It is what you do after taking out the trash, right?
"Haitians mop up as Tomas moves on" by Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press | November 7, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hurricane Tomas pushed northward from Haiti yesterday, leaving villagers to mop up, evacuees to return to their tents, and most everyone relieved that the country did not suffer what could have been its first big disaster since the January earthquake.
Related: Slow Saturday Special: Hurricane Hits Haiti
Now it is not even a disaster. Pfft!
The storm’s western track caused widespread floods and wind damage along the far edge of Haiti’s coast and is blamed for the deaths of at least eight people. It was a serious blow, but far better than had been feared in a nation where storms have been known to kill thousands, and more than 1 million quake survivors are living under tarpaulins and in tents.
“It really didn’t dump a lot of rain on us, so we got very lucky,’’ said Steve McAndrew, Haiti earthquake relief coordinator for the American Red Cross....
The rest is a rewrite so I'm wringing out the mop and moving on.
Once again, no reference to the garbage floating in the streets and only one sentence referring to the cholera crisis.
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"Tropical storm lashes Honduran coast" by Associated Press | October 24, 2010
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Tropical Storm Richard lashed the Caribbean coast of Honduras yesterday with strong winds and heavy rains that threatened to unleash potentially deadly flash floods and landslides....
Related: Come Hell or High Water in Honduras
In Taiwan yesterday, the government’s transport minister said searchers found mangled vehicle parts thought to be a bus carrying 19 Chinese tourists that disappeared when typhoon rains triggered massive mudslides on a mountainside highway.
Landslides caused by Typhoon Megi killed nine people and buried a Buddhist temple in hardest-hit Ilan County in the northeast, where a record 45 inches of rain fell over 48 hours. Three other people drowned in their flooded homes, the Central Emergency Operations Center said.
The bus passengers were among 23 people still missing on the island after Megi, which killed 28 people in the Philippines last week.
See: Filipino Finds
Megi pounded southern China’s Fujian Province with heavy rain yesterday but was downgraded to a strong tropical storm with winds of up to 67 miles per hour. TV news showed flooded streets, uprooted trees, and swollen waterways, but there were no immediate reports of major damage.
I didn't expect to end up in China when I began reading the piece, sigh.
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Seeing as we are there:
"In Taiwan, 9 dead, 23 missing in aftermath of potent typhoon" by Annie Huang, Associated Press | October 23, 2010
TAIPEI — Record rains from a powerful typhoon caused massive mud- and rockslides that buried a Buddhist temple and trapped vehicles on a highway, where one bus carrying 19 Chinese tourists was missing yesterday.
The mudslide at the temple killed nine people, and a total of 23 people were missing in Taiwan as Typhoon Megi swept toward southern China, where landfall was expected late last night or today. The storm earlier killed 26 people and damaged homes and crops in the Philippines.
Megi dumped a record 45 inches of rain in Taiwan’s Ilan County over 48 hours....
Broad swaths of farmland in the county were under feet of water.
Earlier this week, Megi killed more than two dozen people and damaged thousands of homes in the northern Philippines. The storm also forced 55,000 Filipinos from their homes and caused about $175 million in damage to infrastructure and crops, disaster officials said.
Megi was expected to hit China’s southern Guangdong and Fujian provinces between last night and today, meteorologists said.
In Fujian, authorities said 161,800 people were evacuated.
An official in Guangdong’s Shantou city said fishermen were told to return to ports and authorities designated some 200 buildings as emergency shelters.
“This kind of strong typhoon is very rare for this season in Shantou. We are treating it as a ‘super strong typhoon’ and making our preparations accordingly,’’ said a relief official who only gave his surname, Chen.
In Vietnam, the death toll from severe flooding in four central provinces climbed to 75, including 14 victims from a bus swept off a road by strong currents, with six passengers still missing, disaster officials said yesterday.
While Megi bypassed Vietnam, the country’s central region was pummeled by 4.6 feet of rain over the past week, submerging nearly 280,000 houses and forcing more than 170,000 villagers from their homes.
With a flood of flooding I guess the AmeriKan media can't cover them all.
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And what a mess in Hungary!
"Executive of toxic spill firm detained; Containment efforts continue in Hungary" by Pablo Gorondi, Associated Press | October 12, 2010
DEVECSER, Hungary — Hungarian police have detained the director of the aluminum company responsible for a flood of caustic red sludge that killed eight people when it burst from its reservoir last week, the prime minister said yesterday.
Police said they were questioning managing director Zoltan Bakonyi on suspicion of public endangerment causing multiple deaths and environmental damage.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban told Parliament that the government wanted to take over MAL Rt., the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company, because the safe restart of production at the alumina plant was needed to save the jobs of thousands of workers.
Orban said his administration was also freezing the company’s assets to ensure that funds were available to compensate for the damages caused by the disaster.
“Since this is not a natural catastrophe but the damage was brought about by people, the damages must be paid first and foremost not by taxpayers but by those who caused the damage,’’ Orban told lawmakers....
Unless they are banks.
Late yesterday, Parliament passed a proposal giving the government the power to take over any company involved in a catastrophe, including the red sludge spill.
Actually, the previous reporting said it wasn't that bad.
While the opposition Socialists voted in favor of the plan, Ferenc Gyurcsany, former Socialist prime minister, said the bill would give the government too much control.
“The government is asking for authorization to take away by decree whatever it wants, whenever it wants and from whomever it wants and do with it anything it wants without any responsibility,’’ Gyurcsany wrote on his blog. “This in not simply unconstitutional, it is immoral and an atrocity.’’
That's government in three words.
In Devecser, one of several towns hit by the flood a week ago and where many people are employed at the alumina plant, Bakonyi’s detention was met by mixed feelings....
Environmental State Secretary Zoltan Illes said additional risks were centered on a reservoir next to the damaged one, which contained 26.4 million gallons of caustic liquid.
You mean it COULD HAPPEN AGAIN?
Authorities fear that if the cracks on the broken reservoir’s northern wall continued to widen and the wall falls, the second storage pool could also break, releasing a caustic flow.
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This job is going to take a while:
"Months-old photo shows apparent leak in dam; Hungary starts investigation of inspections" by Pablo Gorondi, Associated Press | October 13, 2010
Oh, another government investigation of itself!
Can you say COVER-UP?
BUDAPEST — An aerial photo taken months before a gigantic reservoir unleashed torrents of toxic sludge shows a faint red trail trickling through the container wall — part of a growing body of evidence that inspectors who gave the pit a clean bill of health may have missed warning signs.
Where they all ex-industry executives on the take like here in AmeriKa?
Police are examining the photo as part of an investigation into how part of the wall containing the 350 million cubic feet of caustic slurry could have given way. Inspectors from the government environmental agency inspected the container pond less then two weeks before the spill....
And the photo was taken MONTHS BEFORE, hanh?
Judicial authorities scheduled a court appearance for Zoltan Bakonyi, managing director of MAL Rt., or the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Co., which owns the reservoir, to decide whether he should be formally charged and whether he should remain in custody....
The photo showing an apparent leak on the northern wall of the reservoir — the same wall that partially collapsed — was taken by Interspect, a Hungarian company specializing in aerial photography. It invests some of its profits in environmental projects, such as taking photos of locations that could pose an environmental risk....
A police statement suggested Bakonyi was guilty of negligence, saying he did not prepare a warning and rescue plan to be implemented in case of an emergency.
There was no official information on what Bakonyi told police, with law enforcement officials declining to divulge details on the progress of their investigation.
But according to the daily Blikk, which is considered to have good police connections, a lead engineer at MAL Rt. told police that the company’s top management was aware of — but kept quiet about — the risks of a breach of the reservoir for an unspecified period.
The tabloid also revealed that in the 1980s, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bakony’s father, Arpad, was the head of the environmental department at the Ministry of Industry — a predecessor of the present-day inspectorate — and received several state awards for his work.
They must be a truth-telling paper then to receive such slander from the AmeriKan press.
In an initial reaction after the spill, Zoltan Bakonyi said the reservoir was patrolled daily and “did not show any physical signs that something of this nature could happen.’’
But Prime Minister Viktor Orban suggested that preliminary investigations had revealed negligence played a part....
Gyorgy Bakondi, appointed to the newly created post of disaster commissioner Monday night,, said that police had taken over security tasks at all premises belonging to the company and that production at the plant could restart during the weekend, although a final decision had yet to be made.
Unreal!
Bakondi leads an 18-member supervisory committee that will have to approve practically everything happening at MAL from now on.
The government rejected allegations that it was using the disaster as an excuse for ruling by decree. “This is not the nationalization of the company,’’ said Anna Nagy, government spokeswoman. “It is placing it under government supervision until the catastrophe is resolved.’’
Then that is just what they are doing!
Don't you know governments lie?
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At least they got this guy, right?
"No charges for CEO in toxic sludge spill; Metals firm head released by police in Hungary" by Pablo Gorondi, Associated Press | October 14, 2010
VESZPREM, Hungary — A judge yesterday dismissed prosecution demands that the head of a metals company linked to Hungary’s devastating red sludge spill be charged with negligence and released him from police custody, his lawyer said....
In a bit of good news, authorities said that cracks in the wall of the broken reservoir appear not to have grown wider, calming some fears of a second flood of sludge....
And just why would you believe what a lying government said?
While some local waterways were declared dead in the wake of the spill, the Danube appeared to be suffering little immediate ecological damage.
You know, just like the Gulf where the government told us the oil disappeared as the fish and coral are dead and dying.
Just BELIEVE WHATEVER GOVERNMENT and the NEWSPAPERS TELL YOU, readers.
Anything else is considered BAD FORM and POLITICALLY INCORRECT!
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They dropped the charges because if the CEO is guilty then the government and its incompetent inspectors certainly are!
But hey, everything is fine now. Time to go home, Hungarians.
"Hungarians return to town hit by sludge" by Associated Press | October 16, 2010
BUDAPEST — Production restarted yesterday at the metals plant whose broken reservoir unleashed a massive flood of caustic red sludge, even as villagers began returning to one of the affected towns in western Hungary despite warnings from environmentalists that it was too early and too dangerous to return.
Some 800 Kolontar residents were evacuated last Saturday after authorities said a wall of the factory reservoir could collapse further, releasing a second wave of red sludge after a calamitous break Oct. 4 created a deadly torrent....
Authorities refused to let journalists into Kolontar yesterday....
So the reports are just government handouts, huh?
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"Sludge disasters could strike other sites; Hungary situation is a warning, say environmentalists" by Dan Bilefsky, New York Times | October 17, 2010
Another pile of sludge.
BUDAPEST — With residents who fled the toxic sludge flood in Hungary returning home, environmentalists are warning of other potentially lethal breaches of caustic industrial waste in Eastern and Central Europe, dotted with poorly maintained facilities that are a legacy of Soviet-era Communism and its eventual collapse.
“There are accidents waiting to happen, and it is not only happening in Hungary but across the region,’’ Zoltan Illes, Hungary’s state secretary for the environment, said in an interview. “The lesson of the sludge disaster is what can happen if environmental rules and regulations are ignored in the pursuit of profits.’’
Nearly 200 million gallons of red mud residue — a byproduct of the conversion of bauxite to alumina, for use in aluminum production — poured out of a reservoir after part of its containing wall collapsed. The onslaught forced hundreds from their homes and rendered millions of dollars in private property uninhabitable.
But it didn't affect the Danube! The river just diluted it all, sigh.
No one has been charged with negligence in the disaster, and last week the director of the company linked to the reservoir collapse was freed after two days in custody for lack of evidence.
While the alumina plant restarted production on Friday, the deluge of sludge has raised the alarm across Eastern and Central Europe, where the Danube River is intersected by factories and mines left over from the Communist era, including decades-old facilities with potentially hazardous waste materials that in some cases have been neglected.
Which is odd because after today the story dries up like a mopped floor (my slave specialty, readers)!
Experts say the global financial crisis has undermined governments’ environmental compliance across the region and raised questions as to whether cash-strapped companies and the local authorities are investing sufficiently in safety.
Those bastards have really wrecked this planet for all of us.
And POLLUTION is the REAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM, readers -- not some fart-misting, gas-belching global warming as I fart to keep myself from freezing!
Illes said environmental officials here were concerned by seven pools of red sludge at an old aluminum factory in Almasfuzito, in the northwest of the country, that contains 12 million tons of red sludge produced since 1945 — more than 10 times the amount of the Hungary spill.
It is not just Hungary where more accidents are feared....
In Romania, where many still recall a January 2000 accident in which 100,000 cubic meters of cyanide-tainted water were discharged from a gold mine reservoir in the northern city of Baia Mare, environmentalists are deeply concerned by proposals to allow cyanide mining to resume. During the spill, vast quantities of wildlife were killed and dozens of people were hospitalized after eating contaminated fish....
Also causing concern, according to a World Wildlife Fund report, is Serbia.
They always do, don't they?
Just have to lay some more depleted uranium on them.
I'm sure that will clean up those dirty Serbs!
The report says the country’s environmental risks derive partly from the Kosovo war in 1999, when NATO bombings of fertilizer and vinyl chloride manufacturing plants and an oil refinery caused the release of mercury, dioxins, and other carcinogens into the water....
Oh, ANOTHER NATO WAR CRIME!!
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Time for break, readers.
