Category: Berita Internasional

Are you ready for a potential tsunami? Learn how you can get prepared.

Tsunami and earthquake experts visited two sites in Grays Harbor County Wednesday to help residents learn how they can be prepared for a potential disaster.

The event held at noon at the Ocosta Junior High was packed. It included participation in a drill at the school’s recently built vertical evacuation structure, which is part of a school building. That structure, built to survive a magnitude 9 earthquake, is also built to survive a tsunami with students and residents. It’s believed to be the only vertical evacuation structure built so far in North America, but others are in the planning stages.

The presentation is part of a six-stop tsunami road show on the Washington coast and Olympic Peninsula. It will feature officials from Washington Emergency Management, the Washington Geological Survey, the National Weather Service, the University of Washington/Sea Grant and Grays Harbor County Emergency Management.

Washington coastal areas are particularly at risk from seismic activity in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. A study published in March found a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Grays Harbor County could cause a 60-foot tsunami to inundate parts of Southwestern Washington.

Officials expected high interest in the event following the powerful earthquake off the coast of Alaska in January that triggered a tsunami watch in Washington.

“Given how events unfolded, we think it’s even more imperative to help people understand the advantages of having a NOAA Weather Alert Radio, the difference in tsunami alert levels, near source vs distance source tsunamis and when the tsunami sirens will be activated,” Keily Yemm, tsunami program coordinator for the Washington Emergency Management Division, said in a statement.

The ASEAN region is one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world, and extreme climate events are projected to increase in frequency and intensity due to climate variation and change.
We have seen the impacts that proper preparation and resilience -building efforts can have in the face of disaster events. The APEC Climate Center believes that science and policy, when merged and effectively utilized together, can truly enhance disaster risk reduction and disaster management. Through the ASDMP project, funded by the Republic of Korea government, the APEC Climate Center has worked closely with the AHA Centre, ASEAN Secretariat, and the ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management to enhance DRR and DRM in the region.

This research roadmap provides a guideline on a potential process that will help achieve the ASEAN region’s goal of becoming a global leader on disaster management by 2025. The ASDMP project team has travelled the ASEAN region to ensure the reflection of local knowledge in this roadmap, and surveys have been distributed widely in an attempt to fully understand the status of DRR and DRM in the region.

This roadmap has identified key research and initiatives that need to take place in the short and long term on both the country and regional level, in order to greatly enhance resilience to disasters in the ASEAN region.

APCC would like to thank the Republic of Korea government, AHA Centre, ASEAN Secretariat, the ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management, and the respective governments of the ASEAN Member States for their active participation and support throughout the project duration.

Dr. Hong-Sang Jung Executive Director APEC Climate Center

Message from the ACDM Chair

The ASEAN region sits between several tectonic plates, which cause many extreme climate events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. Also being between the Pacific and Indian oceans causes seasonal typhoons. The ASEAN region is prone to almost all types of natural disasters including typhoons, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, landslides, forest fires, epidemics, and droughts. These extreme climate events often transcend the boundaries of individual nations, and that is why we must work together across boundaries to limit the potential damages of these events.

Therefore, the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025 stipulates on the paragraph D.1. that: A Disaster Resilient ASEAN that is able to Anticipate, Respond, Cope, Adapt, and Build Back Better,
Smater, and Faster.

I still remember my participation in the Kickoff Workshop for the ASEAN Science-Based Disaster Management Platform Project (ASDMP), which was taking place between 30th-31st March 2016 in Busan, Korea.

One of the above-mentioned workshop’s objectives is to Increase APCC’s network in the ASEAN region to increase the likelihood of cooperation and collaboration not only on the ASDMP Project but also on the future needs/projects. Today the objectives have been translated into concrete work. The Research Roadmap is an outstanding result, because this Disaster Roadmap management creates hope for all ten ASEAN Member States to use this as a guiding process for achieving the goal of becoming a global leader on Disaster Management by 2025.

On behalf of the ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management I would like to extend my gratitude and sincere thanks to the Republic of Korea Government, APCC, ASEAN Secretariat, AHA Center, and the respective organisations, and especially all of the experts for their close and fruitful contributions to the Research Roadmap.

https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/ASEAN-Region_Disaster-Management_0228_optimize.pdf

Mr. Prasong VONGKHAMCHANH
Director General of Social Welfare Department
Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare of Lao PDR
Chair of the ASEAN Committee on Disaster Management

Tony Blair has accepted that Britain and Ireland will have to work around rather than reverse Brexit in order to prevent a hard border on the island and preserve the Good Friday agreement.

While stressing he was still “passionately opposed” to Brexit and regarded the UK leaving the EU as a “profound mistake”, the former prime minister said that the two countries would have to “overcome the challenge” posed by the British departure from Europe.

Speaking at an event in Belfast on Tuesday to mark 20 years since the signing of the Good Friday agreement peace accord, Blair said it was essential to avoid the disaster of a hard border reappearing on the island post-Brexit.

On the challenges Brexit will pose for Ireland, Blair said: “We are just going to have to work at it [Brexit] and overcome it. I wish it wasn’t happening but it is and we are just going to do our best to circumvent it.”

He also urged the current generation of Northern Ireland’s political leaders “not to cast aside” the gains of the Good Friday agreement peace deal.

Commenting on the present deadlock between unionism and nationalism in Northern Ireland, Blair said: “Where we are may not be where we want to be but it’s a much better place from where we were.

“This is the most important thing I would say right now to those people today who are in positions of responsibility: try to work your way through the present impasse, give it your all, start working at it, don’t ever give up because what you are doing is vital, it is important.”

There was discord even within the Irish nationalist representatives at the conference to commemorate 20 years of the agreement. Adams confirmed that Sinn Féin wanted a “border poll” on a united Ireland.

Seamus Mallon, the former Social Democratic and Labour party deputy leader and former deputy first minister, said calls for a referendum on Irish unity posed dangers.

Mallon said it would be a “bloody disaster” if any referendum on a united Ireland could be won by a simple majority of 50% plus 1.

In such a scenario, Mallon warned, Ireland would inherit a fearful, recalcitrant large unionist minority on the island.

Disaster-recovery expert Ken Topping and other members of the Cambria FireSafe Focus Group want all North Coast residents to be completely informed and ready for any catastrophe.

In three previous informational forums this year, the Focus Group has addressed a host of do-and-don’t readiness issues.

The group is hosting a fourth session from 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, April 24, at the Veterans Memorial Building, 1000 Main St.

Topping (a former general manager of the Cambria Community Services District) will discuss more about preventing disaster losses and recovering after the catastrophe.

“Prevention and recovery are two sides of the same coin,” Topping said. “The more you prepare in an effort to prevent losses, the less difficult it will be to recover and get back on track after the disaster.”

He’ll also ask attendees for their questions about preparing themselves, their homes and their community for fire, flood, earthquake, landslides and other disasters, as well as about governmental rules that may need tweaking.

“We need to know where the gaps and overlaps are that make prevention a less effective crazy quilt,” Topping said in an April 9 phone interview. “I think there are a lot of holes, kind of like Swiss cheese.”

Cambrians have banded together in the past to advocate for change, including their successful campaign to temporarily remove the county permit fee for taking down trees deemed hazardous by Cal Fire. No healthy trees could be removed under this streamlined process.

At the forum, Topping and Focus Group members will answer any questions they can, and do research later to find answers to other queries, publicizing the responses later.

Those who have questions now can email them to group leader Shirley Bianchi at [email protected].

Topping also will discuss the plan to form a VOAD group (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters) to help the community be more disaster-prepared. A sign-up sheet will be provided for people and organization that wish to participate in the VOAD process.

Do you have a news tip for Village People, Village Voices or the Village Square business bundle? Please send it to Kathe Tanner at [email protected]. While we may not be able to publish every submission, we’ll use as many as we can.

An earthquake of preliminary magnitude 5.3 struck 38 miles (61 kilometers) off the coast of California Thursday afternoon (April 5), rattling Los Angeles.

That’s a moderate quake in the grand scheme of things, and common enough in the region of the San Andreas fault, where LA sits. But the event was still dramatic enough to make people sit up and take notice. Several Twitter users took to the platform to ask if others had felt the quake. [What Causes Earthquakes?]

“This is a very interesting earthquake,” Mark Legg, founder of the consulting firm Legg Geophysical, Inc., in Huntington Beach, California, told Live Science, adding that he’s been anticipating such an earthquake, as a magnitude-5-plus temblor occurs there about every six years. The last one, a magnitude-6.3, struck in December 2012, he said.

The earthquake occurred near a complex region of several faults called the East Santa Cruz Basin fault zone, Legg said. These fissures in the Pacific Plate are located offshore around the Channel Islands; they were most active during the Miocene epoch (between about 20 million and 5 million years ago), Legg said, though they still produce earthquakes today. That’s because they sit snugly on the Pacific Plate, whose motion toward Alaska is impeded by a bend in the San Andreas Fault and the Western Transverse mountain ranges, “which block the smooth northwest movement of the Pacific Plate,” Legg said. 

(The San Andreas Fault, which marks the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, is not a straight line, but rather has lots of bends and other “cricks” along its path.)

Today’s earthquake seems to have struck at a spot where a major collision is occurring along a boundary between the Western Transverse Ranges and what is called the California Continental Borderland.  

“Sometimes, there are thrust earthquakes along this boundary, other times there are strike-slip earthquakes as the WTR [Western Transverse Ranges] tries to ‘escape’ around the bend in the San Andreas fault, as the Pacific plate moves to the northwest,” Legg wrote in an email.

A thrust-type quake happens when the earth on one side of a fault jumps upward and over the other side; a strike-slip earthquake means both sides of the fault move mostly horizontally, as happens along the San Andreas Fault.

If this all sounds complicated, don’t worry, it is.

“I like to think of the southern California region as a major crustal ‘Shear Zone’ composed of many faults working together (or against each other sometimes) to enable the Pacific Plate to move on its way to Alaska,” Legg said. “It is not a simple process, and that is what makes it extremely interesting to scientists like myself and many others.

The LA region experiences an earthquake of this magnitude about once a year, 

There’s a 1-in-20 chance that today’s temblor will be followed by a larger quake in the coming weeks, said John Vidale, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. He added that the more likely scenario involves a series of much smaller aftershocks that may be too weak for anyone to even notice.

“There is a slight chance that this is a foreshock, but as time passes, that probability diminishes rapidly,” Legg said. 

There are no reports at this time of any significant damage from the quake, and there may not be any in a region well-prepared for temblors.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the federal agency primarily responsible for funding community rebuilding in the aftermath of a large-scale disaster, has removed any reference to climate change, including sea level rise and extreme weather, from its just-released strategic plan.

Meanwhile, the United States is still recovering from last year’s devastating floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. The damage costs for these disasters is $306 billion dollars and counting. A bill that will mostly be footed by federal taxpayers. As the climate changes, catastrophic storms and major heatwaves and droughts (i.e. wildfires) are expected to occur more frequently in the coming decades, further straining federal resources.

However, FEMA’s strategic plan, while touting the importance of risk reduction and the responsible management of tax-payer dollars, blatantly avoids acknowledging that climate change is a significant driver of the increasing risk and cost of the natural disasters that FEMA seeks to address. This omission is a notable departure from FEMA’s previous strategic plan, which asserted that the agency “will also ensure that future risks, including those influenced by climate change, are effectively integrated into the Agency’s risk assessment resources and processes.” Overlooking climate change’s effect on extreme weather and other natural disasters in preparedness planning is foolish, but purposefully choosing not to acknowledge the existence of climate change is not only irresponsible, but dangerous.

FEMA is acting like a man who has laid out steps to decrease his risk of a heart attack, but refuses to account for the daily bacon double cheese burger that is part of his diet.

Climate Change-Fueled Extreme Weather is an Extreme Threat

Organizations, like the World Economic Forum (WEF), acknowledge that climate change is one of the planet’s foremost threats. The WEF’s Global Risks Report 2018 ranked extreme weather, natural disasters, and a collective failure to mitigate and adapt to climate change as the greatest and most likely risks facing humanity in the next 10 years. And the United States’ Fourth National Climate Assessment has found that climate change is already fueling more extreme storms.

Hence, FEMA’s failure to acknowledge a main driver of these kinds of worsening events will likely be a dangerous and costly decision. Like the man that fails to reduce his risk of heart attack because he purposefully chooses to overlook his daily diet of cheeseburgers, FEMA will fail to make the nation better prepared for catastrophic storms because it is deciding to ignore a significant contributing factor to the increase in catastrophic storms. 

Underscoring this point is that extreme weather events have caused billions of dollars in disaster-related damages in the United States. In the 2017, sixteen weather-related disasters, each exceeding $1 billion in damage, occurred in the United States. Hurricane Harvey, alone, has likely cost $125 billion in damages.

As this graphic demonstrates, the number of these events and their associated costs has steadily increased.

This trend will likely continue to increase as climate change continues to load the dice when it comes to extreme events.

FEMA’s Strategic Plan Commits a Strategic Error

FEMA’s failure to acknowledge the impacts of climate change, including sea level rise and more extreme weather, is an omission that completely undercuts the goals of the strategic plan. In the document, FEMA outlines plans for building preparedness and readying the nation for catastrophic disasters. For example, FEMA did indicate it wants to invest in more “pre-disaster mitigation, and encourage actors at all levels to better reduce their risks. These are laudable goals. However, FEMA, under a section about “Emerging Threats,” only cites cybersecurity and terrorism, making no mention of climate change and its associated impacts. Such an omission renders any aspirations to increase disaster preparedness meaningless. This glaring omission by FEMA sets the nation up to continue to spend billions of dollars on disaster recovery without every addressing the a contributing factor of the problem.

And ignoring the problem does not make it go away. FEMA will continue to help communities rebuild after every major disasters. However, FEMA’s choice to pretend climate change does not exist will ensure those communities remain vulnerable.

When a powerful underwater earthquake off the coast of Alaska prompted tsunami advisories and frayed nerves last month along the West Coast and Hawaii, I thought about Kobe, Japan.

I traveled to the city in central Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture and to Tokyo last year with a group of journalists in a trip organized by the country’s foreign press center. I went to get an up-close view of Japanese transit, including the famed bullet trains, but it was the lessons about disaster recovery and preparation during the trip that came to mind, especially in light of the recent onslaught of natural disasters in the U.S. – hurricanes, wildfires, mudslides.

Several journalists from the Seattle area on the trip were intensely interested in lessons  from Kobe’s 1995 earthquake because of fears that a major quake could strike along the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia Subduction Zone, potentially affecting an area stretching from British Columbia to California. 

Last month’s Alaska quake — quite powerful at a magnitude of 7.9 — sparked mostly jitters, with apparently no deaths or significant damage. But the exercise was a reminder that the earth can shift suddenly, and mitigating disaster means making plans. Twenty-three years ago, Kobe suffered an earthquake that transformed the modern, industrial city into an international symbol of devastation, with an elevated expressway toppled like a toy after a child’s tantrum among the most remembered images. 

The 7.3-magnitude quake struck the port city at 5:46 a.m. Jan. 17, 1995, leaving 6,434 dead and 43,794 injured. Almost 250,000 buildings collapsed and 10 years’ worth of fires erupted in three days, requiring massive outside firefighting help and even bucket brigades to tackle the blazes.

The day the shock waves hit Alaska last month was less than a week removed from the anniversary of that infamous earthquake. Both occurred along the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area so named because of its volcanoes and rife with seismic activity. On the same day last month that the quake struck off Alaska’s coast, volcanoes erupted in the Philippines and Japan, and an earthquake shook Indonesia, according to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Japan is no stranger to natural disasters, and the quake, known as the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, has since been eclipsed in death toll several times over by a near-apocalyptic quake off the country’s eastern coast in March 2011 known by many as the Tohoku quake, which added the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to the horror of a 9.0-magnitude temblor and a towering tsunami that washed away entire communities.

Kobe’s more recent history suggests a narrative of recovery, even being branded in 2009 as a UNESCO City of Design (it’s a designation that Detroit shared in 2015), but Kobe has never fully recovered economically from the 1995 quake, and Mayor Kizo Hisamoto noted that its previously devastated port operations lost competitiveness to ports in other cities inside and outside the country even after being rebuilt.

The Japanese government came under intense criticism following the Kobe quake. An article published by the nonprofit Asia Foundation in the days after the March 2011 quake noted that the national government was faulted for inadequate early warning, lax building codes and “unsuitable leadership in the relief and recovery effort” after the Kobe earthquake.

Embracing the quakes

Those failures came despite the country’s familiarity with earthquakes and may point to the challenges of remaining prepared for disasters. The country observes Disaster Prevention Day every Sept. 1, and earthquake drills are a part of life. An earthquake simulator, which our group visited at a Tokyo Fire Department location, offered us a dramatic example of how the ground would shift during a quake, sending us scrambling to duck under a table.

Leaders in Kobe appeared to have embraced their city’s quake history and talked of efforts to share what has been learned.

“We believe that by sharing our know-how and the lessons we learned from our earthquake and our experiences that we can make cities all around the world safe from disasters,” according to Yoshihiro Hayashi, a Kobe press officer.

Walk around the city, and the reminders that disaster can strike are evident. Signs point to tsunami evacuation routes, and reminders of the 2011 quake are preserved in very public displays.

Along the city’s waterfront, streetlamps lean at diagonal attention and chunks of concrete from a wharf and twisted metal fencing lie ruptured in seawater at the Port of Kobe Earthquake Memorial Park, testaments to the force nature can apply to man’s attempts at permanence. 

The most visible recognition that this city of 1.5 million, a trip of more than 2½ hours southwest of Tokyo by bullet train, suffered a major disaster stands five stories tall, enclosed in glass but designed to survive a major quake. The cube-shaped Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution is both a memorial and an educational center. The glass is supposed to symbolize transparency in disaster mitigation efforts.

A long way to go

A visit to the institute included showings of films on both the Kobe and 2011 quakes and a walk through a hellish, quake-ravaged model street. Exhibits showed damaged artifacts as well as the kinds of assistance that poured in from around the world in 1995, including stuffed animals.

Teachers were on hand with models to show how buildings can be designed to better withstand a quake, such as by strengthening them with cross braces. In one case, a teacher placed two blocks representing buildings, one with long stakes underneath and another without, into sand she had packed into a clear plastic container. As she turned a hand crank, the unsupported block fell over as the sandy mixture liquefied, but the supported block remained standing.

Building codes have been tightened since the quake, but officials acknowledge that many old buildings have not been retrofitted and would be vulnerable in a quake. 

“We still have a long way to go in order to make it completely safe,” said Hayashi.

The quake severely damaged the underground infrastructure of the city, knocking one of the city’s sewage treatment plants offline for more than three months. In the immediate aftermath of the quake, partitions were dropped into an adjacent canal to close off an area so raw sewage could be dumped somewhere, pending treatment.

Much of the city’s efforts in the years afterward focused on adding redundancy and in making pipes quake resistant. The city also developed 300 temporary toilets, which are stored at places like elementary schools and can be assembled in the event of an emergency, pairing them with stormwater storage tanks for flushing, that can connect into the main sewer. Officials estimated the changes to the sewer system alone cost the equivalent of more than $512 million.

The city also built a large-capacity transmission main, on view by descending eight stories underground, so water would be available in the event of another major disaster. The cost was the equivalent of $340 million. The goals for these infrastructure projects are to keep the systems functioning should disaster strike again. 

Despite these and other changes, such as adding height to the city’s seawall, the region largely rebuilt its devastated transportation network as it was, according to Mayor Hisamoto. Officials had weighed putting the expressway referenced earlier underground, but the mayor noted that the cost would be high, a demonstration of the type of budgetary arithmetic which can hold sway around the world, whether bracing for earthquakes in Japan, hurricanes along the U.S. Gulf Coast or even sewage system failures in metro Detroit. 

Contact Eric D. Lawrence: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @_ericdlawrence.

MANILA, Philippines — The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) has called on UN member states and the international community to “act now” and ensure long-term measures to tackle natural disasters.

“With devastating floods, hurricanes and earthquakes that have impacted numerous countries, humanitarian response must be complemented by medium and long-term recovery and reconstruction efforts,” the ECOSOC said in a statement issued by its president Marie Chatardová.

“Early humanitarian response has been critical for saving lives and livelihoods and the provision of essential services,” Chatardová said following the council’s special meeting on the “Aftermath of recent hurricanes: Achieving a risk-informed and resilient 2030 Agenda” last week.

She said preparedness and partnerships played an essential role in enabling the quick arrival of humanitarian response and emergency supplies during disaster.

Chatardová also issued a statement expressing the council’s condolences to disaster victims and extending solidarity to all the affected people and governments in the hurricane-hit Caribbean, Central America, the United States and Mexico, which was struck by successive earthquakes as well as Africa and South Asia where severe floodings occured.

ECOSOC has been assessing displacements and disruptions to livelihoods of people and their immediate needs such as health, water, sanitation and hygiene, food security and shelter.

It called for greater investment in disaster risk reduction, including preparedness, early warning and early action and urged for greater risk-informed investment in infrastructure and housing.

“We call for stronger collaboration, connectivity and complementarity between humanitarian, development, disaster risk reduction and climate action to define and deliver collective outcomes and to reduce need, risk and vulnerability over multiple years,” said the council.

It said attention must be given to the most vulnerable people facing climate change and extreme weather events.

Elaborating on the measures needed in both the medium and long term, the council called for longer term recovery, development and reconstruction programs, pointing to, among others, the regeneration of industries, including tourism, agriculture and fisheries.

“More importantly, key industries and livelihoods must be made sustainable and resilient to the impacts of future extreme weather events and other hazards. We must support efforts of affected and vulnerable countries to diversify their economies and harness the benefits of digital economy to enhance their economic resilience,” the statement explained.

“We need to act urgently,” council members said, adding that they are committed to continue to promote coordination of UN work in development and progress of countries.