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Posts Tagged ‘Floods’

Floods create ‘inland sea’ in Australia

February 3, 2012 Comments off

rawstory.com

New South Wales flooding via AFP
 SYDNEY — Major flooding hit parts of Australia’s east on Friday, stranding thousands of residents, prompting a military airlift and leaving some communities only accessible by helicopter.

The deluge, which has sparked dozens of rescues and left about 7,275 people isolated in various parts of New South Wales state has also impacted Queensland to the north where homes have reportedly been inundated.

“From the air it looks like an inland sea,” New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell said after visiting the region.

Evacuations have been ordered from some houses and businesses in the New South Wales town of Moree, where more than 600 people have registered with an evacuation shelter as the Mehi River peaked, the State Emergency Service said.

“The town of Moree is inundated with water — so north Moree is not only cut off, but Read more…

Categories: Australia, Flood Tags: , , , ,

2011 Was A Year of Weather Extremes, With More to Come

February 2, 2012 Comments off

treehugger.com

The global average temperature in 2011 was 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.14 degrees Fahrenheit). According to NASA scientists, this was the ninth warmest year in 132 years of recordkeeping, despite the cooling influence of the La Niña atmospheric and oceanic circulation pattern and relatively low solar irradiance. Since the 1970s, each subsequent decade has gotten hotter — and 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the twenty-first century.


© Earth Policy Institute

Each year’s average temperature is determined by a number of factors, including solar activity and the status of the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon. But heat-trapping gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, have become a dominant force, pushing the Earth’s climate out of its normal range. The planet is now close to 0.8 degrees Celsius warmer than it was a century ago. Hidden within Read more…

Categories: 2011 Tags: , , , , , ,

Pakistan’s breadbasket buckles under new flood pressures

September 15, 2011 Comments off

Mail and Guardian

Residents assist a handicapped man while escaping to higher ground from their flooded village in Pakistan’s Sindh province (Reuters)

One year after record floods left 21-million Pakistanis homeless, thousands living on the country’s southern fertile plains have seen their homes washed away for a second time — despite the spending of millions of dollars in aid to avert a fresh crisis.

Anwer Mirani is one of 20 000 people living in Sindh province’s Jamshoro district who have been made homeless again after heavy downpours and rainwater from the surrounding mountains swept their homes away.

“We had just begun to restore our houses when we had to leave again because of the floods,” said the 38-year-old construction worker, wearing a tatty shalwar kameez, the traditional garb of baggy trousers and long shirt.

He took his wife, parents and three children in a boat Read more…

Categories: Flood, Natural disasters, Pakistan Tags: , ,

New Orleans braces for Tropical Storm Lee

September 4, 2011 Comments off

rawstory

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina six years ago, faced a new threat on Saturday from Tropical Storm Lee, which was set to challenge the city’s flood defenses with an onslaught of heavy rain.

The storm was expected to bring up to 20 inches of rain to southeast Louisiana over the next few days, including to low-lying New Orleans, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Lee’s tidal surge could spur coastal flooding in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama before drenching a large swath of the Southeast and Appalachian regions next week.

The slow-moving storm has bedeviled forecasters. Lee’s winds weakened on Saturday night as it Read more…

Categories: Flood, Louisiana Tags: , , , , , ,

Nigerian flooding claims 102 lives: Red Cross

September 1, 2011 Comments off

afp

LAGOS — At least 102 people were killed when a dam burst in torrential rain and flooding in southwest Nigeria, a local Red Cross official told AFP Wednesday.

“The death toll for now… is 102,” said Umar Mairiga, disaster management coordinator for the Nigerian Red Cross Society.

He said the Eleyele dam collapsed and several bridges were swept away at the weekend after heavy rains fell for more than seven Read more…

Categories: Flood, Nigeria Tags: , , , ,

America counts the cost of Hurricane Irene as flooding hits north east

August 29, 2011 Comments off

telegraph

At least 29 people in eight states have now been killed, many through drowning, as estimates of the damage caused to property alone reached $13 billion (£8 billion).

More than 500,000 homes and businesses across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire were left without electricity, as rivers around the north-east burst their banks.

Another 285,000 homes and firms in eastern Canada lost power after being struck by Irene as it left the US, bringing the total dealing with blackouts to more than 5.5 million people.

“The impacts of this storm will be felt for some time,” President Barack Obama told Americans late on Sunday. “And the recovery effort will last for weeks or longer”.

Millions of commuters in New York City faced delays and packed trains upon their return to work on Monday morning, as thousands of evacuated residents continued to return to their homes.

It was their upstate neighbours, however, who bore the brunt. Several small towns throughout the Catskill Mountains were totally submerged by water after local rivers and streams flooded.

Already waterlogged following the wettest August on record, the outer Read more…

Categories: hurricanes, United States Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Kim Jong-il visits Russia for talks with Dmitry Medvedev

August 24, 2011 Comments off

guardian.co.uk

Kim Jong-il's train in Ulan-Ude

Kim Jong-il’s train in Ulan-Ude. Photograph: Yonhap/EPA

Kim Jong-il has travelled by armoured train to eastern Siberia for a summit with the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev.

The North Korean leader arrived in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, a Buddhist province near Lake Baikal, Russian news agencies reported. Kim’s motorcade left town in the direction of Turka, a picturesque village on the shores of Baikal.

The Yonhap news agency said the Medvedev-Kim summit was expected to take place on Wednesday.

The talks could focus on a deal for a pipeline that would stream Russian natural gas through the North’s territory to the South. South Korean media said the North could earn up to $100m a year.

There were signs that preparations were being made for Read more…

Categories: North Korea, Russia Tags: , , , , , ,

New York breaks city’s rainfall record with nearly eight inches soaking city

August 16, 2011 Comments off

nydailynews

Staten Island was hit hard by the record rainfall on Sunday.

Nicholas Fevelo for News

Staten Island was hit hard by the record rainfall on Sunday.

New York broke an all-time record for a one-day rainfall Sunday as up to 8 inches of water soaked the city, snarling trains and flooding roadways.

By 9 p.m., 7.7 inches of rain had fallen at Kennedy Airport.

It was the most recorded there in a single day since the National Weather Service began keeping records 116 years ago.

The heavy tropical rain is expected to continue Monday, and a flash flood warning is in effect until 9 p.m.

The normal rainfall for all of August in New York is 4 inches – which means the city was socked with two months worth of rain in a single day.

“This is what you would expect in a major hurricane,” said Steve Wistar, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.

Kennedy Airport’s old one-day rainfall record, 6.3 inches, set on June 30, 1984, fell by noon.
Central Park, where the city’s official rainfall total is recorded, saw Read more…

Categories: New York, New York City Tags: , , , ,

Is the weather worsening?

August 1, 2011 Comments off

newspressnow

Extreme weather events occur every year in various parts of the earth, but the United States — and Missouri — have seen natural disasters strike its ground this year seemingly more often than not.The jury is still out as to what has caused these extreme events, pending major climatology studies that often take years to complete. Some say it’s due to a naturally variable earth, others argue it’s due to a changing climate, one that’s getting warmer and more intense, leading to weather events we’ve never seen, before calming down again.

Recent devastationMany scientists argue that 2010 was the most extreme year ever in terms of natural disasters across the globe. Devastating worldwide events made the headlines during what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said was the world’s warmest year on record (it tied with 2005).Among the most devastating were Pakistan’s flood, the most expensive natural disaster in its history, Russia’s deadliest heat wave in recorded history, and Read more…

Categories: Weather Tags: , , , , ,

The nine billion-dollar weather disasters of 2011 (so far); Invest 90L rises again

July 30, 2011 Comments off

wunderground

Dr. Jeff Masters

It’s been an unprecedented year for weather disasters in the United States, with the dangerous portion of hurricane season still to come. We’ve already seen nine billion-dollar weather disasters so far in 2011. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) June disaster report estimates that, through May, 2011 is the costliest year since they began tracking billion-dollar disasters in 1980. The cost of the disasters through May could be as high as $32 billion, compared to a typical year-to-date cost of $6 billion. 2011 to-date now ties the entire year of 2008 for the most billion-dollar weather disasters in one year. Of course, this number could go up if we see some hurricane landfalls this year.

Here are NCDC’s estimates of the top-end damages from 2011’s billion-dollar weather disasters so far:

Missouri River Flooding
Snowfall was abnormally heavy in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Wyoming this past winter (over 200% of average), and record rains fell over the Upper Read more…

Categories: Strange Events, Weather Tags: , , , , , , ,