Photo: Contributor/IRIN

At least 50 people were confirmed dead early on Friday when the dam burst

JAKARTA,� -��At least 2,000 people are now staying in four evacuation centres, including universities and government offices, after a dam burst outside Jakarta early on 27 March, killing dozens and leaving scores more missing, officials said.

“We have identified 52 casualties already,” Rustam Pakya, head of the Ministry of Health’s Crisis Centre, told IRIN in the Indonesian capital. “But I expect the death toll to reach about 100 because many more are still missing.”

At least 400 houses in the industrial town of Cirendeu in Tangerang, Banten Province, were reportedly affected by the sudden gush of water following the collapse of a section of the 3m high Situ Gintung dam at about 2am.

Priyadi Kardono, head of data and information for the National Disaster Management Agency, told IRIN about eight homes were completely destroyed while the rest were either partially damaged or submerged.

He said the collapse happened after three days of rains in the area.

With about 400 houses affected and an average of five people per house, there are at least 2,000 victims,” Tia Kurnyawan, a disaster response officer from Red Cross Indonesia, told IRIN.

The government and NGOs immediately mobilised search and rescue teams.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited the site, while Vice-President Jusuf Kalla and Coordinating Minister for People’s Welfare Aburizal Bakrie visited the evacuation centres. The government has promised assistance to help rebuild damaged houses.

Photo: Contributor/IRIN

Hundreds of homes were affected and scores of people remain missin

Rustam said the affected people included some from the capital as the 5 sqkm area involved was on the border of Jakarta and Tangerang, a city of about 1.5 million.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)� in Jakarta, the government is so far able to provide all the food, shelter and healthcare needs of the evacuees.

We have enough food and volunteers and medical doctors, Rustam said. We are now monitoring to prevent the outbreak of any diseases like diarrhoea.

Red Cross Indonesia has provided food and medical aid. “Volunteers this morning mobilised to evacuate victims, and provide medical aid and distribute food, Tia said. We have set up a public kitchen and we will maintain this for three days.

Officials did not have an exact numbers of how many people were affected as residents from neighbouring areas flocked to the site to see the collapsed wall.

Footage from local news stations showed a wide swath of water streaming from Lake Situ Gintung, which, according to Priyadi, was used to supply irrigation water.

“The dam is very old, I think it was built by the Dutch,” Priyadi told IRIN. “This has never happened before.” One local news station reported that it was built in 1933.

The president reportedly said the dam would be rebuilt but different construction methods would be considered.

jd/ds/mw source.www.irinnews.org

Photo: Zambia VAC

Floods devastating infrastructure

GABORONE,� – Rain continues to lash countries along the course of the upper Zambezi River, aggravating already extensive flooding in Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia, where crops and infrastructure have been destroyed. In Namibia at least 90 lives have been lost and 350,000 people affected.

Namibia has launched an operation to rescue schoolchildren marooned by floodwaters at a boarding school in the country’s northeastern Caprivi Strip.

Dorkas Kapembe-Haiduwa, secretary-general of the Namibia Red Cross, told IRIN: “Boats have been sent to the village, Muzee, but we don’t know have an idea of the numbers [of schoolchildren stranded].”

Rapidly rising water levels in the Zambezi, Chobe, Kwando and Linyati rivers meant more than 19,000 people have had to be evacuated from the Caprivi Strip and relocated to eight camps.

Relief efforts have been hampered by a shortage of tents for the displaced and about 6,000 people were without shelter, Kapembe-Haiduwa said. “The tents that are being used are old and tattered and the rain is pouring through them.”

The Zambezi River, which rose to record levels, has begun to subside and rains have eased in Caprivi’s neighbouring Kavango region, where 2,000 people have been relocated to six camps.

The Namibian government has declared a state of emergency and released US$10.9 million for disaster response efforts. It is distributing tarpaulins, blankets and 140,000 water purification tablets.

The UN is expected to make a flash appeal in the next few days to help Namibia deal with the flooding.

Botswana

In neighbouring Botswana the authorities are taking precautionary measures as rising waters in the Okavango Delta, an inland river system which terminates in the arid Kalahari, threaten an outbreak of waterborne diseases.

Water levels in the delta have risen to their highest levels since 1939, the District Commissioner for Ngamiland, Beneddette Malala told local media.

No fatalities or injuries have been reported, but a surge in waterborne diseases in the area has forced the deployment of health officials, and swamped crop fields are likely to cause future food shortages.

Photo: NASA

An image of the flooded rivers in the western part of southern Africa taken by NASA’s Terra satellite on 25 March, 2009

“A team of five public health specialists has been mobilized from the Ministry of Health. The team will provide technical assistance on waterborne diseases that are likely to occur due the Okavango River floods,” said Botswana government spokesperson Jeff Ramsay.

Schooling has been disrupted, and students ordered to stay at home; people working in the fishing industry, a major economic contributor in the area, have been advised to halt their activities for the time being.

Botswana’s National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) has dispatched relief aid, including tarpaulins, shelter kits, water-purifying tablets, blankets, bales of second hand clothing, mosquito nets, kitchen sets, soap bars and jerrycans.

Government has advised people in affected areas to move to higher ground. “There are some homesteads that are resisting [relocation], while others want to do so when the situation gets severe,” Malala said.

Nathan Morule, who works in the capital, Gaborone, but was originally from Shakawe, north of the Okavango Delta on the border with Namibia, told IRIN: “I drove home [to Shakawe] on Sunday [22 March] evening to pick up my family and move my belongings to Kasane [on the border with Namibia's Caprivi Strip].

“The situation there [Shakawe] is very dire. The government says the floods will worsen. There have been floods before, but those who saw them say it has never been like this. I saw it with my own eyes – houses, offices, fields, roads, just everything is submerged in water. Everyone just cannot understand what is happening,” Morule said.

Zambia

Heavy rains in Zambia are stoking cholera in the country, according to an update by the UN Disaster Management Team on 27 March. The provinces most affected by flooding are Western, Eastern, Lusaka, Central and parts of Northern.

“The cholera situation had marginally improved, but is on the upswing again due to the continued rainy spell. In the Southern Province, Siavonga district has reported new cases of cholera and there are also reports from Eastern Province, in the rural areas,” the update said.

The health ministry reported 6,624 cases from September 2008 to 26 March 2009, of which 140 were fatal.

Angola

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a regional report released on 27 March that flooding in Angola had killed in 21 people and affected 200,000 people in the provinces of Cunene, Kuando Kubango, Moxico, Malange, Bie, Huambo and Lunda Sul.

In some instances, military air and boat rescue have been required to evacuate the worst affected and isolated areas

“The number is likely to increase once assessment teams are able reach areas made inaccessible by the floods. In some instances, military air and boat rescue have been required to evacuate the worst affected and isolated areas,” the update said.

The government has set aside US$10 million for flood response measures and is also providing six cargo planes to deliver emergency supplies.

UN agencies have already allocated US$ 600,000 of their own funding, “However, given that the number and needs of affected is likely to increase, UNICEF [the UN Children's Agency], WHO [World Health Organization] and IOM [International Organization for Migration] have issued a US$ 2.3 million CERF [Central Emergency Response Fund] request to secure additional funding,” the report said.

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source.www.irinnews.org

Photo: Evans Mensah/IRIN

People clear water from their houses during the 2007 Ghana floods

ACCRA,� – When a tidal wave displaced 3,000 people living along the coastal belt in the Volta Region in eastern Ghana on 11 March, the Ghana Red Cross Society (GRCS) could not mobilise enough relief items for even a third of the victims. The problem was: it is broke.

We are down completely: it is very frustrating! As it stands now we can only take care of less than a thousand victims in the case of a disaster, Secretary-General of the GRCS, Andrews Frimpong, told IRIN.� “I don’t want to sound like a prophet of doom but as a country [in the event of] a major disaster, we will not be able to do anything about it.

Government funds dropped from US$700,000 a year in 2004 to US$100,000 in 2008.

Contributions from businesses, NGOs and fundraising appeals make up the rest, but Frimpong says these sources are also drying up.

A few wellington boots

Because of funding constraints the GRCS is significantly scaling down its emergency operations across the country -�particularly in the Eastern and Bono Ahafo Regions where the government has taken over its facilities.

While GRCS staff would ordinarily distribute tents, plastic sheeting, food and water, Frimpong says they�now have�just 500 plastic sheets, 300 tents, and some wellington boots left in their stock.

Managers were unable to cover staff salaries in January and February � which are US$200,000 a month � as well as logistical and administrative costs.

The Society also relies on 1,000 volunteers to help carry out its work.

Photo: Ghana Red Cross Society/IRIN

Ghana Red Cross Society volunteers

Humanitarian aid an afterthought

Ben Brown, former chief of the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), a government body in charge of managing disaster and rehabilitation response, says funding is down because the government has not prioritised humanitarian assistance.

As a country we have not made humanitarian assistance and disaster management a priority; it is always an afterthought, he said.

The Ghana Red Cross Society was established by an act of parliament that mandates the government to support the funding of its operations.

186 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies around the world act as independent auxiliaries to their government’s humanitarian response in the event of a disaster.

But Sepa Yankey, Ghana’s Health Minister, which currently supervises the GRCS, told IRIN the government cannot do it all.

There are so many more pressing developmental issues confronting this country that we have little room to accommodate humanitarian issues.

A health official who asked not to be named, told IRIN, we have to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on health: we are bound by them. You don’t realistically expect us to be pumping money into the Red Cross when there are all these other pressing demands.

Context

Ghana’s government passed its humanitarian assistance-related legislation in 1996, following devastating floods the previous year. The law established NADMO, but to this day no humanitarian response policy has been issued to accompany the law, which seriously handicaps NADMO as well as the Red Cross, said Brown.

With no policy in place when floods hit again in 2007, NADMO took weeks to map out its response.

The problems facing the GRCS are not unique to Ghana. While a government’s capacity to fund its Red Cross Society, or develop an emergency strategy varies country by country, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 2006 disaster risk reduction policy acknowledges its members’ national disaster and humanitarian policies “have not explicitly focused on either risk reduction or strengthening local coping strategies, such as National Red Cross Societies.

It concludes: The major challenge is how to make disaster risk reduction a priority development concern, [for member countries].

Change

Health Minister Yankey promises greater attention for the�Red Cross’s�humanitarian work.

I admit the situation is dire and I will personally look into it, Yankey told IRIN, I agree we must look at formulating a comprehensive disaster management and humanitarian assistance policy.

But the government’s budget, presented on 5 March 2009, does not explicitly provision for emergency preparedness or response projects.

Yankey asked for more time to address the issue – he is one of many new ministerial appointments in newly-elected President John Atta Mill’s administration.

Alasan Senghore, West and Central Africa head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies,�assured IRIN in the event of a disaster the Ghana Red Cross Society would not be abandoned: it could apply to the IFRC’s disaster relief emergency fund and if approved, receive finances within 24 hours.

The IFRC is also filling some of GRCS’s�gaps by�covering a few staff salaries, helping with logistical support, and giving trainings, Senghore said. But Ghana is not yet among the countries to come under the West African Disaster Management Capacity Building Project, which would take these efforts further.

In the meantime the Ghana Red Cross Society is seeking $300,000 a month for the next 12 months to cover salaries and administrative costs; and US$5 million to build up emergency stocks in preparation for future disasters.

em/aj/np/ci
source.www.irinnews.org

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9629

Good news to know that the truth will always out–even when you’re Barack
Obama.

“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/

first100days/2009/03/25/obama-helped-fund-carbon-scheme/

In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama
served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were
“instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.
—————–
among other enviornmental causes-Strong works for the UN- UNESCO- the
education program Obama is addopting.  Strong promotes Gaia, the Earth God, among the world’s youth. Strong  encourage American youth replace Christianity with the worship of “mother earth.” Obama has proven his consistant disrespect for Christianity.
—————–

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange,
Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the
Washington cocktail circuit.  Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States.� That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower.� The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.

Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI).� MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste.
Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative
technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.

“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR.� “First, the firm
was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the
firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”

(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time
someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).

“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale.  The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.

“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock
value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996.� But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding.� When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers–including Maurice strong–sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value.� On Oct. 20, 1996–a Sunday–the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.

“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share.� By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors.  Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder.� The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.

In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.

These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement, who three years later were to be funded by the man who was to become President of the United States of America.

If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a year later in 2002.

It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism. The largest shareholder in the
Exchange is Goldman Sachs.  Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives.  John is the brother of William Ayers.

What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah Wright.

Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.

But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.

The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was funded by
Obama before he was POTUS.

Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating
hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade
carbon reduction scheme through Congress.

Obama was never the character he created for himself in the fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”.� He’s the agent of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The Barbarians are pushing at the gate of the Global Warming fraud, and to
borrow a line from children playing Hide and Seek, Here they come, ready or not!

Send in to API by Diana, USA