Indonesia VP says at least 75 killed in quake

30 Sep 2009 14:42:31 GMT

Source: Reuters

JAKARTA, Sept 30 (Reuters) - A powerful earthquake off the coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island has killed at least 75 people and the toll could rise further since so many buildings had collapsed, the country's vice president said on Wednesday. Jusuf Kalla told a news conference that as well as homes, hotels, schools, shops and other buildings had collapsed. (Reporting by Telly Nathalia; Writing by Ed Davies)

Earthquake hits Indonesia, tsunami strikes Pacific islands

30 Sep 2009 14:39:00 GMT

Written by: James Kilner

LONDON (AlertNet) - A powerful earthquake struck off the city of Padang on Indonesia's Sumatra island on Wednesday, killing at least 75 people and trapping thousands under rubble, the country's vice-president said. Only a few hours earlier another earthquake in the Pacific Ocean had triggered a tsunami that washed other the islands of Tonga and Western and American Samoa and killed more than 100 people.

The Indonesian quake caused widespread panic across the city of 900,000 people, and a hospital in Padang collapsed, said Rustam Pakaya, the head of the health ministry's disaster centre in Jakarta. At least 21 people had been killed and "thousands of people are trapped in the rubble of buildings", Pakaya said. Vice-President Jusuf Kalla later told a press conference that over 75 people had died in the earthquake. TV footage showed devastation, with piles of rubble and smashed houses. Metro Television reported the roof of Padang airport had collapsed and other media said hotels were damaged.

The 7.6 magnitude quake was felt around the region, with some high-rise buildings in Singapore, 440 km (275 miles) to the northeast, evacuating staff. Office buildings also shook in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre cancelled an earlier tsunami alert. "Hundreds of houses have been damaged along the road. There are some fires, bridges are cut and there is extreme panic here," said a Reuters witness in the city, who also said broken water pipes had triggered flooding.

His mobile phone was then cut off and officials said power had been severed in the city. A resident called Adi later told Indonesia's Metro Television there was devastation around him. "For now I can't see dead bodies, just collapsed houses. Some half destroyed, others completely. People are standing around too scared to go back inside. They fear a tsunami," said Adi. "No help has arrived yet. I can see small children standing around carrying blankets.

Some people are looking for relatives but all the lights have gone out completely." Online news agency Detik.com said a hospital and a large market had also been damaged in the city. Sumatra is home to some of the country's largest oil fields as well as its oldest and smallest liquefied natural gas terminal, although there were no immediate reports of damage to those facilities. [ID:nSP404330] Padang, the capital of Indonesia's West Sumatra province, sits on one of the world's most active fault lines along the "Ring of Fire" where the Indo-Australia plate grinds against the Eurasia plate to create regular tremors and sometimes quakes.

A 9.15 magnitude quake, with its epicentre roughly 600 km (373 miles) northwest of Padang, caused the 2004 tsunami which killed 232,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and other countries across the Indian Ocean. The depth of Wednesday's earthquake was 85 km (53 miles), the United States Geological Survey said. It revised down the magnitude of the quake from 7.9 to 7.6. LONG HELD FEARS Geologists have long said Padang may one day be destroyed by a huge earthquake because of its location.

"Padang sits right in front of the area with the greatest potential for an 8.9 magnitude earthquake," said Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, a geologist at the Indonesian Science Institute, in February. "The entire city could drown" in a tsunami triggered by such a quake, he warned. Several earthquake-prone parts of the country hold tsunami practice drills, and the national disaster service sends alerts via telephone text messages to subscribers. But some experts have long said Indonesia needs to do more to reduce the risk of catastrophe. (Reporting by By John Nedy in Padang, Indonesia)

Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.

Eid Mubarak to all

Yemen fighting spreads, civilians living under bridges, on roads - U.N.

15 Sep 2009 15:08:00 GMT

Written by: Richard Meares


LONDON (AlertNet) - A month-long conflict between Yemeni government forces and rebels has spread, taking the plight of civilians to alarming levels, with hungry people stranded in the open, on the sides of roads and under bridges, the United Nations said. However, a U.N. appeal for emergency funds to help up to 150,000 displaced people in the north of the poorest Arab nation has so far met with silence.

A new wave of fighting - the "sixth war" in an intermittent five-year-old conflict - erupted a month ago in the mountainous north between rebel Shi'ite Muslims and government forces trying to impose central authority. U.N. agencies estimate this has added up to 50,000 people to the 100,000 or so already left homeless by earlier rounds of the fighting. Most are women and children and many have moved for the second or third time as the arc of fighting widens across Saada governorate into the neighbouring region of Amran.

"The humanitarian situation of the civilians in the conflict zone reached alarming and unprecedented levels after one month due to insecurity, lack of humanitarian access, and government banning. The humanitarian community had repeatedly appealed for opening humanitarian corridors to allow access and delivery of urgently needed relief items," the U.N refugee agency UNHCR said in a report received by AlertNet on Tuesday. "Saada Governorate has been cut off from the rest of the world for more than one month now.

There has been no water or electricity in Saada city since 12 August and food reserves are running out. High temperatures during the day and heavy rains at night have left civilians, most of them observing the Ramadan fasting period, in dire need for shelter, food and clean water." The road from and to Saada was extremely dangerous because of fighting, for which no reliable casualty figures have been made available. Numerous checkpoints and roadblocks, a state of emergency and a 12-hour curfew were further isolating the area.

"Most of the displaced are stranded and dangerously exposed to the fighting as they are unable to reach safer areas. Mines are also reported to be hindering safe passage for those attempting to flee. The only back exit road through Al Jawf governorate is also blocked subjecting civilians to risky journeys through mountainous deserts." Aid agencies sent a mission through neighbouring Saudi Arabia to assess how to help up to 30,000 displaced people who had fled north to a border area at Baqim - only to find that the conflict had already engulfed that area too.

DIRE NEEDS

"Hundreds of families are currently living in schools or even in the open, on the sides of roads, and under bridges, with little to feed on. They are in dire need for shelter, food, and water. Despite the agency's readiness to dispatch needed assistance at the first signal, the authorities have not yet allowed access at this moment to the area due to insecurity," UNHCR said. Agencies have been more able to reach people fleeing south towards the capital Sanaa, about 300 km (180 miles) from Saada. The UNHCR began establishing one of its new camps in the Amran region last week but security there has deteriorated too, forcing work to be suspended.

Some displaced people said they witnessed fierce fighting, heavy attack and airstrikes. "They have spent three to five days walking in the desert, taking mountainous roads on foot due to the blockage of main roads, before reaching the camps. They arrived traumatised and exhausted. The majority of them are women," the report said. Before the latest round of fighting the U.N. food agency had to cut rations to previously displaced Yemenis because of a lack of funding.

On Sept 2 the United Nations called for $23.75 million in an emergency appeal to address the humanitarian situation in Yemen. "No funds were earmarked to date," the UNHCR said of the $5 million it has sought as part of that appeal. Yemen also faces secessionist sentiment in the south and a new al Qaeda campaign that has staged deadly attacks over the past three years. The government said on Monday it had killed at least 20 rebels amid heavy bombing in the north, whose rebels accused President Ali Abdullah Saleh of being a tyrant.

"The air hawks succeeded in directing painful blows to the elements of terrorism," a military source said in a statement, referring to several districts in Saada province. The government says ordinary residents there do not support the uprising by rebels referred to as Houthis after the clan of their leaders. People in the main town Saada are largely trapped by shelling and street-fighting in homes with barely any water, power or communications. Food is scarce and prices spiralling out of reach.

Reuters AlertNet is not responsible for the content of external websites.

Aid Worker PTSD

BY MICHAEL BEAR

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 08, 2009 @ 06:55AM PT

Eight months after coming home from Iraq, I found myself curled on the floor of my bathroom, sobbing. Which, granted, wasn't how I planned on spending the evening. I had always thought I could keep control over my emotions, that I could compartmentalize away all that fear, all that stress. I was wrong.

And apparently I wasn't alone. A recent article from Reuters AlertNet highlights the growing problem of aid worker burn-out.

According to Claire Collard, the Executive Director of the Centre for Humanitarian Pscyhology: "The biggest problems HRs (human resource departments) in NGOs face around their field staff is not trauma at all, it's what is called cumulative stress and burn-out. They are living a very closed-in type of life. They can hardly go out in the evening. They work in the camps then they come back to their compounds and are stuck there for the whole evening with a bunch of colleagues who they haven't chosen in the first place."

We don't like to talk about it, but the problem is real. One study estimated that between 5-10% of aid workers in dangerous situations suffer diagnosable PTSD, while another 20% suffer partial PTSD.

Some studies put the numbers even higher. According to the September 2008 issue of InterAction's Monday Developments, "as many as half of all returned nongovernmental organization (NGO) expatriates exhibited symptoms of burnout, depression, or PTSD."

The November 2007 report NGO Staff Well-being in the Darfur Region of Sudan & Eastern Chadincludes additional statistics from the field - 51.4% of staff surveyed reported feeling physically stressed in the previous two weeks; 45.8% reported feeling emotionally stressed and 29.2% reported feeling mentally stressed over the same period.

Resources for dealing with aid worker PTSD are included below:

- The September issue of InterAction's Monday Developments has a number of excellent articles on the subject, including guidelines for helping to manage stress, as well as a look at staff counseling within the UN system and peer support within humanitarian agencies.

- The 2005 InterAction Forum on staff wellness included useful information and recommendations, in particular the presentation Helping Your Organization Address Staff Wellness by Lisa McKay, Lynne Cripe and Sharon Forrence.

- The Headington Institute focuses on "helping the helpers" - their website is a tremendous resource, including a series of online tools such as training modules, self-examination tools, handouts on coping with traumatic stress, tips for self-care, stories from the field, andlinks to other online resources.

- The majority of attention on staff wellness focuses on international staff, while for the most part national staff are left to fend for themselves. To help address this gap, the Headington Institute offers an excellent module on supporting national staff.

- The Humanitarian Practice Network paper Understanding and addressing staff turnover in humanitarian agencies looks at the causes of staff turnover, as well as the consequences on organizational effectiveness.

- Finally, please see also the bibliography prepared by John Ehrenreich about Managing Stress in Humanitarian, Health Care and Human Rights Workers.

10 Signs That You've Been Overseas Too Long

BY MICHAEL BEAR

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 06, 2009 @ 10:56AM PT

1. If asked to rank the most wonderful inventions in human history, you would list air conditioning significantly above penicillin, movable type and the wheel.

2. You're inordinately impressed by working traffic lights. And paved roads.

3. At your leaving party, you jokingly insist that you won't miss the open sewage trenches along the sides of the roads. But you know that you will.

4. In any debate about copyright infringement, you come down firmly on the pro-piracy side. Unless you're talking about the bastards who simply smuggle a videocamera into a movie theater and then market the resulting product as a clean copy. They can burn in hell.

5. You've developed a Landcruiser fetish.

6. You've also developed an inappropriate, twitching reaction to fireworks.

7. Doctors at home are slightly intimidated by your ability to detect the symptoms of incipient malaria.

8. You simply assume that everyone knows where Yambio is. You also think acronyms like NCP, CPA, FDLR, AMISOM or ISAF are completely self-explanatory.

9. When pregnant friends at home talk about getting ready for the hospital, you mentally translate baby bag into quick-run bag.

10. You've worn exactly three pairs of pants and four shirts over the past month. Tho you do take care to mix the combinations according to a semi-complex rotating schedule known to you and you alone.

Gaza we are Coming-Part 4

Gaza we are Coming-Part 3

Gaza we are Coming-Part 2

Gaza we are Coming-Part 1