry, or whether it was done on the state’s own nickel.
The company has suspended production while it investigates the problem with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Consumers who have purchased any of the items listed are urged to return them to the place of purchase for a full refund. Consumers with questions may contact the company at 1-862-267-3400. Hours of operation are 9 AM to 5 PM EST, Monday through Friday.
The recalled products were distributed to various restaurants, retailers, and distributors in NY, NJ, PA, MA, VA, MD, CT, GA, IL, and TX on or after July 17, 2012.
The Jinga Firm and Soft, SooNyeoWon Firm and Soft Tofu are packaged in a square 16-ounce white plastic container with the label sealed on top with UPC Codes: 0 28346 09112 4, 0 28346 09111 7, 0 28346 07812 5 and 0 28346 07814 9. Expiration date of September 9, 2012 or later is printed in black on top of the label.
The 5 pieces and 10 pieces tofu are packaged in a white plastic bucket. The 5 pieces and 10 pieces are lidded and labeled in Korean “Healthy Tofu” with UPC Codes 0 28346 09125 4 and 0 28346 09129 2. Affected products have an expiration date of July 25, 2012 or later.
The Soy Milk is packaged in a 1.3 gallon white plastic pail.
The Large Tofu Bucket(30 pieces), Soon tofu, and Small Tofu are packaged in a large, white plastic pail enclosed in a plastic bag labeled TOFU with the company name, address, and nutritional information listed directly below. Affected products have an expiration date of July 25, 2012 or later.
SooNyeoWon Silken Tofu is packaged in a small 14-ounce square plastic container with the label sealed on top. It has a UPC Code of 0 28346 09113 1. There is an expiration date printed in black on top of the label. Affected products have an expiration date of September 9, 2012 or later.
The Soybean Sprouts 16-ounce products come in a clear plastic sealed bag colored in red or green with the labels SOONYEOWON SOYBEAN SPROUTS or SOONYEOWON HEALTHY SOYBEAN SPROUTS with UPC Codes 0 28346 07121 8 and 0 28346 07140 9. The Soybean Sprouts 10lbs. and 5 lbs. bags come in a clear hand tied plastic poly bag labeled SPROUTS with the company info directly beneath it.
The San Francisco-based Somersault Snack Co., LLC has recalled some of its Somersaults Pacific Sea Salt (6 oz.) for a packaging mistake.
“Limited quantities of Somersaults Santa Fe Salsa flavored product were inadvertently commingled with Somersaults Pacific Sea Salt flavored product in packages labeled as Somersaults Pacific Sea Salt,” the snack firm said.
“The inadvertent commingling of these two products introduced another allergen (milk) to the Somersaults Pacific Sea Salt (6oz). packages, and that allergen (milk) is not listed on the packaging as either an ingredient or an allergen.
The sell-by date and UPC number on the product is: MAR1113 G6 / UPC Product Code: 8-98403-00201-7. The Sell By Date is located on the back of the package, in the middle, above the sunflower graphics, and the UPC Product Code is located below the UPC bar code.
People who have an allergy or severe sensitivity to milk run the risk of an allergic reaction if they consume the affected product. The product was distributed to retail stores nationwide. No allergic reactions have been reported.
Somersault Snack Co. has taken the precautionary measure of notifying the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is voluntarily recalling approximately 418 cases of the product shown.
Somersault Snack Co. will work with retail customers to ensure that the recalled products are removed from store shelves.
In the event that consumers believe they have purchased products affected by this voluntary recall, they should return the product to the store where it was purchased for a full refund. Consumers or customers with questions may call 415-275-1247 for more information.
Two consumer groups have sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for the delay in implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Four critical regulations have been delayed at OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for more than eight months, making the Act “unlawfully delayed for more than a year and a half,” according to the complaint.
FSMA was signed into law in January 2011, but the FDA has failed to put seven food safety regulations into effect. The lawsuit was filed in Federal Court on Thursday, August 30, 2012 by the Center for Environmental Health and the Center for Food Safety. Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, said in a statement, “if the Obama administration has lost the political will to make FSMA a reality, we’re here to help them find it. It’s a disgrace that a crucial, lifesaving law sits idle while the bureaucracies of FDA and OMB grind along without a hint of results.”
FSMA was established to update the food safety laws in the United States. The FDA was given the power to require preventive controls in the food supply, to inspect food producers, and ensure imported foods meet U.S. safety standards. Meanwhile, two major outbreaks linked to imported foods have occurred this year. The Salmonella Bareilly outbreak in tuna imported from India, and the Salmonella Braenderup outbreak in Mexican mangoes, have sickened hundreds of Americans.
This is not the first time groups have pressured the White House to release the delayed rules. In April 2012, Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) called on the White House to implement the regulations. And in March 2012, the Consumer Federation of America urged the Obama administration to release the proposals.
The lawsuit seeks a court order to impose a deadline to require the FDA to enact FSMA regulations and prevents the OMB from delaying the FDA’s compliance. Charles Margulis, Food Program Director at Center for Environmental Health said, “this unreasonable and dangerous political food-dragging on FSMA has to stop now. While illness outbreaks continue and Americans question the health and safety of their food supply, FDA issues excuses instead of new regulations.”
Food safety was never at risk at Central Valley Meat, which was shut down for a week for inhumane treatment of animals.
But USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has concluded that no downer cows entered the food supply, meaning incidents of inhumane treatment did not result in any food safety violations.
The Hanford, CA slaughterhouse was subjected to an undercover video sting by an animal rights group that produced disturbing footage of inhumane treatment of animals at the plant.
It brought potentially devastating losses to Central Valley Meat, with customers including USDA, Costco, McDonald’s and In-N-Out Burger.
But the concern about downer cattle entering the food supply is apparently unfounded.
“The USDA team conducting the Central Valley Meat investigation has concluded there is no evidence to support the allegation that a downer cow was slaughtered and entered the food supply, and that no food safety violation occurred as a result,” FSIS Administrator Al Almanza told Meatingplace, the industry news service.
Central Valley Meat said it is ready to resume full operations. It reopened with more video surveillance cameras installed, more training for those employees stunning animals and tighter rules for handling animals that become non-ambulatory while in transit from farm to plant.
FSIS took what it said was “aggressive action” to investigate the incident involving “evidence of inhumane treatment of cattle.” The agency received a copy of the undercover video from the animal right groups that took it.
With no downer cows entering the food supply, USDA did not demand the recall of any meat. By comparison, the 2008 animal cruelty investigation at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino, CA brought the one of the largest recalls in history — 143 million pounds of beef — because downer cows has entered the food supply.
Valley Meat Packing Co. did, at least temporarily, lose the business of Costco, In-N-Out Burgers, McDonald’s and USDA. In reopening the company said it was going to improve monitoring and deploy more third-party audits of its operations.
A federal grand jury in Nebraska has indicted Paul Rosberg, 61, and Kelly Rosberg, 44, on six counts stemming from the sale of misbranded and/or non-inspected meat and meat products to Omaha Public Schools. Both men are from Wausa, NE.
If convicted, each man could be sentenced to 3 to 5 years in federal prison, and fined from $10,000 to $250,000 on each of the six counts along with requirements that any release be supervised and fees paid.
Count one charges the pair with conspiracy with the intent to defraud. The second count charges Kelly Rosberg with selling 2,600 pounds of ground beef that was labeled as inspected by the USDA when it was not.
Count three charges both men with selling on or about Sept. 19, 2011 ground beef that was not inspected by USDA. In other words, the indictment is for both the mislabeling ground beef as inspected when it was not and for actually selling beef outside the required USDA inspection.
The fourth count against both men is for representing the 2,600 pounds of beet was USDA inspected, Counts five and six are against Paul Rosberg for making a false statements on or about Nov. 3, 2011 to USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.
Deborah Gilg, U.S. District Attorney for Nebraska, announced the indictments.
The pair were caught by a joint investigation of USDA’s Office of Program Evaluation, Enforcement and Review (OPEER) and the Inspector General (IG).
Information development by investigators led to the issuance of a search warrant for Nebraska’s Finest Meats, which led to the confiscation of records, labels, equipment and other evidence in the case.
Nebraska’s Finest Meats has suspended operations.
Omaha Public Schools, with about 50,000 K-12 students, are Nebraska’s largest.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
Nearly 1,000 earthquakes recorded in Arizona over 3 years Enlarge Nearly 60 USArray stations were installed in Arizona from 2006 to 2009 as part of the EarthScope project. Station 118A, seen in this photo, recorded ground motion north of Wilcox in southeastern Arizona from April 6, 2007 to Jan. 21, 2009. Credit: Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (funded by NSF EarthScope) Arizona State University researchers use EarthScope data to build the first comprehensive earthquake catalog for Arizona. Ads by Google Emergency Mgmt. Degree – Earn an emergency management degree online at AMU. Enroll now. – http://www.AMU.APUS.edu/EmergencyMgmt Earthquakes are among the most destructive and common of geologic phenomena. Several million earthquakes are estimated to occur worldwide each year (the vast majority are too small to feel, but their motions can be measured by arrays of seismometers). Historically, most of Arizona has experienced low levels of recorded seismicity, with infrequent moderate and large earthquakes in the state. Comprehensive analyses of seismicity within Arizona have not been previously possible due to a lack of seismic stations in most regions, contributing to the perception that widespread earthquakes in Arizona are rare. Debunking that myth, a new study published by Arizona State University researchers found nearly 1,000 earthquakes rattling the state over a three-year period. Jeffrey Lockridge, a graduate student in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and the project’s lead researcher, used new seismic data collected as part of the EarthScope project to develop methods to detect and locate small-magnitude earthquakes across the entire state of Arizona. EarthScope’s USArray Transportable Array was deployed within Arizona from April 2006 to March 2009 and provided the first opportunity to examine seismicity on a statewide scale. Its increased sensitivity allowed Lockridge to find almost 1,000 earthquakes during the three-year period, including many in regions of Arizona that were previously thought to be seismically inactive. “It is significant that we found events in areas where none had been detected before, but not necessarily surprising given the fact that many parts of the state had never been sampled by seismometers prior to the deployment of the EarthScope USArray,” says Lockridge. “I expected to find some earthquakes outside of north-central Arizona, where the most and largest events had previously been recorded, just not quite so many in other areas of the state.” Ads by Google ITT Tech – Official Site – Convenient Schedules, Over 130 Locations. Browse New Programs. – http://www.ITT-Tech.edu One-thousand earthquakes over three years may sound alarmingly high, but the large number of earthquakes detected in the study is a direct result of the improved volume and quality of seismic data provided by EarthScope. Ninety-one percent of the earthquakes Lockridge detected in Arizona were “microquakes” with a magnitude of 2.0 or smaller, which are not usually felt by humans. Detecting small-magnitude earthquakes is not only important because some regions experiencing small earthquakes may produce larger earthquakes, but also because geologists use small magnitude earthquakes to map otherwise hidden faults beneath the surface. Historically, the largest earthquakes and the majority of seismicity recorded within Arizona have been located in an area of north–central Arizona. More recently, a pair of magnitude 4.9 and 5.3 earthquakes occurred in the Cataract Creek area outside of Flagstaff. Earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 or larger also have occurred in other areas of the state, including a magnitude 4.2 earthquake in December 2003 in eastern Arizona and a magnitude 4.9 earthquake near Chino Valley in 1976. “The wealth of data provided by the EarthScope project is an unprecedented opportunity to detect and locate small-magnitude earthquakes in regions where seismic monitoring (i.e. seismic stations) has historically been sparse,” explains Lockridge. “Our study is the first to use EarthScope data to build a regional catalog that detects all earthquakes magnitude 1.2 or larger.” His results appear in a paper titled, “Seismicity within Arizona during the Deployment of the EarthScope USArray Transportable Array,” published in the August 2012 issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. Ramon Arrowsmith and Matt Fouch, professors in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, are Lockridge’s dissertation advisors and coauthors on the paper. Fouch is also a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, DC. “The most surprising result was the degree to which the EarthScope data were able to improve upon existing catalogs generated by regional and national networks. From April 2007 through November 2008, other networks detected only 80 earthquakes within the state, yet over that same time we found 884 earthquakes, or 11 times as many, which is really quite staggering,” says Lockridge. “It’s one of countless examples of how powerful the EarthScope project is and how much it is improving our ability to study Earth.” Lockridge is also lead author on a study that focuses on a cluster of earthquakes located east of Phoenix, near Theodore Roosevelt Lake. The results from this study will be published in Seismological Research Letters later this year. In his current studies as doctoral student, Lockridge is using the same methods used for Arizona to develop a comprehensive earthquake catalog for the Great Basin region in Nevada and western Utah. Provided by Arizona State University search and more info website
Possibly volcanic SO2 plumes over Costa Rica on 11 Aug (NOAA)
Activity has decreased at White Island. Ash emissions have been lower than in the previous days. Gas measurements showed that all volcanic gases were at levels lower than the previous measurement on August 1.
Tongariro volcano has stayed calm with and GNS scientists think that the most likely scenario is that the 6 Aug eruption was a single event and will not be followed by new eruptions in the near to medium future.
A “new” volcano just entered the watch list:
Out in the Pacific, a pilot observed an ash cloud rising from Tofua volcano to 3,000 ft (ca. 1 km) in the Tonga Islands at 04:42 GMT, VAAC Wellington reports.
El Hierro volcano: A total of 5 earthquakes (between M1.3-2.4) at 10-19 km depth has occurred today so far. This is the highest number in many days.
Activity remains weak at Popocatépetl in Mexico. About 1 weak eruption per hour has been observed during the past day by CENAPRED. SO2 emissions remain high (which is typical for Popo during phases of activity).
An elevated SO2 plume was visible above Costa Rica’s Central valley on NOAA’s SO2 monitoring images. It could have been caused by stronger degassing activity of the volcanoes Poas or Turrialba, both of which have been showing increased activity in 2011-12, but seem to have calmed down in the past months. Another SO2 signal is visible about 100 km east of Rincon de la Vieja and could have originated there. The Costa Rican volcano observatory doesn’t mention any unusual activity.
Santiaguito / Santa Maria (Guatemala): An explosion at 05:49 local tie ejected an 800 m high ash plume and caused ash fall at Finca la Florida and around San Marcos Palajunoj. Only few and weak rock avalanches were reported since yesterday.
For Fuego volcano, INSIVUMEH reports 8 weak explosions during the past day, generating ash columns of 200-500 m height.
The lava flow in direction of Taniluya canyon has further advances and is now 300 m long and generates constant rock avalanches. Avalanches, too, have been observed towards the “Ash” (Ceniza) canyon.
In Colombia, sporadic gas and ash emissions continue to occur at Galeras and tremor signals are sometimes visible on the seismograms. Nevado del Ruiz (Colombia): Steam and ash emissions continue at Nevado del Ruiz at fluctuating intensity. This morning a fresh ash deposit was found at the volcano observatory.
The seimic recordings show tremor and a seismic swarm with 30 quakes since 22:27 local time last night, located NE of the Arenas crater between 3-5 km, in the same area as the previous swarm on 12 August.
Reventador volcano in Ecuador ejects a 1.5 km high steam plume, but IG mentions no explosions or ash. Tungurahua volcano continues to emit a steam plume with small amounts of ash, and has occasional small to moderate explosions accompanied by gunshot sounds heard around the volcano.
Jumping to the far north, there is little new activity to be reported from volcanoes in Kamchatka, the Kuriles, Aleutians and in Alaska. It is rather surprising that this normally very area has stayed quite calm over the past week.
Midway on its 800-kilometer (500-mile) voyage from Auckland to Raoul Island, New Zealand, the HMNZS Canterbury received an intriguing report: a maritime patrol aircraft had spotted a vast area of open ocean covered with floating pumice. Soon after, the ship was sailing through a mass of buoyant volcanic rocks. Up to two feet thick, the pumice raft was about half a nautical mile (1 kilometer) wide, and “extended sideways as far as the eye could see,” wrote Rebecca Priestley, a science writer aboard the ship. Although the lightweight, gas-filled pumice posed no threat to the Canterbury, enough got stuck in the water filters to provide samples for analysis.
Though the pumice was spread over a vast area of the South Pacific, the origin was a mystery to the crew of the ship. An undersea volcano several hundred kilometers to the north of the pumice—Monowai—had erupted on August 3, but an airline pilot reported seeing pumice as early as August 1. Two data sources provided clues to pinpoint the volcano: earthquake records and satellite imagery. After reports of the pumice rafts surfaced, scientists from Tahiti and New Zealand’s GNS Science connected the eruption with a cluster of earthquakes in the Kermadec Islands on July 17 and 18.
Working independently of GNS, volcanologist Erik Klemetti and NASA visualizer Robert Simmon examined a month’s worth of satellite imagery from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). They discovered the first signs of the eruption—ash-stained water, gray pumice, and a volcanic plume—in imagery from 9:50 a.m. and 2:10 p.m. (local time) on July 19, 2012. (Although the Kermadec Islands are east of the International Date Line, they follow New Zealand time.)
Hidden by clouds in the morning image (above, top), the site of the eruption is clearly visible in the afternoon image (lower). Klemetti matched the satellite imagery with ocean floor bathymetry to identify Havre Seamount as the likely source. The eruption was strong enough to breach the ocean surface from a depth of 1,100 meters (3,600 feet).
Alain Bernard of the Laboratoire de Volcanologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles analyzed nighttime imagery from MODIS and found heat from the eruption at 10:50 p.m. on July 18, 2012, the earliest evidence of the Havre Seamount eruption reaching the ocean surface.
By July 21, the eruption appeared to have waned, leaving behind the dense rafts of pumice. Winds and currents spread the pumice into a series of twisted filaments, spread over an area about 450 by 250 kilometers (280 by 160 miles) as of August 13.
A severe storm swept through Calgary and area this afternoon, bringing hail, torrential downpours and wind gusts reaching more than 100 kilometres per hour that left broken windows and fallen trees in its wake. The worst of the storm has passed Calgary, says CBC meteorologist Danielle Savoni. “At this point it’s starting to change over into just the rain and some embedded thunderstorms, but those embedded thunderstorms are nowhere near as severe as what we’ve seen.” Some window washers got caught on a platform on the 22nd floor on an office building on 5th Avenue S.W. Tara Sukut was in her office a floor below. “You could hear the window washers outside yelling, get us off here, get us out of here,” says Sukut. “And a couple minutes later we just heard glass smashing. And you could see it was banging on the window down on our floor. They broke the windows to get inside the building.” The Calgary Fire Department’s high-angle rescue unit was called in to help the three window washers. Sukut’s interview with the CBC’s Elizabeth Snaddon can be heard in the player below.
NEW: National Guard activated in Washington, will provide air support
An Idaho firefighter is killed battling a blaze; two others are hurt in Oregon and California
In all, 62 fires are burning
Are wildfires blazing near you? Send in your photos and videos to CNN iReport, but please stay safe.
(CNN) — Whipped by high winds, wildfires in central Washington state have scorched 28,000 acres and destroyed at least 60 buildings, officials said Tuesday.
Gov. Chris Gregoire declared Kittitas and Yakima counties to be in states of emergency, according to a written statement from her office. The Washington National Guard will provide air support to the Department of Natural Resources, which is in charge of statewide firefighting efforts.
The fire raging near Cle Elum is one of several Western fires burning this week.
Colorado paid the price earlier this summer. Now, new wildfires are burning through sagebrush, grass and beetle-killed lodgepole pines in California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington and Idaho.
In all, 62 fires, including 16 new large fires, were burning as of Tuesday, the U.S. Forest Service reported. They have destroyed dozens of homes and are threatening many more.
Tearful wildfire victim: ‘Nothing left’
Wildfires destroy homes in Oklahoma
Washington’s Taylor Bridge Fire began as a brush fire Monday afternoon. By Tuesday afternoon more than 20,000 acres, or 31 square miles, were burned.
Authorities have already evacuated between 900 people near the Taylor Bridge Fire, the governor’s office said. There was no report of any injuries.
“The fire behavior I would classify as extreme,” Rex Reed, the incident commander, earlier Tuesday. “Extreme fire conditions. We expect a very busy day. Very rapid rates of spread. There are multiple heads on this fire.”
He said authorities were working to activate National Guard troops to assist in the operation in Kittitas County.
In Idaho, a blaze has killed a 20-year-old firefighter. Two other firefighters have been injured in Oregon and California.
Anne Veseth died Sunday while fighting the Steep Canyon Fire near Orofino, said Phil Sammon of the Forest Service. He said the death was accidental but could not confirm how it happened.
On Tuesday, the fire danger spiked with searing temperatures and single-digit humidity across Western states. In some places, winds were gusting up to 40 miles per hour.
More than 750 firefighters and support personnel were working in Oregon and Nevada to corral the 418,235-acre Holloway Fire, the largest of the Western wildfires ignited by a lightning strike on August 5.
“We saw huge fire whorls all night,” said Fred Kaninski, fire behavior analyst for the Holloway Fire. “It was burning like daytime.”
On Monday, firefighters battled flames that measured 2 to 8 feet high. On occasion, they reported seeing 15-foot flames.
The northeast flank of the fire burned into Oregon Canyon, where a firefighter suffered burns to the leg and forearm and minor smoke inhalation, the Bureau of Land Management said.
The injured firefighter was rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Winnemucca, Nevada, and was released Sunday night. She is being sent to a burn center in Salt Lake City for further evaluation, the bureau said.
In California, a pair of fires north of San Francisco in Lake County burned 7,000 acres and were 30% contained Tuesday, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Two buildings were destroyed and one was damaged, CNN affiliate KGO reported. An additional 480 homes are threatened, and a firefighter was injured while battling the flames, said Julie Hutchinson of the state’s forestry and fire department. She did not have information on the status of the injured firefighter.
Meteorologists predict the dry heat will last into next week — not good news for firefighters. Any thunderstorms that pop up could present more bad news than good, since lightning strikes could spark more flames.
However, rain doused the killer Waldo Canyon Fire that blazed out of control through parts of Colorado for many weeks this summer. On Tuesday, Colorado was not on the national map for large fires.
acquired August 13, 2012 download large image (3 MB, JPEG, 4800×3800)
acquired August 13, 2012 download large image (3 MB, JPEG, 4800×3800)
acquired August 13, 2012 download GeoTIFF file (33 MB, TIFF)
acquired August 13, 2012 download Google Earth file (KMZ)
Wildfires raged across Colorado earlier this summer. Now California, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon are feeling the heat. On August 14, 2012, numerous fires blazed across the four western states, burning through everything from sagebrush to grass to beetle-killed lodgepole pine forests.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the fires on Aug 11, 2012. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires.
Three large fires burned through coniferous forests in northern California: the Reading fire in Lassen Volcanic National Park, the Chips fire in Plumas National Forest, and the Fort Complex fire in Klamath National Forest. The largest of the three (Chips) had consumed 57 square miles (148 square kilometers) and was 12 percent contained by August 14. The Reading fire had consumed 37 square miles and was 15 percent contained, whereas the Fort Complex Fire had burned 3 square miles and was 10 percent contained. All three were ignited by lightning. In Oregon, lightning also sparked the Barry Point fire, which had burned 68 square miles.
In northern Nevada, the Holloway, Hansen, and Willow fires burned through grass, brush, and sagebrush. The Holloway fire was the largest and had burned 676 square miles by August 14. The Willow and Hanson fires had burned 67 square miles and 20 square miles respectively. All three were ignited by lightning on August 5.
In Idaho, the Halstead fire burned through stands of beetle-killed lodgepole pines in Salmon-Challis National Forest. It had consumed 81 square miles. To the south, the Trinity Ridge fire had burned about 58 square miles. Lightning ignited the Halstead fire on July 27, whereas human activity started the Trinity Ridge fire.
According to statistics compiled by the National Interagency Fire Center, a total of 9,400 square miles had burned in the United States through August 14. That was above the ten-year average for that date, which was 7,750 square miles.
A fast-moving wildfire stoked by triple-digit temperatures burned 3,000 acres Tuesday in the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains, creeping perilously close to tinder-dry areas of the San Bernardino National Forest, officials said. At least four structures, including one home, were destroyed by the blaze, which spread rapidly through dry brush and grasslands in a sparsely populated area south of Hemet and east of Temecula. The fire, just 5% contained as of Tuesday evening, was spreading rapidly through the rocky hills and desert scrub, and was within a mile of forest lands west of Anza, where drought has heightened fire danger all summer. “Of course we’re concerned,” said John Miller, spokesman for the San Bernardino National Forest. “This year our big concern is the fact that rainfall and that includes snow for our forest was somewhere between 50% to 70% of normal.” Mandatory evacuations were ordered in the sparsely populated area near Aguanga, and more than 30 homes have been evacuated, according to Jody Hagemann of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Two firefighters suffered minor injuries and were taken to a hospital, according to radio dispatch reports. One man who lived in a trailer was seriously burned and taken by helicopter to a local hospital. Authorities said the man, whose home was in a remote area, apparently had not received a notice to evacuate.South of the Riverside County fire, fast-moving blazes, some started by lightning strikes from heat-born thunderstorms, have burned more than 2,300 acres in northeast San Diego County, leading to evacuations in the rural communities of Ranchita and the San Felipe area off California 78. The four San Diego County fires are being fought by more than 500 firefighters, along with air tankers and water-dropping helicopters. No structures have yet been reported damaged. “We have very dry vegetation, brush and grass and things like that. Now we have multiple days of very high temperatures,” said Chief Julie Hutchinson, spokeswoman for the state fire agency. “It’s like lighting your fireplace with a blowtorch.” The fire in Riverside County was reported just before 1 p.m. in the community of Aguanga. More than 210 firefighters were working to extinguish the blaze, and six water-carrying helicopters and six water-tender aircraft as well as a DC-10 were assisting, state fire officials said. Crews from the Sierra Nevada mountains areas are being dispatched to assist firefighters. “That’s one thing that’s unique about California. We have a state fire agency, and we’re able to move resources up and down the state,” said Hutchinson, adding that crews from the U.S. Forest Service, local departments and the California National Guard are playing a role in the statewide firefighting efforts. Although flames are more than 14 miles away from Idyllwild, residents and fire officials in the artsy mountain community have been nervously watching television news reports.
Crews are monitoring a fire in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest that has charred an estimated 1,200 acres. The so-called Queen Fire was reported Monday night and forest officials say its cause is under investigation. The blaze is burning about 2 miles northeast of Superior in rocky, inaccessible terrain and crews are attacking the flames by air. Officials say the fire is burning grass and brush. There was immediate timetable Tuesday for containment of the blaze. Meanwhile, the forest is temporarily closing several areas because of the Mistake Peak fire 11 miles east of Basin. That fire began Aug. 8 and is 10% contained after burning about 3,400 acres by Tuesday. Tonto officials chose to temporarily close areas of the forest to protect the public and crews fighting the fire.
A second tropical storm in as many weeks battered the northern Philippines after making landfall Wednesday, killing at least two people, as forecasters warned that the still-reeling capital could see more flooding. Meanwhile, President Benigno Aquino III scrambled to avert another crisis when hundreds of state weather agency employees protested over their pay and warned that forecasting services could deteriorate. Tropical Storm Kai-Tak slammed ashore in northeastern Isabela province with maximum winds of 100 kilometers (60 miles) per hour and higher gusts. It is expected to traverse northern farming provinces and exit along Luzon Island’s western seaboard possibly as a powerful typhoon heading toward southern China in the direction of Hong Kong. The head of the disaster-relief agency, Benito Ramos, reported two deaths, including a man who drowned while swimming in Ilocos Norte province. He said some roads were flooded knee-deep, and government forecasters warned of intense rains that may drench the sprawling capital, Manila, which is still reeling from last week’s monsoon deluge. On Tuesday, an alarmed Aquino rushed to assure the protesting weather agency employees that steps were being taken to resume payment of the cash benefits that had been suspended in March. “I just reminded that since the weather is bad and we have a weather disturbance, we should not add to the worries of those who were hit by the floods,” Aquino told reporters after a hasty meeting with the restive employees.Forecasters and other employees of the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration wore black arm bands and hoisted streamers urging the government to resume hazard pay and other allowances. While the workers did not plan any work stoppage, protest leader Ramon Agustin said some hard-up employees had failed to report for work due to lack of money. “The only reason why we remain strong in performing our tasks is our pure love for the country, but this will eventually weaken,” Agustin said in a news conference at the weather agency, which buzzed with activity as forecasters tracked the second storm. The archipelago located in the tropical far western Pacific serves like a welcome mat for about 20 tropical storms and typhoons that develop in the open ocean and blow toward Asia every year. Heavy rain from those storms and the annual monsoon often cause flooding and landslides and leave a trail of death and destruction. Relentless rains for nearly two weeks culminated in last week’s two-day deluge that submerged Manila and outlying farming provinces, killing nearly 100 people and displacing more than 400,000. Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said payment of the hazard pay and other cash benefits had been suspended to correct past irregularities, but added the workers would get back the benefits soon. Agustin said the employees have lost an average of 10,000 pesos ($238) monthly since the benefits were suspended by officials in March.
The tornado then went back into the bay as a waterspout before briefly turning into a tornado for a second time as it came onshore at Barker’s Island, where it finally dissipated around 11:20 a.m. CDT.
The tornado was rated an EF-0 on the enhanced fujita scale, with winds from 65 to 85 mph. No damage was reported.
Nonetheless, the tornado is the first confirmed on record to touchdown in Duluth.
Thursday’s waterspout in Duluth, Minnesota is the city’s first tornado on record. (August 9, 2012)
Photo credit:
(NWS)
According to Carol Christenson, Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the NWS, there hasn’t been a tornado in our city limits in recorded history, Northland NewsCenter reports.
“There was one outside of city limits back in 1986,” Christenson said.
The NWS says it appears the waterspout turned tornado developed near an inflection point along the leading edge of a strong surge of northeast winds and or small scale frontal boundary, which were enhanced by the very warm Lake Superior water temperatures.
A state of emergency has been declared by the James Smith Cree Nation following continued high rainfall and flooding. Local officials are calling for increased assistance from the federal and provincial governments. The drinking water of nine homes has been contaminated due to the high water levels and some roads have flooded over, says a news release issued Tuesday by James Smith. The continued rainfall is adding to the problems caused by last year’s flooding, said the release. “The high rains are destroying what’s left of our roads and water systems, and this is creating dangerous health conditions for our people, especially very young children and our elders,” said James Smith Chief Wally Burns. “We’ve been trying to get assistance since the 2011 flood, but have so far received minimal support.” Last month officials with the provincial disaster assistance program met with band leadership. The program provided $110,000 to repair damage from previous years of flooding, but the band estimates $3.2 million is needed. James Smith is located about 180 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon.
View GalleryMysterious Louisiana Sinkhole Raises Concerns of Explosions and Radiation (ABC News)
A nearly 400-foot deep sinkhole in Louisiana has swallowed all of the trees in its area and enacted a mandatory evacuation order for about 150 residences for fear of potential radiation and explosions.
The 400-square-foot gaping hole is in Assumption Parish, La., about 50 miles south of Baton Rouge.
The sinkhole sits in the middle of a heavily wooded space where it has consumed all of the soaring cypress trees that had been there. Flyover photos show some of the treetops still visible through the mud.
Authorities enacted a mandatory evacuation for between 100 and150 homes in the area, but most people have chosen to stay, according to the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Preparedness. If any of the dangers seem to become more imminent, the order will be escalated to a forced evacuation.
While officials are not certain what caused the massive sinkhole, they believe it may be have ben caused by a nearby salt cavern owned by the Texas Brine Company.
After being used for nearly 30 years, the cavern was plugged in 2011 and officials believe the integrity of the cavern may have somehow been compromised, leading to the sinkhole.
On Thursday, Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources required that Texas Brine drill a well to investigate the salt cavern as soon as possible, obtain samples from the cavern and provide daily reports on their findings. It could take up to 10 days to set up the drilling process, even with an expedited process.
“We have to arrange for the driller. We have to pick a location. We have to be very careful to not be in a point that’s too close to the sinkhole because of the weight of the rig,” Texas Brine Company spokesman Sonny Cranch told ABCNews.com today. “We don’t want to aggravate the situation.”
The sinkhole is on the outside edge of the salt dome where this particular brine well is located.
“There are some indications that it very well may have been connected, but there’s just indications,” Cranch said. “There’s nothing concrete that has connected the sinkhole to the cavern.”
There was bubbling in the water and the sinkhole is near areas where there has been exploration for oil and gas in the past, which would make the presence of low levels of naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) possible.
The state’s Department of Environmental Quality said water samples from the sinkhole showed oil and diesel on its surface, but initial readings did not detect radiation.
In the days after the sinkhole opened up on Aug. 3, nearby Highway 70 was closed down because officials discovered that the sinkhole caused a 36-inch natural gas pipeline to bend and feared the possibility of an explosion, according to ABC News’ Baton Rouge affiliate WBRZ.
“That’s why the mandatory evacuation is going to stay on, because there is a risk for explosion,” John Boudreaux of from Assumption Parish Emergency Preparedness said at a meeting with residents on Tuesday, WBRZ reported.
“We are determined to do everything we can to find the answer,” president of Texas Brine Mark Cartwright told the residents.
Some community members were visibly frustrated with the situation and lack of answers.
“You can give us a straight answer because that’s all we want,” one woman said at the meeting. “We want to know when we can come home and be safe. Because you all go home after a days work. You’re safe, but we’re not.”
Gov. Bobby Jindal issued a declaration of emergency allowing the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security to assist in the efforts if necessary.
“This is extremely serious and it’s been going on for too long to still be at this point,” Kim Torres, spokeswoman for the Office of Emergency Preparedness, told ABCNews.com today. “The people are very aware of how serious this is.”
Prairie Island nuclear plant shut down Unit 1 after operators declared its two backup diesel generators inoperable Tuesday. Staff determined during routine testing that both generators had exhaust leaks, Xcel Energy media relations spokeswoman Mary Sandok confirmed. That deemed them inoperable, and the plant filed an incident report of the safe shutdown with the Nuclear Regulatory Plant. Prairie Island has other backup protection, including diesel generators and turbine-driven and portable pumps, the company said in the statement issued at 2:30 p.m. There was no radiation leak or danger to the public. Prairie Island Tribal Council President Johnny Johnson called the loss of both generators “not acceptable.” “A failure of the back-up diesel generators can affect all other safety features that rely on the electricity that they generate,” he said. The plant has had more than 30 reported incidents of failing equipment, security breaches, human performance problems and operating errors in recent years, he said. The emergency diesel generators did not fail, Sandok said. Plant workers test equipment regularly, and during this week’s test they determined both generators had defects. “When it comes to important equipment, the nuclear industry has no tolerance for any imperfections, so operators shut the unit down to repair the generators,” she said. As of 7 p.m. Tuesday, one diesel was operable and the other one was repaired and awaiting testing. “Despite these assurances, today’s unplanned shutdown – and the unusual white steam clouds released throughout the day during the reactor shutdown – are ominous reminders of the fact that the 40-year-old Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant operating a half-mile from our homes relies on aging technology,” Johnson said. An unrelated outage also occurred Tuesday at the Monticello plant to repair a gasket on a pipe flange. The plant had been operating at 10 percent power since the weekend as workers investigated leakage to a collection point inside the plant’s containment structure.
MessageToEagle.com – Gamma-ray photons seen emanating from the center of the Milky Way galaxy could be evidence of dark matter.
Dark-matter particles are annihilating each other in space, according to UC Irvine astrophysicists, who found more gamma-ray photons coming from the Milky Way galactic center than they had expected, based on previous scientific models.
Kevork Abazajian, assistant professor, and Manoj Kaplinghat, associate professor, of the Department of Physics & Astronomy analyzed data collected between August 2008 and June 2012 from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbiting Earth.
The gamma-rays Fermi detectsare billions of times more energetic, from 20 million to more than 300 billion electron volts.These gamma-ray photons are so energetic, they cannot be guided by the mirrors and lenses found in ordinary telescopes.
Instead Fermi uses a sensor that is more like a Geiger counter than a telescope.
If we could wear Fermi’s gamma ray “glasses,” we’d witness powerful bullets of energy – individual gamma rays – from cosmic phenomena such as supermassive black holes and hypernova explosions.
According to Abazajian, “this is the first time this new source has been observed with such high statistical significance, and the most striking part is how the shape, spectrum and rate of the observed gamma rays are very consistent with the leading theories for dark matter.”
In this illustration, one photon (purple) carries a million times the energy of another (yellow). Some theorists predict travel delays for higher-energy photons, which interact more strongly with the proposed frothy nature of space-time. Yet Fermi data on two photons from a gamma-ray burst fail to show this effect, eliminating some approaches to a new theory of gravity. The animation link below shows the delay scientists had expected to observe. Credit: NASA/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet
“Future observations of regions with less astrophysical emission, such as dwarf galaxies, will be able to conclusively determine if this is actually from the dark matter.”
Nonluminous and not directly detectable, dark matter is thought to account for 85 percent of the universe’s mass. Its existence can only be inferred from its gravitational effects on other, visible matter. The UCI researchers’ findings could support its presumed presence at the center of galaxies.
The prevailing hypothesis is that dark matter is composed of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. When two WIMPs meet, they annihilate each other to produce more familiar particles – including gamma rays.
Although the data interpretation seems to be consistent with dark-matter theory, the gamma rays could be coming from a source other than WIMP destruction, Kaplinghat noted.
“The signal we see is also consistent with photons emitted by pulsars,” he said, “or from high-energy particles interacting with gas in the galactic center.”
UC Irvine astrophysicists submitted their research to the American Physical Society journal Physical Review D.
Casey Council will not install warning signs after a man reported being stung by a box jellyfish at Tooradin. Devon Meadows’ Tony Jenner said he was swimming when stung by a jellyfish with “six-foot long” tentacles. “It felt like I got bitten by two or three bees,” Mr Jenner said. “I came home and put vinegar on it and I didn’t feel too bad then but through the night I could feel my throat getting tight and it was hard to breathe.” In April, Cr Geoff Ablett called for an investigation into the “life-threatening situation” and whether warning signs should be posted to notify swimmers of the risks. However, in her report to councillors last week, community safety manager Caroline Bell said the incident was isolated and signs were not required. Joanna Browne, of Museums Victoria, said there was a species of box jellyfish in Victoria, but it was smaller and less harmful than those in the tropics.
Biohazard name:
Jellyfish Invasion (Box)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Nine people have died from a West Nile virus outbreak that infected 175 people in Dallas County, Texas, prompting officials to declare a state of emergency. The emergency was declared on Friday by Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, the county’s director of homeland security and emergency management. “This declaration will expand our avenues DisasterNew assistance in our ongoing battle with West Nile virus,” Jenkins said. “While we are busy doing everything we can to keep residents well informed and as protected as possible, we need your help.” Jenkins also said that planes would be spraying insecticide over areas most effected by the virus, which is spread by mosquitoes. He assured citizens that the insecticide is safe and that the planes will be precise in their spraying. Tarrant County has also received 146 reported cases of West Nile in the last few weeks. The county has not declared a state of emergency, though. Houston officials are warning residents of an increased threat of the virus. “Houston can definitely expect an increase in West Nile disease,” said Kristy Murray, an infectious disease specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, DisasterNews reports. “From mid-August through September is the big season here.”
Biohazard name:
West Nile virus outbreak
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
A baby was killed and 14 other people were injured when a Long Island house was reduced to rubble in an explosion Tuesday morning. Six people, including the 18-month-old boy, were inside the Brentwood home when it exploded shortly before noon, said John Meehan, deputy chief of the Suffolk County Police. The five surviving adults were transported to local hospitals, three with serious injuries, he said. Five police officers responding to the scene suffered respiratory problems, one firefighter suffered chest pains and another firefighter suffered a sprained ankle, Meehan said, while a neighbor and a pedestrian were also injured. Authorities have declined to identify any victims and are not saying how many were residents of the home. Investigators are trying to determine if gas caused the explosion, said Robert Kuehn, an inspector for the Brentwood Fire Department. The house was not heated by natural gas, but there were two, 200-pound propane tanks on the property, Meehan said. The explosion leveled the home on Prospect Avenue, leaving no walls standing and covering the small yard in debris. On Tuesday afternoon, firefighters were digging through piles of lumber and sheetrock where the house stood on the wooded suburban street. Clothing was strewn in nearby trees, and adjacent houses sustained broken windows and other damage, authorities said. Neighbors described hearing a loud noise and then walking outside to see only clouds of dust and piles of debris where the house stood moments earlier. “The mother of the baby that came out, she was bloody, crying,” said Anthony Acevedo, 16 year old, who lives across the street. “She kept screaming, ‘My baby’s in there, my baby’s in there.’ They finally got the baby out, but the baby wasn’t moving.”
acquired July 15, 2012 download large image (400 KB, JPEG, 1440×960)
acquired July 7, 1994 download large image (688 KB, JPEG, 1000×1016)
Weather satellites frequently document dust palls blowing westward from Africa’s Sahara Desert across the tropical Atlantic Ocean. Astronauts see these Saharan dust masses as widespread atmospheric haze. The dust can be transported right across the Atlantic Ocean, taking about a week to reach North America (in northern hemisphere summer) or South America (in northern hemisphere winter). This puts the Caribbean Sea on the receiving end of many of these events.
In the top image, the margin of hazy air reaches the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic) and the Turks and Caicos Islands, though the eastern tip of Cuba (foreground) remains clear. This image—taken by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) in July 2012—attracted the interest of scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center because the margin between dust haze and clear atmosphere lies in almost the same location as it appeared in another astronaut image in July 1994. When astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia captured the lower image (rotated from the 2012 view), few scientists had considered the possibility of trans-Atlantic dust transport.
The Columbia image also shows the brilliant blues of the shallow banks surrounding the Caicos Island in the Bahamas. The mountainous spine of Haiti lies further away, partly obscured by dust. Closer to the foreground—about 26 degrees north latitude—the skies are clear.
The dust in the images is almost 8,000 kilometers from its likely source in northern Mali, although data from sensors such as the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer and Ozone Monitoring Instrument have suggested that some dust traveling across the Atlantic may originate even further east in Chad or Sudan. Once airborne, Saharan dust has been known to travel west all the way into the Pacific Ocean, crossing Mexico at the narrow Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
We now know that African dust reaches the western hemisphere every month of the year, though not necessarily in as visible a form as in these images. Researchers have linked Saharan dust to coral disease, allergies in humans, and harmful algal blooms (“red tides”). There is also evidence that some of this African dust serves as a source of airborne nutrients for Amazon rainforest vegetation.
Astronaut photograph ISS032-E-8976 was acquired on July 15, 2012, with a Nikon D3S digital camera using a 28 mm lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 32 crew. Astronaut photograph STS065-75-47 was acquired on July 7, 1994, with a Hasselblad Camera using a 100 mm lens and Kodak Lumiere film. Both images have been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by M. Justin Wilkinson, Jacobs/ESCG at NASA-JSC.
Ice retreated rapidly in the Parry Channel—part of the famous and elusive Northwest Passage—between mid-July and early August 2012.
These images, acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, show significant changes over two weeks. The top image shows Parry Channel on July 17, 2012, when ice filled the channel. The bottom image shows the same region on August 3, when some ice was still clinging to the shores of Victoria and Melville Islands but open water otherwise dominated the region.
The Canadian Ice Service reported that ice cover in Parry Channel began to fall below the 1981–2010 median after July 16, 2012, and the loss accelerated over the following two weeks. On July 23, the percentage of ice cover in the channel was roughly 67 percent, compared to the median of 80 percent. On July 30, ice cover was roughly 33 percent, compared a median of 79 percent.
These photo-like images show widespread open water in early August, though patches of ice linger south of Melville Island. Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center cautioned, however, that while the Parry Channel appeared almost entirely free of ice, it was not necessarily open for navigational purposes. Sea ice can be thin enough to avoid detection by satellite sensors such as MODIS yet still thick enough to impede ships.
Whether or not ships can easily pass, recent studies have suggested that certain organisms have begun to take advantage of the open water. The Northwest Passage opened in 2007, a year when there was record-low sea ice in the Arctic. A 2007 study on Neodenticula seminae—a type of plankton historically found in the Pacific Ocean—concluded that the species had turned up in the North Atlantic. The research suggested that the plankton’s route included the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. A 2012 study on bowhead whales, which tracked individuals with satellite transmitters, indicated that Pacific and Atlantic populations had begun to overlap in the Northwest Passage in August 2010.
Attempts to identify a shortcut between Europe and Asia across the Arctic date back to the late fifteenth century, just several years after Columbus journeyed to the Americas. For centuries, attempts to find the route were stymied by unfamiliar geography and unforgiving ice. The Northwest Passage was first successfully navigated by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen between 1903 and 1906. He used the southern route through the Northwest Passage; Parry Channel is part of the northern or “preferred” route.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Jesse Allen, using data from the Land Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE). Caption by Michon Scott, with information from Walt Meier, National Snow and Ice Data Center.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
White Island crater, 5 August 2012 – Source: GeoNet
View of White Island from Papamoa Beach – Source: Supplied by Rebecca Cowley
A steam plume has been visible at the White Island crater today.
Earlier this week GNS Science issued a volcanic alert for White Island, which is off the coast of the Bay of Plenty, due to signs of increased activity.
According to GNS, although more volcanic activity has been recorded, “everything seems to be relatively stable”.
Volcanologists have recorded a rapid rise in White Island’s crater lake, a pulse of volcanic tremor and slightly higher gas levels in the plume.
“Although the volcanic tremor increased substantially during Saturday it has returned to levels similar to those during the early part of last week,” GNS said.
The white steam plume can sometimes be seen from areas of the Bay of Plenty coast.
On Thursday, GNS Science duty volcanologist Michael Rosenberg said its crater lake has started to re-fill and gases were now “vigorously streaming through it”.
“Airborne gas measurements show that the discharge of some sulphur gases has increased,” he said.
GNS volcanologists plan to visit White Island early next week to collect water and gas samples and make a ground level survey of the crater floor.
These measurements will help understand what changes are taking place beneath the volcano and whether these might lead to increased surface activity.
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GNS advises people to take extra caution, especially if approaching the crater lake and other active thermal features.
In this Sept. 30, 2011, file photo, sailboats and a floating dock lie on the dry, cracked dirt in a harbor at Lake Hefner in Oklahoma City as drought continues to be a problem across the state. The relentless type of heat that has blistered the U.S. and other parts of the world in recent years is due to man-made global warming, a new study from a top government scientist says.
By The Associated Press and NBC News staff
The relentless, weather-gone-crazy type of heat that has blistered the United States and other parts of the world in recent years is so rare that it can’t be anything but man-made global warming, says a new statistical analysis from a top government scientist.
The research by a man often called the “godfather of global warming” says that the likelihood of such temperatures occurring from the 1950s through the 1980s was rarer than 1 in 300. Now, the odds are closer to 1 in 10, according to the study by NASA scientist James Hansen. He says that statistically what’s happening is not random or normal, but pure and simple climate change.
“This is not some scientific theory. We are now experiencing scientific fact,” Hansen told The Associated Press in an interview.
Hansen is a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a professor at Columbia University. He has called for government action to curb greenhouse gases for years. While his study was published online Saturday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, it is unlikely to sway opinion among the remaining climate change skeptics.
However, several climate scientists praised the new work.
In a departure from most climate research, Hansen’s study — based on statistics, not the more typical climate modeling — blames these three heat waves purely on global warming:
—Last year’s devastating Texas-Oklahoma drought.
—The 2010 heat waves in Russia and the Middle East, which led to thousands of deaths.
—The 2003 European heat wave blamed for tens of thousands of deaths, especially among the elderly in France.
The analysis was written before the current drought and record-breaking temperatures that have seared much of the United States this year. But Hansen believes this too is another prime example of global warming at its worst.
In an opinion column published Saturday in The Washington Post, Hansen said his predictions in the late 1980s of the dire consequences of steadily increasing temperatures have proven to be worse than he thought.
“Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.
These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.”
The new research makes the case for the severity of global warming in a different way than most scientific studies and uses simple math instead of relying on complex climate models or an understanding of atmospheric physics. It also doesn’t bother with the usual caveats about individual weather events having numerous causes.
The increase in the chance of extreme heat, drought and heavy downpours in certain regions is so huge that scientists should stop hemming and hawing, Hansen said. “This is happening often enough, over a big enough area that people can see it happening,” he said.
Scientists have generally responded that it’s impossible to say whether single events are caused by global warming, because of the influence of natural weather variability.
However, that position has been shifting in recent months, as other studies too have concluded climate change is happening right before our eyes.
Hansen hopes his new study will shift people’s thinking about climate change and goad governments into action. He wrote an op-ed piece that appeared online Friday in the Washington Post.
“There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time,” he wrote.
The science in Hansen’s study is excellent “and reframes the question,” said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was a member of the Nobel Prize-winning international panel of climate scientists that issued a series of reports on global warming.
“Rather than say, ‘Is this because of climate change?’ That’s the wrong question. What you can say is, ‘How likely is this to have occurred with the absence of global warming?’ It’s so extraordinarily unlikely that it has to be due to global warming,” Weaver said.
For years scientists have run complex computer models using combinations of various factors to see how likely a weather event would happen without global warming and with it. About 25 different aspects of climate change have been formally attributed to man-made greenhouse gases in dozens of formal studies. But these are generally broad and non-specific, such as more heat waves in some regions and heavy rainfall in others.
Another upcoming study by Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, links the 2010 Russian heat wave to global warming by looking at the underlying weather that caused the heat wave. He called Hansen’s paper an important one that helps communicate the problem.
But there is bound to be continued disagreement. Previous studies had been unable to link the two, and one by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that the Russian drought, which also led to devastating wildfires, was not related to global warming.
White House science adviser John Holdren praised the paper’s findings in a statement. But he also said it is true that scientists can’t blame single events on global warming: “This work, which finds that extremely hot summers are over 10 times more common than they used to be, reinforces many other lines of evidence showing that climate change is occurring and that it is harmful.”
Skeptical scientist John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville said Hansen shouldn’t have compared recent years to the 1950s-1980s time period because he said that was a quiet time for extremes.
But Derek Arndt, director of climate monitoring for the federal government’s National Climatic Data Center, said that range is a fair one and often used because it is the “golden era” for good statistics.
Granger Morgan, head of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, called Hansen’s study “an important next step in what I expect will be a growing set of statistically-based arguments.”
In a landmark 1988 study, Hansen predicted that if greenhouse gas emissions continue, which they have, Washington, D.C., would have about nine days each year of 95 degrees or warmer in the decade of the 2010s. So far this year, with about four more weeks of summer, the city has had 23 days with 95 degrees or hotter temperatures.
Hansen says now he underestimated how bad things would get.
And while he hopes this will spur action including a tax on the burning of fossil fuels, which emit carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, others doubt it.
Science policy expert Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado said Hansen clearly doesn’t understand social science, thinking a study like his could spur action. Just because people understand a fact that doesn’t mean people will act on it, he said.
In an email, he wrote: “Hansen is pursuing a deeply flawed model of policy change, one that will prove ineffectual and with its most lasting consequence a further politicization of climate science (if that is possible!).”
Tens of thousands evacuated as high winds threaten music Lollapalooza fest
Many of the fans were told to go to one of three underground parking garages designated as ‘emergency evacuation shelters’
Daniel Boczarski / Getty Images Contributor
Fans evacuate Lollapalooza music festival after a severe storm warning on Saturday in Chicago.
NBC News and news services
The Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago was suspended and tens of thousands of fans were evacuated to shelters on Saturday as the city braced for dangerous storms with high winds, organizers said.
Organizers stopped at about 3:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m. ET), and many of the fans were told to go to one of three underground parking garages designated as “emergency evacuation shelters,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
“Our first priority is always the safety of our fans, staff and artists,” said Shelby Meade, communications director for C3 Presents, the promoter behind Lollapalooza. “We regret having to suspend any show but safety always comes first.”
The National Weather Service office in Romeoville, Illinois, which covers Chicago, recorded wind gusts up to 55 miles per hour on Saturday and had reports of gusts up to 70 mph, some measured, some estimated, said meteorologist Ben Deubelbeiss.
“Heavy rains, wind and lightning are the main threats from these storms,” he said.
The worst of the severe weather powered through Chicago late Saturday afternoon and headed over Lake Michigan and northern Indiana.
The unsettled weather was set to continue in the Midwest and beyond throughout the weekend and into Monday, Weather.com reported. A cold front was set to march across the eastern states on Sunday and Monday, the website said.
This cold weather mingled with a warm, humid air mass will help trigger severe thunderstorms from the eastern Great Lakes and Northeast into the Mid-South, weather.com said.
Downpours were expected ahead of the front and flash flooding was possible, it added.
Festival-goers evacuated Festival-goers were evacuated from Grant Park in downtown Chicago and directed by police and staffers to three shelter sites along Michigan Avenue in underground garages.
The festival draws nearly 200,000 people to the park each year, and this year is headlined by music acts including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Sabbath and Jack White.
A year ago, seven people died and 40 were injured when a huge temporary stage at the Indiana State Fair came crashing down amid high winds just before the country duo Sugarland was to begin performing.
Poor communication about predictions of stormy weather approaching the area ahead of the Sugarland concert was among the factors cited in the stage collapse by consultant studies commissioned by the state.
This year, organizers thanked city officials and fans for their reaction to the inclement weather.
“We want to thank the tens of thousands of festival goers, staff, and artists who calmly and safely exited from Grant Park today,” Charlie Jones, partner of C3 Presents, which promotes the festival. “We also applaud and thank the City of Chicago for their cooperation and commitment to making Lolla a safe and enjoyable experience for all. Once again Chicago has come through and we’re proud to call the city our partner.”
Lollapalooza, initially organized in 1991 by Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell, began as a traveling music festival with several dates all summer. After a six-year hiatus starting in the late 90s, the popular alternative music festival began holding its annual concerts only in Chicago in 2005.
About 30 homes in Layton were evacuated late Saturday after a brush fire broke out in the foothills. The residents in the Layton Ridge subdivision and along Hanney Canyon were ordered to evacuate as a precaution. Dubbed the Ridges Fire, firefighters were worried that if the winds shifted, the flames could threaten several homes in the area. Fire crews were prepared to spend the night defending those homes if necessary. “We have a hillside fire that’s actually involving a lot of federal and stand land property right now,” said Layton fire spokesman Doug Bitton. “We do have some concerns that we have downslope winds that have been projected.” The fire began about 6 p.m. east of Highway 89, burning brush and steep terrain. It had burned about 10 acres as of 11 p.m. How the blaze began, however, was unknown. The steep terrain made it difficult for firefighters to reach the area and fight it from the ground. Air attacks were stopped for the night, which contributed to the concerns. “This will be an overnight fire and will probably extend for many days to search for and seek containment,” Bitton said. Residents and drivers along Highway 89 flooded dispatchers with 911 calls. Smoke could be seen for miles. No homes were initially threatened, but dozens of families came to see where the smoke was coming from. “I drove home, got the wife and kids and came over to take a look. It’s probably tripled in size since I saw it first,” Layton resident Michael Ellgren said of the wildfire. “I see a helicopter going and trying to pour water onto the fire, which is spreading really fast,” said Scarlett Kluge, who also lives in Layton. More than 30 firefighters were battling the fire, which quickly became a danger to a nearby neighborhood. The Red Cross set up an evacuation shelter at Northridge High School, 2430 N. Hill Field Road. Fire officials also sent a Tweet warning commuters along Highway 89 to slow down because of the large amount of smoke in the area.
Firefighters are struggling to control more than a dozen blazes that have scorched thousands of acres. NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez reports.
By NBC News staff and wire services
Updated at 12:20 a.m ET: At least 121 structures, many of them homes, have been destroyed by wildfires in Oklahoma, officials said Saturday as temperatures topped 100 degrees for a 19th straight day.
New evacuations were under way Saturday as well: Authorities ordered evacuations in the towns of Glencoe, population of around 600, and Mannford, population about 3,000 in Creek County about 20 miles west of Tulsa.
Thousands were on the move as the fire in Creek County spread quickly, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported.
A grass fire near Luther consumed 56 structures and hot spots there and at two other large fires kept crews busy Saturday. It has burned 2,600 acres by Saturday evening.
Gov. Mary Fallin toured the Luther area on Saturday, calling the devastation “heartbreaking.”
“A lot of people were at work and didn’t realize how quickly the fire was moving,” Fallin told Reuters in a telephone interview. “It’s emotional. For the children, it’s very emotional to lose their possessions.”
Authorities suspect that fire might be arson: The Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Department said it received a 911 call from a man who reported seeing another man toss a lighted newspaper from a pickup truck window on Friday afternoon.
Residents returning to their homes Saturday found charred timbers poking from the debris and the burned out shells of refrigerators, washers and dryers.
“It’s all gone. All of our family pictures, everything was there,” said Victoria Landavazo, clutching a young child in her arms.
Tracy Streeper was working in Oklahoma City, about 40 miles southwest, when she learned the fire was approaching. Caught in traffic, it took her a long time to reach home and then, “once we got here, we had maybe 30 minutes.”
A wildfire has consumed over 2,000 acres in Cleveland County, Oklahoma, burning buildings and forcing evacuations. NBCNews.com’s Al Stirrett reports.
She grabbed a few clothes, medicine and her three dogs and left quickly.
Reuters
Remains of a home burnned to the ground are seen in Luther, Okla., on Saturday.
“Your adrenaline is running. You’re pumped up,” Streeper said. “You could just see a wall of flames coming this way. Everything was on fire.”
Casey Strahan said he went outside after power went out in the home he rents about 4:30 p.m. He looked south and saw smoke rising in the distance. He thought it was moving away from him until police ordered him to leave. He rushed through the house, grabbing clothing, photos and a computer as he went. When he returned Saturday, he found the house burned to the ground.
“I just never thought it was really going to get us,” said Strahan, a softball and girls basketball coach at Luther High School.
Fires near Mannford and Noble claimed another 65 structures.
Two new fires broke out on Saturday, and Oklahoma now is fighting 13 across the state, said Forestry Services spokeswoman Michelle Finch-Walker.
Oklahoma has contacted neighboring states for help but, with the exception of Texas, neighbors have had to focus on their own fire threats, Fallin said on Friday.
“There’s fires in Arkansas. There’s fires in Kansas and Texas. Everybody else is on high heat alert,” she said.
Sarah Phipps / AP
A home burns during a large wildfire Friday, Aug. 3, 2012 in Luther, Okla.
Oklahoma joins several states that have been plagued by wildfires this summer, including Colorado, Arkansas and Nebraska. Fires are being fed by a widespread drought. Nearly two-thirds of the contiguous United States was under some level of drought as of July 31.
Low humidity, strong southerly winds and drought conditions enabled the wildfires to spread quickly across treetops, said Michelann Ooten, deputy director of the state’s Office of Emergency Management.
“It’s just a very difficult situation we’re facing that’s all weather related,” Ooten said.
The heat in Oklahoma City, the state capital, has reached historic levels.
On Friday, Oklahoma City tied its all-time record for the highest temperature ever recorded when the thermometer reached 113 Fahrenheit, a mark last recorded in the Dust Bowl days in 1936.
It’s so hot that some volunteer fire departments have made a public plea for Gatorade donations to keep their crews hydrated in the scalding conditions.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Hundreds of people residing near Beas river have been evacuated to safe places after flash flood caused by torrential rain over Dhundi peaks at south portal of Rohtang tunnel flooded the Seri rivulet, a tributary to Beas river, on Friday at 8pm. People living close to river between Palchan and Kullu are being evacuated and traffic on national highway has been stopped. Till last report received from Palchan (near Dhundi) at 10.30pm, level of the river was rising continuously and police were evacuating the people from Bahang village, 6km from Manali. According to police, there is no report of any casualty. Sandeep Kumar, a resident of Bahang village, said people are trying to save the household accessories amid chaotic atmosphere and conditions have become even worse after power failure. “Everything was normal till late evening but the situation changed suddenly after 8pm when river water, mixed with sludge, started engulfing its banks. People are risking their lives to remove the household stuffs,” he said. An engineer working with a hydel project near Palchan said over phone that roaring sound of river is shaking the foundation of the houses. “Nobody is going to sleep tonight. Villagers have gathered at many places and are guarding the river banks with floodlights,” he said. According to villagers it is a cloudburst which might have caused devastation at its source on mountains. Kullu deputy commissioner Amitabh Awasthi said , police are patrolling the river banks and have directed people to move to safe places. “We have closed the traffic on national highway. We shall keep an eye on the situation throughout the night,” he said.
Today
Flash Flood
United Kingdom
England and Wales, [Western, Southwestern and Northern region]
Heavy rain over the weekend caused a landslip, and left homes knee-deep in floodwater. Firefighters worked with rescue teams to ensure no one was trapped after serious landslide in Portbury, near Bristol, brought soil, rocks and debris down on to a country lane. In North Somerset, Devon, North Cornwall and North Yorkshire fire brigade teams were called out to pump water from homes and to rescue people from cars trapped on inundated roads. Flash flooding closed the A69 Newcastle to Carlisle Road in Northumberland for a time. Six people were evacuated from properties in Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders, roads were closed due to flash flooding and the town centre had to be pumped out. In Wales, the Environment Agency put a flood warning in place on the River Hydfron at Llanddowror, Carmarthenshire, and an alert on rivers on the eastern Cleddau, Pembrokeshire. The Met Office issued amber “be prepared” warnings of slow-moving heavy showers through the day for the East Midlands, North-east England, North-west England, South-west Scotland, Lothian borders, South-west England, Strathclyde, Wales, the West Midlands and Yorkshire and Humber.
Overnight heavy rain has flooded scores of homes in the Scottish borders and the south-west of England. A flash flood ripped through the Scottish border town of Jedburgh on Saturday night. Around 30 homes had to be evacuated after they were submerged in 3ft of silted water when the river broke its banks. Displaced families are being put up in the local community hall. Flash flooding also hit towns in north Somerset, where the emergency services received around 80 calls for help. Firefighters spent the night pumping out homes in an operation that lasted for more than six hours. Crews also worked with specialist rescue teams at a landslip in Portbury, near Bristol, after the rain and run-off from surrounding fields brought down mud, rocks and trees. Fire brigades said no one had been trapped under the slip. A search and rescue 4×4 vehicle was used to clear debris to make the lane passable, with help from a local farmer and his tractor, and one family was helped to safety. An Avon Fire and Rescue spokesman said: “One family that were trapped in their property by the slides were able to get access to and from the lane. “Very fortunately, after extensive searching the area was declared clear.”David Westrup, 61, who runs the Elm Tree Cottage bed and breakfast in Nailsea, about eight miles from Bristol, said that his neighbours had been hit by the floods. “We’re on a hill above the river, so we’re absolutely fine … but there’s a cottage right on the roadside that was flooded out last night.” “I saw fire engines there that were pumping and there were houses that were in our view that were being pumped out by the fire brigade.” He said the home on the opposite side of the river which flows through Nailsea had been flooded a few times in recent years. “There were sandbags all over their drive and you could see water all over their driveway. But whether it got up to their front door I don’t know.” Westrup said the Environment Agency had shored up the river bank in the area in 2011, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. He added: “I can’t imagine the [extra defences] would have broken because they put extra shuttering which wasn’t there before. In other words, the agency had properly shored it up and raised the level of the bank, but it looks like it [the water] may have come over the top of it again.” Heavy showers have been forecast across much of the UK for the rest of Sunday, but Olympic events in London may escape the worst despite heavy downpours hitting the start of the women’s marathon race .
A team of medical experts from Dar es Salaam was yesterday dispatched to Kagera region to further examine the two patients believed to be suffering from the Ebola hemorrhagic fever. But as the team of medical experts was sent to Kagera region, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare subsequently confirmed the outbreak of the deadly fever in the western part of the country. Confirming the reports, the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Seif Seleman Rashid, also said that a team of medical experts was still diagnosing a patient in efforts to establish the symptoms. In the meantime, reports from Nyakahanga designated hospital in Karagwe district, Kagera region indicate that there were two patients including a child, suspected to be suffering from the deadly fever that has rocked neighbouring Uganda. According to one of the doctors who diagnosed the patient at Karagwe’s Nyakahanga hospital, preliminary findings show that the victim might have contacted the Ebola virus. However, the doctor who requested anonymity told the Guardian on Sunday that ‘further medical examination’ would be conducted to gather more evidence about the possible outbreak of Ebola, adding that the patient had since been quarantined pending final results. According to the doctor, the ‘Ebola patient’ was brought to the hospital on Friday morning and, upon diagnosis, it was established that the patient had suffered from Ebola. The patient who is a six-year-old child was brought to the Mulongo hospital by his mother from a village close to the Uganda-Tanzania boarder after the child developed severe symptoms.“We are doing further medical examination on a patient … we will tell the general public once it is confirmed that we are dealing with Ebola virus infections,” the doctor said, adding that currently the patient alleged to have been infected was admitted in a separate room and now lives in isolation from other patients at the hospital. He said preliminary check-ups found out that the diagnosis had all signs showed clear symptoms of Ebola – after which he ordered the patient to be admitted for closer monitoring locally, and further medical examination by medical experts from the ministry headquarters. He added that the patient had since been placed in a special intensive care room which is out of bounds for all other people — apart from his mother who is taking care of the patient. However, he said, this was a medical rule aimed at avoiding quick spread of the deadly disease Another patient also believed to have crossed the boarder from Uganda was admitted at the hospital as well, but medical investigations of his deteriorating health conditions were still not completed by Saturday evening. As a precaution, the doctor said his hospital team and the district health workers had since started warning people in surrounding villages to take immediate measures whenever they come across such patients. He has also warned the people living closer to the border with Uganda to be careful not to come into contact with any person whom they see vomiting or bleeding – clear signs of someone suffering from Ebola.
On Wednesday this week, Dr. Mwinyi told visibly alarmed legislators in Dodoma that a team of medical experts had been dispatched to the border with Uganda, fully equipped with protective gear and medical supplies. The minister advised the general public especially those living in the northern regions of Kagera, Mara, Mwanza and Kigoma — some of which share the border crossings with Uganda — to take precautions because the disease was highly contagious. Earlier, the World Health Organization (WHO) had alerted Tanzania on the Ebola threat, prompting the ministry to issue a press statement elaborating that Ebola (Ebola HF) was a severe, often-fatal disease in humans and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees) that has appeared sporadically since its initial recognition in 1976. The disease is caused by infection with Ebola virus, named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), where it was first recognized. The virus is one of two members of a family of RNA viruses called the Filoviridae; there are five identified subtypes of the Ebola virus — four of which have been known to cause disease in humans: Ebola-Zaire, Ebola-Sudan, Ebola-Ivory Coast and Ebola-Bundibugyo. The fifth, Ebola-Reston, has caused disease in nonhuman primates, but not in humans.
Biohazard name:
Ebola (susp.)
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
At least 10 people admitted to the Sukraraj Tropical and Disease Control Hospital in Nepali capital Kathmandu have tested positive for cholera. The hospital laboratory said Vibrio Cholera belonging to 01 Ogawa stereotype was detected in all the patients. Doctors at hospital attributed the spread of cholera and diarrhea infection in Kathmandu to contaminated water, according to Saturday’s Republica daily. “Most of the patients who came to the hospital said that they had drunk water supplied by Kathmandu Upatyaka Kahanepani Limited without boiling or treatment,” Tulsha Adhikari, a nursing staff said. She said whole families had been infected and some were brought to the hospital by their neighbors as all family members were sick.
Biohazard name:
Cholera
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
Health workers in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo say an outbreak of cholera has claimed at least nine lives in a refugee camp. The first case of cholera – a contagious disease caused by filth and lack of hygiene – emerged three days ago among thousands of people in a makeshift refugee camp, Doctors Without Borders said. Thousands of people have fled fighting between M23 rebels and government forces backed by UN peacekeepers. Patrick Wieland, from Doctors Without Borders, said his organisation had set up an isolation clinic tent at Kanyaruchinya on the outskirts of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. Wieland said humanitarian agencies were delivering water to the camp but people probably were collecting the water with dirty containers. He said there were not enough toilets for the people who fled fighting last week in Rutshuru and neighbouring Kiwanja, about 80km north of Goma. “We’re treating people with arms and legs blown-off by grenades and other heavy arms,” said Wieland. He also said that for the first time they treated many more civilians than combatants. In Goma, locals had told that 13,500 families had arrived in the past month, displaced by the fighting. “People have been forced to build their own makeshift shelters – shelters made of twigs, grass and so on and a few leaves,” he said.”Few people have been able to get hold of plastic sheeting from the United Nations refugee agency, but for the most part people are being forced to live out in the open. “They’re saying they have had no food for a month and have [had only] high-energy biscuits a week ago, but since then nothing.” M23 rebels, who take their name from a March 23 2009 agreement they signed with the Congolese government, last week attacked government troops and UN peacekeepers, firing mortars at the peacekeepers’ base at Kiwanja which was surrounded by more than 2,000 displaced people at the time. Wieland said the fighting was much heavier than any his team has seen in the three-month-old rebellion. He said that since April, Doctors Without Borders has treated more than 500 people hurt in the conflict. Congo’s army now controls only the city of Goma and the village of Kibumba, 10km outside Goma. Now the rebels hold all towns going north as far as Rutshuru and are threatening to besiege Goma. The UN Security Council demanded on Thursday that the M23 halt any advances towards Goma. In a statement delivered by council president Gerard Araud of France, the Security Council expressed deep concern at the worsening humanitarian situation, especially a surge in the number of refugees. Araud called on the international community to provide appropriate humanitarian support.
Biohazard name:
Cholera Outbreak
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
A 30-year-old tourist from Germany presented in the Mid West Regional Hospital earlier this year with renal failure and respiratory symptoms. He was managed with supportive therapy and made a good recovery. He was discharged and returned to Germany. Subsequently, he was found to be IgM positive for [a] hantavirus [infection] and this diagnosis was confirmed by Porton Down in early June [2012]. A human hantavirus infection has not previously been diagnosed in Ireland. However, there were an exceptional number of cases reported in Germany and in other countries in Europe during the winter of 2011 and spring of 2012. Given the amount of travel between the continent and Ireland, it is not surprising that we would eventually see a case of this infection here. This is the 1st ever case confirmation that has been reported in this country [Ireland] and, as an unusual event, it merits further consideration.
Biohazard name:
Hantavirus
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
For more than two months, officials from federal to local have been unable to pin down the source of a natural gas leak and tremors in assumption parish.
But on Thursday a 200 by 200 foot “slurry area” has appeared in bayou corne in northern assumption parish…
The formation of the slurry area was accompanied by a diesel-like odor that some residents said burned their eyes and noses but dissipated by midmorning Friday…
Assumption parish officials declared an emergency and called for an evacuation of residents living near the nearly 1-acre muddy site.
A potential failure of a cavern operated by Texas brine company may have caused the slurry area, or sinkhole, which swallowed full-grown trees and denuded a formerly forested patch of cypress swamp.
Final determination of a positive link between the failure of the cavern and either the natural gas bubbling or the slurry area has not been made.
In response, gov. bobby jindal declared an emergency Friday.
Broomfield Public Health and Environment advises people to steer clear of wild rodents, squirrels and rabbits near the Plaster Reservoir after confirming cases of tularemia. The disease was found Thursday in specimens of wild rabbits collected south and west of the reservoir located northeast of W. 136th Avenue and Lowell Boulevard. Broomfield residents had noticed several dead rabbits in the vicinity. Broomfield Public Health and Environment said in a health alert released Friday that there have not been any confirmed cases or noticeable outbreaks in other areas. People can contract tularemia from tick and deer fly bites or skin contact with infected animals. Symptoms include sudden fever, chills, headache, diarrhea, muscle aches, joint pain and dry cough. People can also develop pneumonia. Health officials said the threat to human health is minimal, so trails will remain opened and the area will be monitored over the next few weeks.
Biohazard name:
Tularemia (rabbit)
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
A Surfer on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion has been seriously injured in a shark attack, the second in two weeks, as local authorities called for swift preventative action. Xavier Brunetiere, general secretary at the Reunion town hall, said the surfer’s right foot and his hand were seriously injured, in the attack at Saint Leu, located in a marine reserve on the western side of the island. The man, whose identity was not released, is aged about 40 and is an experienced surfer, Mr Brunetiere said. Witnesses said the shark had severed a hand and a foot from the victim, but he made it back to the beach by himself. His life was not in danger, Mr Brunetiere said. Shark attacks here have been increasing in the last two years, with three surfers killed in the last 13 months. Sunday’s attack, the third this year, comes just over a fortnight after 22-year-old local Alexandre Rassica was killed by a shark who bit off his leg. A number of worried local mayors want to allow fishermen to catch sharks in the marine reserve. Last week, the mayor of Saint Leu, Thierry Robert, authorised fishing for sharks in the waters around Saint Leu — which contain part of the marine reserve. He later withdrew the decision after French Overseas minister Victorin Lurel said France would deal with the problem.
Biohazard name:
Shark attack (Non-Fatal)
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
by GRANT SCHULTE (AP) — Thousands of fish are dying in the central U.S. as the hot, dry summer dries up rivers and causes water temperatures to climb in some spots to nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius). Ads by Google Heating Contractor – Repair-Replacement-Maintenance Mention Ad 10% off Repair/ Install – http://www.g-smechanical.com/ About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon were killed in Iowa last week as water temperatures reached 97 degrees Fahrenheit (36.1 Celsius). Nebraska fishery officials said they’ve seen thousands of dead sturgeon, catfish, carp, and other species in the Lower Platte River, including the endangered pallid sturgeon. And biologists in Illinois said the hot weather has killed tens of thousands of large- and smallmouth bass and channel catfish and is threatening the population of the greater redhorse fish, a state-endangered species. So many fish died in one Illinois lake that the carcasses clogged an intake screen near a power plant, lowering water levels to the point that the station had to shut down one of its generators. “It’s something I’ve never seen in my career, and I’ve been here for more than 17 years,” said Mark Flammang, a fisheries biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “I think what we’re mainly dealing with here are the extremely low flows and this unparalleled heat.” The fish are victims of one of the driest and warmest summers in history. The federal U.S. Drought Monitor shows nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states are experiencing some form of drought, and the Department of Agriculture has declared more than half of the nation’s counties — nearly 1,600 in 32 states — as natural disaster areas. More than 3,000 heat records were broken over the last month. Iowa DNR officials said the sturgeon found dead in the Des Moines River were worth nearly $10 million, a high value based in part on their highly sought eggs, which are used for caviar. The fish are valued at more than $110 a pound. Gavin Gibbons, a spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, said the sturgeon kills don’t appear to have reduced the supply enough to hurt regional caviar suppliers. Flammang said weekend rain improved some of Iowa’s rivers and lakes, but temperatures were rising again and straining a sturgeon population that develops health problems when water temperatures climb into the 80s. “Those fish have been in these rivers for thousands of thousands of years, and they’re accustomed to all sorts of weather conditions,” he said. “But sometimes, you have conditions occur that are outside their realm of tolerance.” Ads by Google Fish & Wildlife Mgmt. – Online Environmental Science Degree at AMU. Flexible Courses. Enroll. – http://www.AMUOnline.com/Environment In Illinois, heat and lack of rain has dried up a large swath of Aux Sable Creek, the state’s largest habitat for the endangered greater redhorse, a large bottom-feeding fish, said Dan Stephenson, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. “We’re talking hundreds of thousands (killed), maybe millions by now,” Stephenson said. “If you’re only talking about game fish, it’s probably in the thousands. But for all fish, it’s probably in the millions if you look statewide.” Stephenson said fish kills happen most summers in small private ponds and streams, but the hot weather this year has made the situation much worse. “This year has been really, really bad — disproportionately bad, compared to our other years,” he said. Stephenson said a large number of dead fish were sucked into an intake screen near Powerton Lake in central Illinois, lowering water levels and forcing a temporary shutdown at a nearby power plant. A spokesman for Edison International, which runs the coal-fired plant, said workers shut down one of its two generators for several hours two weeks ago because of extreme heat and low water levels at the lake, which is used for cooling. In Nebraska, a stretch of the Platte River from Kearney in the central part of the state to Columbus in the east has gone dry and killed a “significant number” of sturgeon, catfish and minnows, said fisheries program manager Daryl Bauer. Bauer said the warm, shallow water has also killed an unknown number of endangered pallid sturgeon. “It’s a lot of miles of river, and a lot of fish,” Bauer said. “Most of those fish are barely identifiable. In this heat, they decay really fast.” Bauer said a single dry year usually isn’t enough to hurt the fish population. But he worries dry conditions in Nebraska could continue, repeating a stretch in the mid-2000s that weakened fish populations. Kansas also has seen declining water levels that pulled younger, smaller game fish away from the vegetation-rich shore lines and forced them to cluster, making them easier targets for predators, said fisheries chief Doug Nygren of the Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism. Nygren said he expects a drop in adult walleye populations in the state’s shallower, wind-swept lakes in southern Kansas. But he said other species, such as large-mouth bass, can tolerate the heat and may multiply faster without competition from walleye. “These last two years are the hottest we’ve ever seen,” Nygren said. “That really can play a role in changing populations, shifting it in favor of some species over others. The walleye won’t benefit from these high-water temperatures, but other species that are more tolerant may take advantage of their declining population.” Geno Adams, a fisheries program administrator in South Dakota, said there have been reports of isolated fish kills in its manmade lakes on the Missouri River and others in the eastern part of the state. But it’s unclear how much of a role the heat played in the deaths. One large batch of carp at Lewis and Clark Lake in the state’s southeast corner had lesions, a sign they were suffering from a bacterial infection. Adams said the fish are more prone to sickness with low water levels and extreme heat. But he added that other fish habitat have seen a record number this year thanks to the 2011 floods. “When we’re in a drought, there’s a struggle for water and it’s going in all different directions,” Adams said. “Keeping it in the reservoir for recreational fisheries is not at the top of the priority list.” Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
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World Foods is recalling products it distributes to retail supermarkets that contain Daniella mangoes recalled by Splendid Products. The mangoes may be contaminated with Salmonella Braenderup that are linked to a 
Hannaford Bros. Co. is recalling several products made with recalled Daniella mangoes. The fruit may be contaminated with Salmonella Braenderup and may be linked to a 
Brand new Energy re-sale distributor is recalling all lot codes of EphBurn 25. The FDA has notified them that one lot of EphBurn 25 was sampled and found to contain ephedrine alkaloids, making it an unapproved drug.
Klement Sausage Company of Wisconsin is recalling about 2,920 pounds of frozen bratwurst patties because they may contain pieces of ap lstic pen. The product is 10-pound cases containing 4-ounce patties of Klement Sausage Co. Bratwurst Patty.
The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company LLC is recalling Daniella mangoes it received from Splendid Products for possible Salmonella Braenderup contamination. The mangoes were purchased between July 12, 2012 and August 24, 2012. The mangoes have PLU #4959.
BI-LO is recalling whole Daniella brand mangoes for possible Salmonella Braenderup contamination. The mangoes, imported from Mexico, were sold in stores between July 12, 2012 and August 27, 2012. The fruit was sold as individual fruit and can be identified by the Daniella brand sticker and UPC number 0-00000-04051.
The CFIA and Continental Strictly Kosher Meat, Poultry and Delicatessen Products are recalling ground beef and ground veal products because they may be contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. The following Glatt’s brand products are being recalled: lean ground veal, lean ground beef, medium ground beef, and medium ground beef club pack.
Two consumer groups have 
Tearful wildfire victim: ‘Nothing left’
Wildfires destroy homes in Oklahoma
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MessageToEagle.com – Gamma-ray photons seen emanating from the center of the Milky Way galaxy could be evidence of dark matter.
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