Oklahoma deaths because of lack of shelters

This video about Moore, Oklahoma in the USA is called Shelters Scarce in Tornado-Stricken Community.

By Naomi Spencer in the USA:

Lack of shelters a factor in Oklahoma tornado death toll

22 May 2013

As Moore, Oklahoma residents grapple with the devastating destruction from Monday’s tornado, information is coming out about the way in which the lack of adequate infrastructure significantly increased the death toll.

At least 24 people were killed, including nine children, when a massive twister hit the Oklahoma City suburb Monday afternoon. Seven of the children were students at an elementary school in the direct path of the storm. At least 240 others were injured; of those, 60 are children.

The Oklahoma City Medical Examiner’s Office modified their early fatality estimate of 51 early on Tuesday, saying that the lack of phone communications had resulted in double reporting of casualties. However, the death toll will likely climb as search teams carry out their work.

The National Weather Service upgraded the Moore tornado to a category EF5, the highest rating, with winds more than 200 miles per hour. The storm cut a path up to two miles wide and 20 miles long, and was reportedly on the ground for more than 40 minutes. Flyover footage and first-hand video taken by residents reveal a vast scene of shredded neighborhoods, twisted vehicles and utility poles and four-feet-deep drifts of rubble.

The Plaza Towers Elementary School was destroyed as children and teachers sheltered in the hallways and bathrooms. “All you could hear were screams,” first responder Stuart Earnest Jr. said. “The people screaming for help. And the people trying to help were also screaming.”

At least three children remain unaccounted for.

With disturbing frequency, natural disasters like tornados expose the underlying social disaster of American life.

Once again the undeveloped state of infrastructure in the US is revealed: Masses of people are exposed to the elements, with no access to underground storm shelters. Public schools are built in the heart of “Tornado Alley” with no basements or storm safe rooms. Although tornado sirens sounded 16 minutes ahead of the twister and meteorologists warned of the approaching dangers for hours, many hundreds of people simply had nowhere to go. The tornado hit during the early rush hour just before school let out. Many people were on the roads during that time and simply could not find shelter.

Five public schools in the area were hit by the storm. None of them had shelter areas, such as reinforced “safe rooms” or basements. A report on NBC News Tuesday noted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates that school safe rooms would cost $1.4 million.

“We have limited numbers of funds, so you set priorities,” Oklahoma’s Emergency Management Agency Director Albert Ashwood told a press conference. “It’s not a matter of they’re being left out for any reason. They hadn’t been brought forward yet.” Only 100 schools in the state have safe rooms.

The surrounding residential area was also bereft of safety rooms because of a months’ long delay in FEMA aid disbursement. A grant for safe rooms was promised in 2011, but the $2 million in federal aid had not been allocated nearly a year and a half later. Local officials explained that the county’s emergency initiatives were funded based on previous disaster declarations. “Oklahoma has had a few of these declarations in the past couple of years, so there is not a lot of grant money available.”

Residential safe rooms can be built for $8,000 to $10,000 each. Out of 16,000 applicants for financial assistance in constructing safe rooms statewide, only 500 were chosen, based on a lottery drawing.

Moore had not built a common tornado shelter, because, according to the city, it was not likely to be hit by a tornado. The city’s web site said it faced only a “1-2 percent” chance of a tornado hitting the town on any spring day. Tornado season in the US is typically 60 to 90 days long, and tornados are a daily occurrence in the nation’s midsection.

That public shelters do not exist in a city perhaps best known for its weather tragedies is a crime for which the entire political establishment bears responsibility.

Moore has been hit by four tornados in the last decade and a half: October 4, 1998; May 3, 1999; May 8, 2003; and three years ago, on May 10, 2010. The 1999 storm carried wind speeds of 318 miles per hour—the strongest ever recorded near the earth’s surface. The tornado killed 42 people and injured 800 others. Monday’s storm followed approximately the same path as the 1999 twister.

In 2002, engineer Timothy Marshall issued a report, published in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society, on housing construction in Moore following the 1999 tornado. Marshall found that many neighborhoods were rebuilt for a higher population density than before, using the same substandard methods that had failed under the impact of the tornado.

Of the subdivisions surveyed, only a single house was found to be rebuilt better than before. Houses in the region are generally unable to withstand winds of even 90 miles per hour, let alone the more than 200 mile per hour winds that came with Monday’s twister.

“Most newly built homes were attached to their concrete [slab] foundations with tapered cut nails or shot pins as had been noted in homes destroyed by the tornado,” he wrote. “None of the houses inspected had hurricane clips or other wind-resistant connections.” Marshall lamented that far from leading to more stringent building codes and enforcement, the tornado bolstered the claim that “no building could survive a tornado” and led to even weaker standards.

The decrepit and unplanned state of physical infrastructure compounded Monday’s disaster. As the storm hit, communications systems failed, the above-ground electrical grid was instantly destroyed, and the transportation system was thrown into chaos.

Local officials responded to such situations by erecting police checkpoints. Interstate ramps in and out of the city have been closed. A live report from KOCO-TV showed long lines of traffic in neighborhoods across the city, with residents stranded trying to check on their homes.

The disaster bears long-term consequences for thousands of residents, who lack insurance. Time after time, the response of the industry is to jack up rates even further in areas hit by storms.

Related articles

• How to Understand the Scale of Today’s Oklahoma Tornado (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
• PHOTOS: Tornado Devastates Moore, Oklahoma (huffingtonpost.com)
• How You Can Help in the Aftermath of Moore, Oklahoma Tornado (saunsea.wordpress.com)
• Oklahoma City tornado: disaster declared as scores found dead (telegraph.co.uk)
• Search For Survivors Continues After Deadly Oklahoma Twister (dfw.cbslocal.com)
• Oklahoma tornado path, video and radar imagery in Moore (wjla.com)
• The Evening Post: Moore Oklahoma Tornado and Ways To Help (geekalabama.com)
• Heartbreaking Tornado Disaster in Moore Oklahoma on May 20th 2013 (21stcenturyscreenshots.wordpress.com)

Corporate destruction of Mayan temple in Belize

This video is called Mexico – Chichen Itza (Mayan Pyramids).

From Associated Press:

May 13, 2013, 7:30 PM

Bulldozers destroy Mayan pyramid in Belize

BELIZE CITY – A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2,300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.

“It’s a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity … they were using this for road fill,” Awe said. “It’s like being punched in the stomach, it’s just so horrendous.”

Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field, and lacked the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids. But Awe said the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet tall, for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat.

“These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s just bloody laziness”, Awe said.

Photos from the scene showed backhoes clawing away at the pyramid’s sloping sides, leaving an isolated core of limestone cobbles at the center, with what appears to be a narrow Mayan chamber dangling above one clawed-out section.

“Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines,” said Awe. “To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can’t these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It’s mind-boggling.”

Belizean police said they are conducting an investigation and criminal charges are possible. The Nohmul complex sits on private land, but Belizean law says that any pre-Hispanic ruins are under government protection.

The Belize community-action group Citizens Organized for Liberty Through Action called the destruction of the archaeological site “an obscene example of disrespect for the environment and history.”

It is not the first time it’s happened in Belize, a country of about 350,000 people that is largely covered in jungle and dotted with hundreds of Mayan ruin sites, though few as large as Nohmul.

Norman Hammond, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Boston University who worked in Belizean research projects in the 1980s, wrote in an email that “bulldozing Maya mounds for road fill is an endemic problem in Belize (the whole of the San Estevan center has gone, both of the major pyramids at Louisville, other structures at Nohmul, many smaller sites), but this sounds like the biggest yet.”

Arlen Chase, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida, said, “Archaeologists are disturbed when such things occur, but there is only a very limited infrastructure in Belize that can be applied to cultural heritage management.”

“Unfortunately, they (destruction of sites) are all too common, but not usually in the center of a large Maya site,” Chase wrote.

He said there had probably still been much to learn from the site. “A great deal of archaeology was undertaken at Nohmul in the ’70s and ’80s, but this only sampled a small part of this large center.”

Belize isn’t the only place where the handiwork of the far-flung and enormously prolific Maya builders is being destroyed. The ancient Mayas spread across southeastern Mexico and through Guatemala, Honduras and Belize.

“I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived,” wrote Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University’s Anthropology Department.

“Unfortunately, this destruction of our heritage is irreversible but many don’t take it seriously,” he added. “The only way to stop it is by showing that it is a major crime and people can and will go to jail for it.”

Robert Rosenswig, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Albany, described the difficult and heartbreaking work of trying to salvage information at the nearby site of San Estevan following similar destruction around 2005.

“Bulldozing damage at San Estevan is extensive and the site is littered with Classic period potsherds,” he wrote in an academic paper describing the scene. “We spent a number of days at the beginning of the 2005 season trying to figure out the extent of the damage …. after scratching our heads for many days, a bulldozer showed up and we realized that what appear to be mounds, when overgrown with chest-high vegetation, are actually recently bulldozed garbage piles.”

However small the compensation, bulldozing pyramids is one very brutal way of revealing the inner cores of the structures, which were often built up in periodic stages of construction.

“The one advantage of this massive destruction, to the core site, is that the remains of early domestic activity are now visible on the surface,” Rosenswig wrote.

Related articles

• Ancient Mayan pyramid destroyed by construction company in Belize (rt.com)

Drowned medieval English town Dunwich, new research

From the University of Southampton, in Britain:

-Secret streets of Britain’s Atlantis are revealed

09 May 2013

A University of Southampton professor has carried out the most detailed analysis ever of the archaeological remains of the lost medieval town of Dunwich, dubbed ‘Britain’s Atlantis’.

Funded and supported by English Heritage, and using advanced underwater imaging techniques, the project led by Professor David Sear of Geography and Environment has produced the most accurate map to date of the town’s streets, boundaries and major buildings, and revealed new ruins on the seabed. Professor Sear worked with a team from the University’s GeoData Institute; the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton; Wessex Archaeology; and local divers from North Sea Recovery and Learn Scuba.

He comments, “Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site.

“We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

“DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.”

Peter Murphy, English Heritage’s coastal survey expert who is currently completing a national assessment of coastal heritage assets in England, says: “The loss of most of the medieval town of Dunwich over the last few hundred years – one of the most important English ports in the Middle Ages – is part of a long process that is likely to result in more losses in the future. Everyone was surprised, though, by how much of the eroded town still survives under the sea and is identifiable.

“Whilst we cannot stop the forces of nature, we can ensure what is significant is recorded and our knowledge and memory of a place doesn’t get lost forever. Professor Sear and his team have developed techniques that will be valuable to understanding submerged and eroded terrestrial sites elsewhere.”

Present day Dunwich is a village 14 miles south of Lowestoft in Suffolk, but it was once a thriving port – similar in size to 14th Century London. Extreme storms forced coastal erosion and flooding that have almost completely wiped out this once prosperous town over the past seven centuries. This process began in 1286 when a huge storm swept much of the settlement into the sea and silted up the Dunwich River. This storm was followed by a succession of others that silted up the harbour and squeezed the economic life out of the town, leading to its eventual demise as a major international port in the 15th Century. It now lies collapsed and in ruins in a watery grave, three to 10 metres below the surface of the sea, just off the present coastline.

The project to survey the underwater ruins of Dunwich, the world’s largest medieval underwater town site, began in 2008. Six additional ruins on the seabed and 74 potential archaeological sites on the seafloor have since been found. Combining all known archaeological data from the site, together with old charts and navigation guides to the coast, it has also led to the production of the most accurate and detailed map of the street layout and position of buildings, including the town’s eight churches. Findings highlights are:

* Identification of the limits of the town, which reveal it was a substantial urban centre occupying approximately 1.8 km2 – almost as large as the City of London
* Confirmation the town had a central area enclosed by a defensive, possibly Saxon earthwork, about 1km2
* The documentation of ten buildings of medieval Dunwich, within this enclosed area, including the location and probable ruins of Blackfriars Friary, St Peter’s, All Saint’s and St Nicholas Churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine
* Additional ruins which initial interpretation suggests are part of a large house, possibly the town hall
* Further evidence that suggests the northern area of the town was largely commercial, with wooden structures associated with the port
* The use of shoreline change analysis to predict where the coastline was located at the height of the town’s prosperity

Commenting on the significance of Dunwich, Professor Sear says: “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants.
“Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.

“Our coastlines have always been changing, and communities have struggled to live with this change. Dunwich reminds us that it is not only the big storms and their frequency – coming one after another, that drives erosion and flooding, but also the social and economic decisions communities make at the coast. In the end, with the harbour silting up, the town partly destroyed, and falling market incomes, many people simply gave up on Dunwich.”

Professor Sear’s full report can be found here.

A new breed of archaeologists is using satellite imagery to unearth clues about past civilisations: here.

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Egyptian Jews, history and today

From The Art Newspaper:

Fight to preserve Egypt’s ancient Jewish sites

New leader want the government to recognise that “Jewish temples are like the pyramids and the Sphinx”— an important part of the country’s history

By Lauren Gelfond Feldinger. Web only

Published online: 26 April 2013

Magda Haroun

The new elected head of Cairo’s declining Jewish community, Magda Haroun, said she will campaign to save Egypt’s Jewish synagogues and other historic sites—but according to reports, she will reject offers of help from Israel, because she wants the Egyptian government to recognise that the sites are an important part of their history. “Jewish temples are like the pyramids and the Sphinx,” she told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. “They are part of Egypt’s history that cannot be ignored.”

Haroun’s election, following the death last month of 84-year-old Carmen Weinstein, is a good sign for Egyptian heritage, an Egyptian filmmaker told The Art Newspaper. Amir Ramses, whose documentary “Jews of Egypt” was released on 27 March, spent four years researching the country’s Jewish communities and heritage sites. Haroun, a 60-year-old-lawyer, “gets what she wants”, Ramses said. “She is very keen to protect Jewish heritage and keep it a part of Egyptian culture and history, just as [with] any other religious historical heritage.”

Officials have alienated Egyptians from the Jewish part of their historical legacy over the years because of the Israeli-Arab conflict, the secular Christian filmmaker said. Haroun will fight to make the Jewish heritage sites more accessible to the Egyptian public “for the first time…in years”, Ramses said, adding that only the Ben Ezra synagogue in a tourist district is accessible. “It is the Egyptian government’s duty to handle the Jewish history in equality to Muslim and Christian,” he said.

At Carmen Weinstein’s funeral last month, Haroun invited the public to Cairo’s dilapidated Bassatine cemetery to witness the waterlogged and neglected state of the ninth-century Jewish burial site, as she talked about following in Weinstein’s footsteps to protect heritage.

In her inaugural letter published by the Cairo Jewish Community Centre, Haroun described Weinstein’s funeral as a coming together of Muslims, Catholics, Copts, officials, youth and other Egyptians. “All of the above were assembled together to honour the passing of a symbol of the Egypt that was. An Egypt open to people from all creeds, nationality and colour,” she wrote.

The Egyptian intellectual community has supported Haroun’s appointment, because of her family history, Ramses said. Haroun’s father was a founder of Egypt’s Tagammu party, which promotes democratic, humanist and socialist values and has opposed the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to a spokeswoman at the Alexandria Jewish Community Centre, Alexandria is one of only two Jewish centres left in Egypt, with 20 Jews remaining in the city: 17 women and three men aged 70-90. In Cairo, there are an estimated 20 or 25 Jews. Most of Egypt’s tens of thousands of Jews fled between the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the 1956 Suez Crisis.

The historical remnants of Egypt’s Jewish history—around two dozen synagogues and a handful of cemeteries and Jewish schools around the country—range from being in well-preserved and reasonable condition to “disastrous”, despite some new restoration projects taken on in recent years by the former minister of culture Farouk Hosni, Ramses said.

Haroun told Al-Ahram that she is seeking Egyptian funding for restoration projects and would otherwise turn to Unesco for assistance. The Alexandria spokeswoman said that they are also hoping for Unesco assistance.

Related articles

• Leader’s Death Provides New Focus on Egypt’s Jews (dailynewsegypt.com)
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• Egypt’s remaining Jews gather to bury one of their own… (telegraph.co.uk)
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How Egyptian pyramid builders ate

This video from Egypt is called Sound and Light Show at the Pyramids of Giza.

By Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor:

Giza Secret Revealed: How 10,000 Pyramid Builders Got Fed

23 April 2013 Time: 11:50 AM ET

The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation, the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers’ town near the pyramids.

The workers’ town is located about 1,300 feet (400 meters) south of the Sphinx, and was used to house workers building the pyramid of pharaoh Menkaure, the third and last pyramid on the Giza plateau. The site is also known by its Arabic name, Heit el-Ghurab, and is sometimes called “the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders.”

So far, researchers have discovered a nearby cemetery with bodies of pyramid builders; a corral with possible slaughter areas on the southern edge of workers’ town; and piles of animal bones.

Based on animal bone findings, nutritional data, and other discoveries at this workers’ town site, the archaeologists estimate that more than 4,000 pounds of meat — from cattle, sheep and goats — were slaughtered every day, on average, to feed the pyramid builders. [See Photos of the Unearthed Giza Pyramid Site]

This meat-rich diet, along with the availability of medical care (the skeletons of some workers show healed bones), would have been an additional lure for ancient Egyptians to work on the pyramids.

“People were taken care of, and they were well fed when they were down there working, so there would have been an attractiveness to that,” said Richard Redding, chief research officer at Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), a group that has been excavating and studying the workers’ town site for about 25 years.

“They probably got a much better diet than they got in their village,” Redding told LiveScience.

Feeding the Giza work force

At the workers’ town, which was likely occupied for 35 years, researchers have discovered a plethora of animal bones. Although the researchers are still unsure of the exact number of bones, Redding estimates he has identified about 25,000 sheep and goats, 8,000 cattle and 1,000 pig bones, he wrote in a paper published in the book “Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of the ICAZ Working Group ‘Archaeozoology of southwest Asia and adjacent Areas’” (Peeters Publishing, 2013).

About 10,000 workers helped build the Menkaure pyramid, with a smaller work force present year-round to cut stones and complete preparation and survey work, the AERA team estimates. This smaller work force would have ramped up for a few months starting around July of each year. “What they would do is, for about four or five months a year, they would bring in a big work force to move blocks, and they would do nothing but move blocks,” explained Redding, who is also a research scientist at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan. [In Photos: The Beautiful Pyramids of Sudan]

Needless to say, pyramid building is hard work. The workers would need at least 45 to 50 grams of protein a day, Redding said. Half of this protein would likely come from fish, beans, lentils and other non-meat sources, while the other half would come from sheep, goat and cattle, he estimated. Milk and cheese were probably not consumed due to transportation problems and the cattle’s low milk yield during that time, Redding said.

Combining these requirements and other protein sources with the ratio of the bones (and the amount of meat and protein one can get from an animal), Redding determined about 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats were consumed each day.

This would be in addition to supplying workers with grain, beer and other products.

Vast herds … and herders

In order to maintain this level of slaughter, the ancient Egyptians would have needed a herd of 21,900 cattle and 54,750 sheep and goats just to keep up regular delivery to the Giza workers, Redding estimates.

The animals alone would need about 155 square miles (401 square kilometers) of territory to graze. Add in fallow land, waste land, settlements and agricultural land for the herders, and this number triples to about 465 square miles (1,205 square km) of land — an area about the size of modern-day Los Angeles. Even so, this area would take up just about 5 percent of the present-day Nile Delta.

These animals also needed herders — likely one herder for every six cattle and one herder for every 50 sheep or goats, based on ethnographic observations. This brings the total number of herders to 3,650 overall and, once their families are included, 18,980, just under 2 percent of Egypt’s estimated population at the time.

These herds would have been spread out in villages across the Nile Delta, then brought to the workers’ town at Giza to be slaughtered and cooked. At the end of their lives, the animals were likely kept in the southern part of the town, in a recently unearthed structure that researchers have dubbed the “OK corral.” (“OK” stands for “Old Kingdom,” the time period in which the Giza pyramids were built.) The structure, which includes two small enclosures where animals may have been slaughtered and a rounded pen, is partly hidden under a modern-day soccer field. [Image Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries]

The boss eats the beef

The research revealed interesting details about life in the workers’ town. For instance, the overseers — who lived in a structure the archaeologists call the “north street gatehouse” — got to eat the most cattle, and those living in an area called the “galleries,” where the everyday workers lived, ate mainly sheep and goats.

Redding said it wasn’t surprising that the overseers preferred to dine on beef, considering it was the most valued meat in ancient Egypt. “Cattle is, of course, the highest-status meat,” he said, noting that it appears far more frequently then sheep or goat in tomb scenes, and that pigs never appear in tomb scenes.

The settlement located adjacent to the workers’ town, dubbed “eastern town,” wasn’t as rigidly planned as workers’ town, and its residents were eating a considerable number of pigs, the researchers found. Evidence also suggested the people in eastern town were trading with people in workers’ town for hippo-tusk fragments.

These finds suggest that the residents of the eastern town were not as directly involved in pyramid building and had a special relationship with the pyramid workers.

“They were not provisioned; they were not given their meat and food every day,” like those in the workers’ town were, Redding said. “It’s more of a typical urban farming settlement, and there was a symbiotic relationship between the two —probably,” he said.

Future discoveries at Giza

Research at workers’ town suggests that not all the workers lived there and some may have actually camped out near the Giza pyramids.

“What we think now is — and this is something we’re going to be coming out with in the next little while — is that, more likely, it was a large portion of the work force, the more skilled laborers [living at workers' town], and that there were temporary camps up by the pyramids where the temporary workers who came in would be housed,” he said.

“They probably (didn’t) need much in the way of housing; they would need more shade than anything else. They wouldn’t need any kind of warmth because it wouldn’t be winter.”

Future studies will look for the remains of the workers’ towns of Khufu and Khafre, the two other pharaohs who built pyramids at Giza. A dump area, investigated in the 1950s, may hold them; seal impressions found at the dump have the rulers’ names on them.

“What we think was going on was that Menkaure came along, he establishes his reign, he leveled that whole area and he took all the levelling debris, took it to the top of the hill and threw it over the back in a big dump,” Redding said.

“That dump on the back side of the ridge may represent a remnant of Khufu and Khafre’s construction’s town,” Redding said, adding that he hopes new excavations will begin on the dump in the next year or two.

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London museum gets wildlife garden roof

This video is called Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.

From Wildlife Extra:

V & A Museum to get a wildlife garden roof

The world’s greatest museum of art and design gets a new roof for wildlife

March 2013. Wildlife charity Buglife – The Invertebrate Conservation Trust, are due to start work on a Living Roof project at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in central London this spring.

Thanks to funding from Western Riverside Environment Fund – a partnership between Western Riverside Waste Authority and Groundwork UK, an area of the existing roof will be transformed into a wildflower meadow to provide food and shelter for wildlife including bees, butterflies and moths.

Clare Dinham, Buglife Brownfields Stepping Stones Officer, said “Creating a green space on the roof of a building in central London provides insects with a lifeline of food and shelter. Pollinating insects are in decline due to habitat loss so we hope to use the Living Roof on the high profile V&A as a flagship for other buildings, encouraging more people to get involved”.

In 2012, Buglife with support from the Green Roof Consultancy, produced the UK’s first living roof guidance report including details on why and how to create a living roof for wildlife, after creating a number of Living Roofs across London. The V&A Living Roof will be another vital habitat stepping stone for wildlife in the city.

Range of habitats for insects

The roof will boast a wildflower meadow with nectar and pollen rich plants, areas of bare ground for invertebrates to bask and burrow as well as piles of deadwood for mini-beasts to shelter and feed upon.

The new roof will be monitored by wildlife experts this summer as part of wider research to identify which invertebrates are using the roof. Previous studies on Living Roofs in central London have recorded many species of beetles, flies and bees including the nationally rare Brown-banded carder bee (Bombus humilis).

The Living Roof at the V&A will be designed by The Green Roof Consultancy. Dusty Gedge of Green Roof Consultancy said “We hope that installing a green roof on such an iconic building in central London will raise the profile of these important urban habitats for wildlife. The Living Roof will also include wetland features and we will be recording the species that use these areas, an under-recorded habitat on green roofs.”

…

Steve Hyde, Head of Estates for the V&A said: “The Museum is very excited about this project and it fits well with our on-going sustainability programmes and initiatives”.

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Amsterdam Van Gogh museum reopening with new exhibition

This video, recorded in the Netherlands, says about itself:

April 29, 2013

The anniversary exhibition ‘Van Gogh at work’ shows many of Vincent van Gogh’s outstanding works to mark the conclusion of eight years research into the artist’s methods.

From DutchNews.nl:

Van Gogh museum on target for May re-opening with jubilee show

Tuesday 02 April 2013

Work on refurbishing the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has now been completed and the building is now being fitted out for the jubilee exhibition Van Gogh at Work, which will open on May 1, 2013, the museum authorities said on Tuesday.

The new show commemorates 160 years since the painter’s birth and marks the conclusion of seven years of research into Van Gogh‘s methods.

The refurbishment project has taken just seven months. Major works from the collection are on display at the Hermitage Museum on the Amstel river until April 25, pending the re-opening.

‘Against all expectations, we were even able to seize the opportunity to refurbish the floors, walls and ceilings so the building looks fresh again,’ said the museum’s new managing director Adriaan Dönszelmann.

Heat storage

The project involved installing a modern and sustainable air conditioning installation that allows the right climatic conditions to be set per room. A 160-metre-deep well was dug under the museum for heat and cold storage, collecting warmth in the summer and releasing it to heat the building in winter.

The roof has also been completely replaced and given extra insulation. In total, 2,300 m² of parquet flooring was renewed, 4,300 m² of ceiling replaced and 11,000 m² of walls painted, the museum said in a statement.

The newly refurbished Rijksmuseum is due to reopen later this month after a 10-year closure.

See also here.

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Leuven in Belgium, old buildings and art

Thursday, 7 March 2013.

After yesterday, today to the Groot Begijnhof in Leuven, Belgium.

The Groot Begijnhof (Grand Béguinage in French) is a well-preserved and completely restored historical quarter of a dozen streets in the city center of Leuven.

Two branches of the Dijle river cross it, bridged by three bridges.

Near a lawn, great tit and blackbird.

The Jesuit order played a role in Leuven history. So, in the Groot Begijnhof, there is this small statue of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of that order.

Back at a Dijle bridge, domestic pigeons. Also, Egyptian geese flying overhead.

Then, after the Groot Begijnhof, on to the M-Museum Leuven.

This video says about itself:

A small fragment of a musical performance in the M-Museum, in Leuven, Belgium.

This museum has a big art collection, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. But they don’t exhibit all of that permanently; like many other museums.

When you enter, you see religious sculptures. One from the twelfth century, one from the fourteenth century. Most are from the sixteenth century, a “golden age” for the Low Countries, especially the southern provinces. However, the museum does not show much from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then, the Habsburg rulers had managed to oppress the sixteenth century revolt against King Philip II of Spain: not in the north, which went on to have its Golden Age in the seventeenth century and would become the Netherlands; in the south, which later became Belgium. Though early in the seventeenth century, Rubens and others still made Antwerp a center of art, Leuven and many other southern Low Countries areas became backwaters economically and artistically under the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg monarchs.

The museum does have a lot of nineteenth century objects. Many of them are by Constantin Meunier (12 April 1831 – 4 April 1905). Though born in a Brussels working class neighbourhood, Meunier worked in Leuven at his painting and sculpture for quite some time.

A major theme in Meunier’s work is the Belgian working class, their exploitation and their bad situation at work. His style is called “social realism”.

Constantin Meunier made this sculpture after a fire in a coal mine in 1887. It killed 120 miners. The sculpture depicts a mother, recognizing the dead body of her son among the victims of the disaster.

Leuven in Belgium, botany, birds and bees

Wednesday, 6 March 2013.

To Leuven, an ancient Belgian university city.

It has many attractions, from the Middle Ages and later.

These include the oldest botanical garden in Belgium, founded in 1738: the Hortus Botanicus Lovaniensis.

When we went there, it was sunny weather, with higher temperatures than later in March.

Sounds of nuthatch, great tit, blue tit and chaffinch.

And a canary, but it is in a cage.

Bee hives. A “hotel” for solitary bees and other insects.

And chickens. They are of the “Brakelhoen” (Braekel) race, the only surviving Flemish Belgian race.

This is a Braekel video.

Crocus flowers. They attract honeybees, probably the bees’ first day on flowers this year.

Leuven university is about 150 years older than the one in Leiden. However, the botanical garden is some 150 years later than the garden in Leiden; and smaller. Then, again, in Leiden, there is only source of a brook flowing to the big pond. Here, there are two sources and two brooks.

In the pond, mallard ducks and carp, like often in Leiden.

In Leuven, there is also the Sint-Donatuspark or city park. It includes remains of the 12th century city wall. A nuthatch was looking for food between the stones of that old wall. Also in the park: blackbird, chaffinch.

In the evening, this photo of the Martelarenplein (Martyrs’ Square) near Leuven railway station.

What would tomorrow in Leuven bring for us?

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Paris Panthéon restoration

This video is called Panthéon, Paris.

From The Art Newspaper:

Facelift for Panthéon, Paris’s grande dame

Building that has become an expression of national pride to undergo a €100m restoration lasting ten years—but funding is still to be found

By Claudia Barbieri Childs

Published online: 21 March 2013

One of the largest restoration projects in Europe is due to begin this August in the French capital. The Centre des Monuments Nationaux, the French body responsible for caring for state monuments, is preparing for a ten-year, €100m programme to restore the Panthéon, an 18th-century building that has become an expression of national pride. During the first phase, the structure will be covered in scaffolding with awnings featuring work by a yet-to-be-selected contemporary artist.

Classical beauty

The building was conceived by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot as a church dedicated to Geneviève, a patron saint of Paris. But the 1789 revolution swept away the old order a year before the building was completed, and in 1791, the National Constituent Assembly ordained its rededication as the temple of the new republican nation. Despite being repurposed many times in the 19th century, the Panthéon has become the final resting place of some of the great and the good of French culture, science and national identity, including Rousseau, Zola, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Malraux, Marie Curie, the socialist hero Jean Jaurès and Jean Moulin, a symbol of the French Resistance.

The architectural style of the building, which boasts an 82m-high dome, may not be original, but its method of construction is. Soufflot was one of the first to use a skeleton of iron bars set into the masonry, which enabled him to create a building that was the tallest in Paris until it was outdone in 1889 by Gustave Eiffel’s all-metal tower.

Although the use of iron reinforcement was a major step forward in architectural engineering, it is also one of the major reasons for the Panthéon’s current sorry state. A leaking roof has rusted the ironwork, causing it to swell and to split the stone cladding.

In the first phase of restoration work, which will take 18 months and cost an estimated €19m, the lantern, the cupola and the colonnade that supports the base of the dome will be rejointed, and replaced with new stone and ironwork where necessary. The dome’s lead roofing will also be replaced. Where possible, the original ironwork will be stabilised and treated to prevent further decay. The glasswork of the dome and the lantern will be replaced to improve the interior lighting.

Subsequent phases will restore the Grecian peristyle, the vaults, the interior and external walls and the stone platform on which the building rests.

Funding challenge

During the first stage, the dome and its colonnade will be enveloped in freestanding scaffolding that will be a piece of monumental engineering in its own right; piling 17m deep will support a 37m-high, 315-tonne base. However grand the Panthéon and its restoration, though, these are hard times. In a move that represents a major departure for France, funding for the project will come not only from the state and the usual institutional philanthropists but also, it is hoped, from an online crowd-funding appeal. So far, the appeal has raised only €57,000, but donations will be taken until 6 May.

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