Category: disasters

Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral is on fire

April 15, 2019 • 12:45 pm

This was just reported, and you can see a scanty report at the BBC. It looks quite serious:

The cause of the blaze was not immediately clear, but officials say that it could be linked to renovation work.

Images on social media show plumes of smoke billowing into the air above the 850-year-old Gothic building.

Last year, the Catholic Church in France launched an urgent appeal for funds to save the cathedral, which was starting to crumble.

A major operation is under way to tackle the blaze, which broke out on Monday afternoon, and an area surrounding the building in central Paris has been cleared, officials said.

Videos:

Click on the second tweet below to go to a livestream of the fire, or click here.

 

I’ve spent many hours in the lovely building, and even went to Christmas Mass one year, just to see the celebrations and smell the incense. It looks like it’s mostly the roof that will be damaged, but you can be sure that French firefighters will do their very best to stop the blaze, for this is one of the world’s great religious sites and of course a major tourist draw to Paris.

h/t: Grania

When the Big One hits the U.S.

July 20, 2015 • 11:00 am

Professor Ceiling Cat has an article that he highly recommends you read. It’s in the latest New Yorker, and is called “The really big one” by Kathryn Schulz (subtitle: “An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.”). It’s a superbly researched and written account (also free to access) of what’s going to happen when the Big Earthquake hits not California, but the Pacific Northwest.  The scenario is not pretty, with at least 30,000 deaths and massive destruction of the infrastructure. Here’s a short excerpt:

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says. 

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake [magnitude 8.0-8.6] happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one [magnitude 8.7-9.2]  are roughly one in ten.

. . . Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

Don’t miss this article. If you live west of Interstate 5, you may want to move, as the quake is way overdue.

h/t: Diane G.

Did they find the lost plane?

April 5, 2014 • 4:54 am

I just got this on my emailed CNN News bulletin, but can’t find confirmation anywhere else:

Chinese ship discovers pulse signal with frequency of 37.5 kHz in southern Indian Ocean, state news agency Xinhua says.

According to Hydro International, that’s the right frequency for a “black box” (my emphasis):

All commercial air transport (CAT) aircraft are fitted with underwater locator beacons to assist in the relocation of black box flight data recorders (FDRs) and cockpit voice recorders (CVRs). These beacons are free-running pingers transmitting at an acoustic frequency of 37.5kHz with a claimed battery life of at least 30 days.

I hope this doesn’t prove to be one of the many false alarms, for the relatives and friends of those aboard the Malaysia Air flight have had a horribly emotional roller-coaster ride. I suspect, however, that this is indeed the plane.

***

UPDATE: As one reader noted below, the ABC News said this:

The signal was detected by the Haixun 01 vessel around 25 degrees south latitude and 101 degrees east longitude, the Xinhua agency reports.

However there is no evidence so far that the signal is linked to MH370.

I’d say, however, that since the signals last only 30 days, and there’s no evidence of other planes having gone down in the area in the last year, this is evidence linking the signal to the Malaysia Air flight.