Tag: disaster

Wars threaten health of 600 million women and children – dpa international

DUBLIN — Protracted and messy wars mean over 600 million women and children worldwide struggle to access essential health care, according to estimates published in The Lancet medical journal., according to estimates published in The Lancet medical journal. By 2019, the authors wrote, there were 54 “state-based armed conflicts” in 35 countries – wars that had lasted an average of two decades and presented a “growing threat to humanitarian access and the delivery of essential health services, affecting at least 630 million women and children.” The research team, from nine institutions, including Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, estimated that by 2017, 10 per cent of the world’s women and 6 per cent of children “were either forcibly displaced or living dangerously close to conflict zones.” From 2009-17, the number of women and children displaced by fighting jumped from around 30 million to over 50 million, with factors such as “population growth, more conflicts, increasing use of explosive and chemical weapons in urban areas” driving the rise.

Indonesia disasters: Washed away or move away – Southeast Asia Globe/RTÉ World Report

Robitan, Kiki Mariam and Amin at their new home. Simon Roughneen

BIMA — At first Kiki Mariam wasn’t too concerned as the tail end of a cyclone sent cascades of roof-rattling rain onto the riverside home she shared with her husband Robitan in Bima, a city of around 170,000 people on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa.“At first the water was low and then it got higher,” the 37-year-old recalled, one hand resting on a sawdust-speckled workman’s table, the other pointing to the riverbank a couple of yards away. Now the river is flowing as normal, about ten feet below ground level down a 70 degree angle bank. But during that mid-December morning in 2016, as the rain beat down hour after hour, Mariam saw the river’s ineluctable swell and soon forgot her breakfast-time frustration about a leaking roof. “I didn’t think it would get higher than that,” Mariam said, pointing at the riverbank. But as the rain hammered down relentlessly, the river rose and rose, until the water, ominously, was climbing close to ground level. “We saw it wasn’t going to stop – it took quite a long time, but it came,” Mariam said. “I was really scared, we were asked to leave, so we grabbed what we could and moved away from the river,’ she said, as husband Robitan, 39, pointed to a head-high spot on a nearby wall, the faded difference in hue indicating the high water mark of the 2016 deluge that destroyed their house and left 100,000 people homeless in and around Bima.

Indonesian search for earthquake and tsunami victims to end Friday; death toll at 2,073 – Los Angeles Times

NUSA DUA — Hundreds of mostly Indonesian aid workers continued to distribute relief items to the nearly 88,000 people left homeless by the disaster, after days of slow access to the region, which is a near-three-hour flight from Jakarta. The impact of the 7.5 quake cracked roads and left rocks and debris blocking routes outside Palu to rural areas and smaller towns. By midweek, many of the roads to remote regions were passable, but mostly still to smaller trucks and cars, said Irwan Firdaus, an aid worker with Oxfam in Indonesia. The main routes across Sulawesi to Palu had been opened up to larger relief convoys. “We have been seeing donations come in from other areas of the island,” said Dini Widiastuti of Yayasan Plan International, another aid organization.

Earthquake and tsunami kill hundreds in Sulawesi, Indonesia – Los Angeles Times/CBC

JAKARTA — Indonesian officials said 384 people were killed and many more remained unaccounted for after an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 on Friday evening triggered a sundown tsunami measuring between five and ten feet high that washed over Palu and Donggala, two coastal cities in Sulawesi in the east of the Indonesian archipelago. Earlier on Saturday Sutopo Nugroho, the disaster mitigation agency spokesman, told media in capital Jakarta that the deaths had been tallied from four hospitals in Palu, population c.a 380,000, and that there were likely to be “many [more] victims,” possibly including hundreds of people who were attending a beach festival when the waves hit.  Among the dead was Anthonius Gunawan Agung, a young air traffic controller who died after leaping from a damaged airport navigation tower in Palu, after ensuring a commercial flight took off before the disaster hit. 

Nearly a hundred dead, thousands evacuate after earthquake on Lombok in eastern Indonesia – Los Angeles Times/RTÉ

View of Banda Aceh from tsunami evacuation tower, built on the coast after the 2004 earthquake off Sumatra (Simon Roughneen)

JAKARTA – Medical equipment, tents and other supplies Monday were being rushed to the Indonesian island of Lombok after a devastating earthquake killed at least 98 people and left about 20,000 people homeless, disaster relief officials said. The earthquake Sunday evening, coming only a week after another deadly earthquake in Lombok, knocked down bridges, left roads blocked and damaged communications infrastructure, making it difficult for emergency crews to reach some hard-hit areas. Arifin Hadi, spokesman for the Indonesian Red Cross, said that “the disaster on Lombok is big, there are many houses down, there needs to be roads cleared.” Hadi said the Red Cross has sent nurses, doctors and drinking water to Lombok. “We have 11 water trucks there now, we will send 10 more from Surabaya” (Indonesia’s second biggest city, in the east of island of Java).

Haiti earthquake: time running out in nightmare republic – The Sunday Tribune

PORT-AU-PRINCE — In ‘The Comedians’, Graham Greene called Haiti the nightmare republic. But for the past few days in Haiti, truth has been more nighmarish than fiction after an estimated 140,000 people were killed in last week’s earthquake. The international relief operation appears to be struggling, meaning that time is running out for the estimated 3 million Haitians affected by the disaster, people now injured, homeless,  without food and water. There seems to be little hope for those still trapped alive under the rubble as the risk of disease grows by the hour — and with each passing hour the prospect of rescue diminishes.