Oklahoma, terrible tornado disaster

This video from the USA is called 5/20/13 Moore, Oklahoma Devastating Tornado.

By Niles Williamson in the USA:

Devastating tornado kills at least 91 in Oklahoma City

21 May 2013

On Monday afternoon a massive tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, leaving behind a mile-wide swath of devastation. As of this writing, 91 people have been confirmed dead, including 20 children from an elementary school that was in the path of the storm.

Many remain missing, including an unknown number of children in the elementary school. At least 120 residents are being treated at area hospitals.

The tornado was estimated to be a category of either EF4 of EF5, with winds in excess of 200 miles per hour. News helicopter flyovers and video images taken by survivors show drifts of splintered housing materials and mangled cars for as far as the eye can see.

“People are trapped. You are going to see the devastation for days to come,” stated Betsy Randolph, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol speaking to CNN Monday afternoon. Some 171,000 people lived in the path of the twister.

The Plaza Towers Elementary School was completely flattened by the tornado, with an as yet unknown number of casualties. Children had been sheltered in the school in an attempt to protect them from the powerful storm. The Briarwood Elementary School was also severely damaged. By late evening, all Briarwood students had reportedly been accounted for.

The second floor of the Moore Medical Center was ripped off as it took a direct hit. “It looks like we have lost our hospital. I drove by there a while ago and it’s pretty much destroyed,” Moore Mayor Glenn Lewis told the press. “The whole city looks like a debris field.”

Other local hospitals struggled to admit the crush of wounded patients. “They are coming in minute by minute,” Integris Southwest Medical Center spokeswoman Brooke Cayot told Reuters.

“It seems that our worst fears have happened today,” said Bill Bunting, National Weather Service meteorologist in Norman, Oklahoma.

Emergency responders rushed to the multiple scenes of devastation to search through the debris for survivors. The National Guard was also activated to respond to the disaster.

Hundreds of homes and automobiles were destroyed while at least 7,000 customers were left without power in the Oklahoma City area. Interstate 35, which passes through Moore, was closed due to debris scattered on the roadway. All the roadways in the area are reportedly snarled with wreckage, and travelers are stranded in traffic backups.

Speaking Monday night in Washington, Oklahoma Representative Jim Brindenstine said, “At this time we don’t know the full extent of the damage and the potential human toll, but we are inspired. We are inspired by those who are sparing no effort to assist their neighbors and even many people that they don’t know.” President Barack Obama pledged federal support.

Disasters such as tornados—annual occurrences in the United States—require an enormous mobilization of social resources to properly respond to the destruction and human need. In every case, however, communities are left to fend for themselves. Politicians put in their appearances, invoke religion, and promise aid that never materializes. Emergency responders and ordinary citizens, responsible for shouldering the bulk of the rescue and recovery efforts, are offered hollow praise for their “resilience” and independent spirit.

Despite knowledge of the inherent dangers of tornados many residents are still left completely without any protection from the high winds and flying debris. There are no systematic tornado safety structures. Especially vulnerable are those that live in trailer parks which are composed of cheap materials completely incapable of resisting excessive winds and flying debris.

Moore is in the heart of the US’s so-called Tornado Alley and has been repeatedly hit by powerful tornados over the past 15 years: October 4th, 1998; May 3rd, 1999; May 8th, 2003 and May 10th, 2010. The tornado that struck Moore in 1999 was the strongest tornado ever recorded, with wind speeds reaching 318 miles per hour. Thirty-six people were killed, and there was $1 billion in damage. It was the deadliest and most destructive tornado in US history until the tornados that struck Joplin, Missouri and Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 2011.

The Moore tornado was one of numerous others spawned by a cold front moving through the region. High winds toppled trees downing power lines and smashing cars and homes throughout the Midwest. More than two dozen tornados were spotted during the day in Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois.

Monday’s storms come on the heels of violent weather the previous evening. On Sunday a strong storm with high winds and large hail killed two men in their 70s. One fatality occurred at a trailer park in Bethel Acres near Oklahoma City, another fatality occurred when a trailer park was destroyed in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Thirty nine people were injured as the storms destroyed many homes and scattered debris.

The United States is currently experiencing the height of tornado season; severe tornado activity is not unusual this time of year in Oklahoma and the other Plains states. Last week tornadoes tore through north-central Texas leaving at least six people dead and dozens wounded. (See: “Tornadoes rip through North Texas”)

At least 60 million people live in the path of the storm system that is moving across the Midwest, according to the National Weather Service. In towns throughout the country’s midsection, masses of people live in poverty, in substandard housing, without storm shelters or insurance to rebuild.

Related articles

• Students and staff trapped in school after tornado strikes Moore, Oklahoma (earthsky.org)
• Massive tornado hits Oklahoma (dailykos.com)
• Oklahoma tornado had 320km h winds (bigpondnews.com)
• The Evening Post: Moore Oklahoma Tornado and Ways To Help (geekalabama.com)
• Massive tornado rips through Moore, Oklahoma; 51 killed, more feared dead (thegreatone22.wordpress.com)
• Oklahoma City tornado: disaster declared as scores found dead (telegraph.co.uk)
• Monster tornado rips apart Oklahoma city, kills at least 91 – Indian Express (indianexpress.com)

Manure explosions at United States hog farms

This video from the USA, Iowa State University Extension, is called David Schmidt: Foaming Manure Pits.

From Mother Jones in the USA:

Mysterious Poop Foam Causes Explosions on Hog Farms

—By Tom Philpott

Wed May. 15, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

When you hear about foam in the context of food, you might think of molecular gastronomy, the culinary innovations of the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, who’s famous for dishes like apple caviar with banana foam.

But this post is about a much less appetizing kind of foam. You see, starting in about 2009, in the pits that capture manure under factory-scale hog farms, a gray, bubbly substance began appearing at the surface of the fecal soup. The problem is menacing: As manure breaks down, it emits toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and flammable ones like methane, and trapping these noxious fumes under a layer of foam can lead to sudden, disastrous releases and even explosions. According to a 2012 report from the University of Minnesota, by September 2011, the foam had “caused about a half-dozen explosions in the upper Midwest…one explosion destroyed a barn on a farm in northern Iowa, killing 1,500 pigs and severely burning the worker involved.”

And the foam grows to a thickness of up to four feet—check out these images, from a University of Minnesota document published by the Iowa Pork Producers, showing a vile-looking substance seeping up from between the slats that form the floor of a hog barn. Those slats are designed to allow hog waste to drop down into the below-ground pits; it is alarming to see it bubbling back up in the form of a substance the consistency of beaten egg whites.

And here’s the catch: Scientists can’t explain the phenomenon.

Check out this amazing 2011 video presentation [top of the post] on the matter by University of Minnesota researcher David Schmidt. He opens by describing a 2009 explosion that lifted a hog barn a “couple of feet off the ground” and blew the farm operator himself 20 feet from the building. (Thankfully, he wasn’t injured, and there were no animals in it.) And check out the footage, starting about 3:19 in, of the foam itself, which must be seen to be believed. At one point , a shovel dips into the mire and scoops up as sample—which jiggles and pulsates, alive, apparently, with microbial activity. Schmidt also does a great job of explaining just how manure foam can cause explosions.

Related articles

• The Latest in Job Safety Hazards: Poop Foam (lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)
• New in Factory Farming: Exploding Poop Foam (newser.com)
• Latest Factory Farm Byproduct: Exploding Foamy Pigdoots (wonkette.com)
• Explosive Hog-Shit Foam (motherboard.vice.com)
• There’s a Mystery Foam on Some Hog Poop, and It Causes Explosions (geekosystem.com)
• U.S. Agriculture Secretary Responds to Hog Farm Protestors (5newsonline.com)

Fukushima nuclear disaster measured

This video from Japan says about itself:

Relationship between Yakuza gangs and TEPCO has become the closer for the accident

Oct 22, 2011

Syunsuke Yamaoka, representative of Access Journal, entered the site of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant illegally with a helping hand of the workers there and found Yakuza gangs arranged jobs there, especially jobs inside the buildings which would make the workers’ life get at stake and that the relationship between Yakuza gangs and TEPCO had got closer than that before the accident.

And he wrote a book ‘Fukushima Daiichi Genpatu Sennyuki (Book of Infiltration into Fukushima Daiichi Nuke Plant)’ about that with interviews with three workers working there.

Day laborers were deceived into removing highly-irrated rubble in the Fukushima, I heard: here.

From the University of Southampton in England:

Southampton researchers develop new tool to provide radiation monitoring in Japan

14 May 2013 Southampton, University of

A team of researchers from the University of Southampton have designed a new tool to intelligently combine nuclear radioactivity data in Japan. The technology harnesses the power of crowdsourced radiation data; an innovative resource which became available after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

During March 2011, the second-largest nuclear emergency since Chernobyl 1986 was caused by a magnitude nine Tsunami hitting the North-East coast of Japan and severely damaging the nuclear power plant of Fukushima-Daiichi. The consequent nuclear accident provoked radioactivity increases of up to 1,000 times the normal levels in the area of Fukushima with more than 488,000 people being evacuated from their homes for the risk of nuclear contamination.

In response, private individuals brought forward the unprecedented effort of deploying 577 Geiger counters across the country to help the public monitor the spread of the nuclear cloud. These sensors were mostly built using low-cost open hardware boards such as Arduino and were able to stream radiation data in real time connected through the Cosm web platform. This crowdsourced sensor network, also known as the Cosm network, came to life in less than two weeks after the Tsunami and provided very relevant data to both official authorities and local citizens for monitoring the evolution of the disaster. More recently, the network was extended to 1,024 sensors contributed by several other organisations such as Safecast and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT). All together, the Cosm sensors provided more than 27 million readings since the day of the Fukushima disaster.

According to the researchers, a key element in order to incentivise people to take part in crowdsourcing projects is to help them understand these large quantities of data. To help people gain such an understanding, it is important to close the loop and feedback the results to the data contributors.

For this reason, the researchers have developed the Japan Nuclear Crowd Map (JNCM http://jncm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/): a web platform that combines into a single database the sensor readings provided from the three main crowdsourced radiation monitoring services: Cosm, Safecast, MEXT.

Matteo Venanzi, from the University of Southampton, who developed JNCM says: “The platform automatically collects raw radiation data from the online sensors and uses a non-parametric Gaussian process model to fuse the data into a single radiation map over Japan. The estimates are then shown to the users as a heat map and an intensity map, showing the average radioactivity in each prefecture. The users can also search by postcode to find out the radioactivity in their neighbourhood based on the latest predictions.”

JNCM is also available for smartphones with the JNCM Android app. Through the app, the users can visualise the radiation heat map directly on their phones as data are collected and also know the radiation level at their current location.

Yuki Ikumo, also from the University of Southampton, who developed the JNCM Android app says: “JNCM aims to be one of the future technologies for disaster managements in which the large participation of people will play a crucial role in community-based sensing crowdsourcing environmental monitoring tasks.”

JNCM users can now perceive the usefulness of this technology by freely accessing a number of radiation monitoring services based on the data contributed by thousands of crowd members.

JNCM is developed within the ORCHID project based in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, which investigates how human and software agents can work effectively together to collect the best possible information from a disaster environment. To find out more and try the platform, go to http://jncm.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ or download the app from Google play.

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• Good-bye Dubai? Bombing Iran’s Nuclear Facilities would leave the Entire Gulf States Region virtually Uninhabitable (thetruthseeker.co.uk)
• Plutonium found outside of containment in marine soil at Fukushima Daiichi (enformable.com)
• Fukushima Nuclear Crisis Update for May 10th to May 13th, 2013 (greenpeace.org)

Bangladesh trade unions legalized

This video from the USA says about itself:

Apr 26, 2013

On April 25, 2013 Bangladesh garment workers who are fighting for justice and against the deadly health and safety conditions of workers in Bangladesh protested at the San Francisco world headquarters of the Gap corporation. Since 2006, more than 600 Bangladeshi garment workers have died in preventable fires while sewing clothing for companies like Gap and Walmart. 112 workers died in a recent fire at a Walmart supplier and 29 workers died at a Gap supplier, but Gap and Walmart are still refusing to pay for reforms and join with other companies in a binding fire safety agreement that includes independent inspections and worker representation.

At the rally at noon, Bangladeshi factory fire survivor Sumi Abedin and Bangladesh garment worker organizer Kalpona Akter of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity- BCWS spoke and protested with bay area activists for global worker safety. There was also a reading of the workers names who died in recent factory accidents.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Workers get right to form trade unions

Monday 13 May 2013

by Our Foreign Desk

Bangladesh’s government agreed today to allow garment workers to form trade unions without prior permission from factory owners.

The cabinet decision came a day after the government announced a plan to raise the workers’ minimum wage.

Government spokesman Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan said that the cabinet had approved an amendment to the 2006 Labour Act lifting restrictions on forming trade unions in most industries.

The old law required workers to obtain permission before they could organise in unions.

“The government is doing it for the welfare of the workers,” Mr Bhuiyan claimed.

But it is likely part of a desperate effort to placate international public opinion, which has been outraged by the frequent catastrophes hitting garment workers, and to protect the clothing industry from a resulting backlash.

Local and international trade unions have long campaigned for such changes.

Though the 2006 law allowed unions, garment factory owners never gave permission for them, claiming they would lead to lack of discipline among workers.

On Sunday, Textiles Minister Abdul Latif Siddiky announced a new minimum wage board to issue pay recommendations within three months.

It will include government, factory and workers’ representatives.

Bangladesh’s 3.6 million garment workers are paid some of the lowest wages in the world to sew for global retailers in the country’s 5,000 factories.

Working conditions in the £13 billion industry are grim – a result of corruption and greed.

Garment workers’ minimum wages were raised by 80 per cent to £25 a month following protests in 2010.

Since 2005 at least 1,800 garment workers have been killed in factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh, according to the International Labour Rights Forum.

The Textiles Ministry has begun a series of factory inspections and has ordered about 22 closed temporarily for violating safety and working standards.

Rescue workers said today that they were ending their search after 1,127 bodies were recovered from the ruins of Rana Plaza.

Anger mounts as death toll exceeds 1,100 in Bangladesh building collapse: here.

Some of the world’s major clothing retailers have agreed to a pact to improve safety in Bangladesh’s garment factories following the Rana Plaza building collapse: here.

Related articles

• Bangladesh eases trade union laws after factory building collapse (guardian.co.uk)
• Bangladesh search draws to close (bbc.co.uk)
• Bangladesh to end search for collapse victims (newsobserver.com)
• Bangladeshi police attack garment workers’ protest (rinf.com)

Bangladesh factory collapse death toll over 1,000

This video says about itself:

Bangladesh union representative speaks to Al Jazeera

May 9, 2013

The death toll in Bangladesh’s worst industrial disaster has soared past 1,000 after more bodies were found in the rubble of a collapsed building outside the capital, Dhaka.

The “death toll now stands at 1,006″ as the recovery operation entered its 17th day since the building caved in at Savar town, army spokesman Captain Shahnewaz Zakaria told the AFP news agency on Friday.

Some of the bodies, which are badly decomposed, could be identified by mobile phones in their pockets or factory identity cards around their neck, he said.

“Of the total dead, most are female garment workers.”

Of the bodies recovered so far, “at least 150 bodies were buried in unmarked graves in a state graveyard after they could not be identified,” Zakaria added.

Death Toll Passes 1,000 in Bangladesh Collapse: here.

By Sarath Kumara and Wimal Perera:

Death toll in Bangladesh factory collapse reaches 950

10 May 2013

The death toll of the Savar building collapse reached 950 by Thursday evening, refuting earlier claims of the Bangladesh government and business organisations, which put the number of deaths at a lower figure.

Press reports indicated 121 decomposed bodies were retrieved from the wreck of the Savar building by noon on the 16th day after the disaster. It is feared that the death toll will increase further as the debris continues to be cleared.

Previous official estimates held that as there were fewer than 3,200 workers in the building at the time of the collapse on April 24, with 2,437 rescued, the death toll would be less than 763. This underscores that the figures published by the authorities after the disaster were unreliable.

The collapsed eight-story Rana Plaza building in Savar near Dhaka had housed five garment factories. The factory owners ordered workers into the building, despite their objections due to serious, visible cracks noted in the building on April 23. Thousands of workers were injured in the disaster, many critically, and hundreds will suffer permanent disability.

As body parts are retrieved from the collapsed multi-story building, mass anger with the political establishment has deepened. The fact that no survivors have been found since heavy cranes began clearing debris have heightened relatives’ concerns that these operations will end the chances of rescuing remaining survivors.

Hundreds of surviving workers and their relatives staged a protest on Tuesday near Savar bus terminal and blocked the Dhaka-Aricha highway for two hours, demanding wages and other benefits.

Workers from the Rana Plaza building are charging that, after the collapse of their plant, the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) is now also violating compensation agreements. The BGMEA is only ready to give a pittance to the survivors: one month’s salary.

The Daily Star cited a worker who said, “We heard they [BGMEA] were going to pay only one month’s salary. But we want four months’ pay and other perks, as per the rules.”

Another worker, Shipu Begum, explained: “We lost many colleagues, while most of the injured will not be able to bear their treatment expenditure with a month’s salary.”

In another devastating example of the deadly conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories, a factory fire at Tung Hai Sweater killed eight on Wednesday night—including Managing Director Mahbubur Rahman, Deputy Inspector General of Police Z.M. Monzur Morshed, and Sohel Mostafa Swapan, a regional leader of the Jubo League, the ruling Awami League’s youth movement.

It is not clear what these officials were doing at the factory, though Reuters wrote that their presence highlighted the “entanglement” between higher officials and big business in Bangladesh.

Because the factory was closed at 11 p.m. when the blaze took place, workers were not on the premises. Reuters reported that this company is a large one, running two factories employing 7,000 workers.

Workers at the Rana Plaza building who survived after being trapped in the rubble have been traumatized, with some rescued only after spending four days under the debris. Describing her experience, Laboni, rescued after 36 hours, said: “A pillar had fallen on my left arm. Blood was coming out of my head, eyes and nose.” One of her friends, Dipa Patra, died after a big piece of concrete fell on her chest.

Laboni, 22, who lost her left hand, still screams, “Get me out of the building. It terrifies me,” when someone tries to wake her. She told the Daily Star: “My life is ruined … I don’t want to see the life of any other man or woman ruined like mine.”

“Whenever we need to wake her up … she springs out of her bed, scared and stupefied,” said her father.

There is no rehabilitation program for the partially disabled, however. What the government and business organizations are interested in is to re-start the garment factories, which account for 80 percent of the country’s exports.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Italian retailer Benetton’s CEO Biagio Chiarolanza admitted on Wednesday that his firm had had shirts made for it at the Rana Plaza building, something Benetton initially denied. In a devastating indictment of the conditions his firm and other major international clothing retailers impose on garment workers, Chiarolanza admitted: “The wages in Bangladesh are an act of cruelty. Women cannot support their families on $40 a month.”

He cynically added, “I can assure everyone that Benetton has always paid special attention to the workers condition, and the environment in which they operate. I believe our long-standing commitment to social issues speaks for itself.”

With several Western retailers threatening to withdraw their operations from the country to prevent the exposure of their connections with sweatshops, the Bangladeshi government is desperate. On Wednesday it temporarily shut down 18 garment factories—16 in Dhaka and two in Chittagong.

Textiles and Jute Minister Abdul Latif Siddiqui tried to portray the action as part of cleaning up of operations “deemed to be dangerous.” However, with more than 5,400 factories in this sector in Bangladesh, in which unsafe and unhealthy conditions are common, this measure is for show.

In Dhaka, the 16 factories ordered to close were part of a group of 32 that Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments (DIFE) ordered shut because of faults that pose dangers to the workers. But DIFE officials could not confirm what happened with the remaining factories, the Daily Star reported on Thursday.

Business groups protested even these cosmetic gestures. The BGMEA and the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI) expressed concern over the shutdown in a meeting with the prime minister on Wednesday. Former FBCCI president A.K. Azad said: “Firstly, we went to the PM’s residence, and being instructed, we met Textiles and Jute Minister Abdul Latif Siddiqui at his residence and expressed our concern.”

Just 2p would be added to the price of a t-shirt if clothing firms doubled the wages of Bangladeshi garment workers, the TUC said yesterday: here.

Related articles

• Bangladesh factory collapse death toll hits 1,038 (mysanantonio.com)

New York Aquarium reopening after Hurricane Sandy

This video is called NEW YORK AQUARIUM 5 5 2009.

From the Wildlife Conservation Society in the USA:

WCS’s New York Aquarium Set To Reopen after Sandy

April 6, 2013

The Wildlife Conservation Society will partially reopen the New York Aquarium on Saturday, May 25.

This partial reopening will come about 7 months after Hurricane Sandy devastated the 14-acre aquarium campus, severely damaging its buildings, exhibits, and the facility’s aquatic life support systems.

The partial reopening will include: Glover’s Reef (featuring the sea life found in Glover’s Reef, Belize); Exhibits in Conservation Hall (Coral Triangle of Fiji, Great Lakes of East Africa, and the Flooded Forests of the Amazon); Outdoor spaces of Sea Cliffs (walrus, sea lions, harbor seals, sea otters and penguins); and a fully re-modeled Aquatheater with a new sea lion demonstration.

“We are ready to welcome New York families and tourists back into the WCS New York Aquarium,” said Cristián Samper, WCS President and CEO. “We have worked nonstop to ensure that the marine life in the aquarium was safe and secure. We want to share this progress with New Yorkers and be a part of the Coney Island comeback following Hurricane Sandy. The aquarium is an important economic engine for the community, providing jobs and sparking commerce. We have been encouraged by the outreach from the city and across the country urging us to reopen.”

Watch a news clip about the aquarium’s comeback from ABC here.

Read more about the partial reopening in our press release.

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Bangladesh garment disaster death toll continues to rise

This video is called Anger on Bangladesh streets after Dhaka factory collapse.

By Sarath Kumara:

Bangladesh building disaster death toll nears 700

7 May 2012

Two weeks after the collapse of the multi-story Rana Plaza building in Savar, near Dhaka, the official death toll yesterday reached 677, mainly young garment workers. Despite this unprecedented tragedy, one of the worst industrial accidents in the world, the main concern of the Bangladesh government and international retailers is how to continue business as usual.

The number of deaths will undoubtedly rise further because debris is still being cleared from the collapsed building that housed five garment factories. Thousands of workers were also injured in the disaster, many critically. Hundreds will suffer permanent disability. The Rana Plaza owner had claimed the building was safe, and the factory owners had ordered workers into the building despite their objections after serious cracks were found in the structure on April 23, the day before the disaster.

The Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) and the government are intent on obscuring the total number of deaths. The BGMEA has not published a list of the names of the several thousand workers employed in the destroyed factories. The Daily Star reported that BGMEA secretary Rafiqul Islam had the workers’ March salary sheets, but refused to disclose the number of employees. The Awami League-led government has also failed to prepare a list of workers or deaths.

International garment industry companies like Walt Disney are reportedly threatening to withdraw from Bangladesh. The European Union warned it could suspend trade concessions to Bangladesh unless safety conditions were improved. The only concern of retailers and governments is to try to refurbish their tarnished image and wash their hands of the terrible loss of life.

Global companies, including some of the world’s best-known brands, extract 60 to 80 percent profit margins from merchandise made in Bangladesh, by pressing contractors to deliver the lowest possible costs. Their threats to pull out of Bangladesh have nothing to do with improving workers’ rights. The corporate giants would just seek another cheap labour platform to ensure continued super profits.

The Bangladeshi ruling elite operates as a junior partner of international big business. Last week, 40 buyer companies, including H&M, JC Penney, C&A, Levi’s, Marks and Spencer, Tesco and Nike, met with the BGMEA to discuss the crisis.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government is desperate to demonstrate to Western countries and companies that it can continue to deliver the sweatshop regime they demand. In a revealing CNN interview, Hasina insisted that Bangladesh had “good conditions for investments.” She insisted that no company would withdraw because “they get cheap labour. That is why they come here.”

Hasina sought to minimise the disaster, declaring that an “accident can take place” anywhere in the world, and no business should be blamed “just for one incident.” These comments display the real contempt of the ruling elite for the lives and safety of workers. Rana Plaza was not just “one incident” but one of the world’s worst industrial disasters, in a long series of similar tragedies in Bangladesh and other countries.

The prime minister has also made thinly-veiled threats against the clothing workers who have held days of large protests since the catastrophe. Her government is determined to ensure the resumption of garment factory operations. Urging workers last week to stop “violence” and return to work, Hasina warned that if the unrest continued they “would become unemployed.” She directed the home ministry to crack down by identifying the “culprits” who were engaged in attacks on factories.

The government is still seeking scapegoats to cover up its own responsibility for the disaster. After arresting building and factory owners and some of their relatives, police detained an engineer who worked as a consultant for Rana Plaza. Savar municipality mayor Mohammad Refatullah was charged with negligence and failure to take action after the building’s cracks appeared.

International Labour Organisation (ILO) representatives rushed to Dhaka on May 1 to discuss ways to pacify workers and enable Bangladesh to keep operating as a cheap labour country. Its response illustrated how the UN-affiliated ILO acts as an advisory body on manipulating labour relations to meet corporate needs.

According to a statement issued last Sunday, ILO officials held discussions with employers, the government and NGOs and trade unions to identify “what needs to be done to prevent such future tragedies.” The ILO said the government had promised to introduce a “labour law reform package” during the next session of parliament to improve safety and collective bargaining.

Such cosmetic declarations are needed by the international companies and local employers to deflect worldwide attention, and the anger among workers. Similar promises have been made in the past by successive governments and the BGMEA, solely in order to buy time. In her CNN interview, Hasina admitted that the government had only 18 inspectors, responsible for overseeing safety conditions in more than 100,000 factories in and around the capital city.

Speaking to the media, one garment worker, Manara, described the plight of the workers, mostly young girls from the rural areas. She shared a single windowless room in an unclean back street with her husband and daughter, having to use a common toilet and share the kitchen with neighbours. Her 15-year-old daughter also worked in a factory and, even with overtime, they jointly earned just $US90 a month.

The BBC reported that many factories offer sub-contracts to back-street companies that had few fire or other safety precautions and had workers “who were clearly children” in their sweatshops.

Such brutal conditions are not accidental, given the close nexus between big business and the political establishment. About 30 parliamentarians—from both government and opposition parties—are apparel factory owners. Transparency International’s director in Bangladesh, Iftekharuzzaman, noted: “Politics and business is so enmeshed that one is kin to the other.”

The result, for which the Bangladesh government, manufacturers and global retailers are all responsible, is the worst industrial disaster in recent history, surpassing the Ali Enterprises garment factory tragedy in Pakistan, in which 289 people died in a fire last year.

Hundreds of survivors of last month’s garment factory collapse in Bangladesh protested for compensation today: here.

Bangladesh Garment Factory Fire Kills 8 Just Weeks After Building Collapse Claims More Than 900 Lives: here. And here.

Related articles

• Death toll from Bangladesh disaster tops 700 as survivors protest (globalnews.ca)
• Bangladesh collapse toll passes 700 (bbc.co.uk)
• Survivors protest as death toll from Bangladesh disaster tops 700 (ctvnews.ca)
• Murder investigation opens against owner as death toll from Bangladesh accident hits 675 (vancouverdesi.com)
• Bangladesh building survivors protest as toll passes 700 (abc.net.au)
• Bangladesh collapse survivors demand pay as toll tops 700 (cbc.ca)
• Toll from Bangladesh factory tragedy tops 800 as decomposing bodies sent for DNA tests (vancouverdesi.com)
• Bangladesh collapse toll reaches 800 (bbc.co.uk)

Fukushima disaster continuing for decades

This is a music video of Japanese Fukushima punk rock band Scrap, consisting of people who lost everything because of the nuclear disaster, performing their song Fuck TEPCO, in Koriyama, 10/2/2011.

Here is another video of that song, with English subtitles of the lyrics.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Clean-up ‘to take over 40 years’

Monday 22 April 2013

A UN nuclear expert warned today that Japan may need more than 40 years to decommission its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant.

International Atomic Energy Agency team leader Juan Carlos Lentijo said that damage at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant is so complex that it is “impossible” to predict how long the cleanup may last.

The government and plant operator Tepco have said the cleanup will be accomplished in 40 years.

But they still have to develop technology and equipment to operate under fatally high radiation levels to locate and remove melted fuel.

Mr Lentijo warned of problems to come.

“It is expectable that in such a complex site, additional incidents will occur as happens in nuclear plants under normal operation,” he said.

Related articles

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Texas unsafe fertilizer plant disaster

This video from the USA says about itself:

April 18, 2013

Federal regulators fined the company that operates the Texas fertilizer plant that exploded overnight $10,000 last summer for safety violations, The Associated Press reported Thursday. But the government accepted $5,250 after the company took what it described as corrective actions.

By Naomi Spencer in the USA:

West, Texas residents survey explosion aftermath

22 April 2013

On Saturday, some residents of the small farming town of West, Texas were allowed to return to the area destroyed by a massive explosion last Wednesday. A five-block blast site around the West Fertilizer Plant had been closed off since the disaster that killed 14 and injured 200 others.

On Friday, small fires broke out at the site of the explosion, fueled by leaking fertilizer tanks. The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), which are overseeing the disaster response, are removing the tanks as part of the investigation into the cause of the blast.

While officials have said the explosion was likely an accident, the site of the disaster is being treated like a crime scene. As of Saturday, 50 ATF agents were at the site to collect evidence. Journalists and residents have not been allowed near the center of the blast. The aftermath of the disaster has largely disappeared from the national news.

Authorities announced that only residents older than 18 years old who lived in the outer perimeter of the disaster zone could re-enter. The announcement came after growing frustration and complaints from those displaced over the lack of information and activity. Residents were told they could survey their homes but would only be allowed in between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

Residents were also told they must present proper identification to police before entering the area. Many survivors of the explosion were forced to flee their homes and did not have their IDs with them.

Those who attempted to enter the area earlier were ordered to stay out by state troopers, according to an Associated Press report. Ron Price, who was trying to assess his son’s property said that when he and other residents were spotted by state police, they “came flying down the road” yelling at people. “It was pretty scary,” he said. “Everybody just jumped and took off running. They jumped in their cars and we all started heading back.”

Officials said those residents who were allowed into the outer blast zone would only be allowed two vehicles at each house, with no vehicles larger than a pickup truck. Police set up a checkpoint to register vehicles. Mayor Pro Tem Steve Vanek said in a press conference Saturday that anyone staying overnight was doing so “at your own risk.” Vanek dismissed concerns about chemical contamination or other hazards. “It is safe, it is safe, it is safe for our citizens,” he said. “Any rumors you have heard today, forget about it.”

In the days since the explosion, details have emerged that indicate West Fertilizer Company operated without regard to safety laws, and state and federal regulatory agencies did not enforce rules or regularly inspect the factory.

A 2012 state health department filing revealed that the company had some 540,000 pounds of the explosive fertilizer ammonium nitrate in a storage building—1,350 times the amount that is the limit that triggers oversight by the Department of Homeland Security. This is now considered the likely cause of the enormous fireball that erupted half an hour after the initial fire engulfed the plant.

West Fertilizer Company issued a risk assessment in 2011 in which it disclosed to the Environmental Protection Agency that it had 54,000 pounds of anhydrous ammonia, but declared it presented no risk of fire or explosion. “The worst possible scenario,” the report stated, “would be a 10-minute release of ammonia gas that would kill or injure no one.”

The explosion has devastated West, a town of 2,800 people. Because of the lack of zoning enforcement, the 62-year-old factory was surrounded by residential neighborhoods, schools, and parks. A nursing home and 50-unit apartment building were among those structures obliterated by the blast. Aerial photographs of the aftermath reveal a scene resembling the wreckage left by a heavy bomb.

Most of the victims who have been identified were emergency responders, a fact that compounded the difficulty of search and rescue operations in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. Two of West’s three ambulances were destroyed, along with three of the town’s five fire trucks.

Local reporting has included profiles of some of the victims. Among them were 10 volunteer firefighters: 41-year-old Morris Bridges, 37-year-old Perry Calvin, 26-year-old Jerry Chapman, 50-year-old Cody Dragoo, 52-year-old Kenny Harris, 52-year-old Jimmy Matus, 29-year-old Joey Pustejovsky, 29-year-old Cyrus Reed, and brothers Doug, 50, and Robert Snokhous, 48. Forty-five-year-old resident Buck Uptmor also rushed to the scene to help.

On Friday night, after delivering a statement on the events in Boston, President Obama issued an emergency declaration for West, authorizing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate the recovery efforts. Texas Governor Rick Perry also declared the town a disaster area. According to a statement on the FEMA web site, the federal government will fund 75 percent of the response, though no damage estimate has been announced.

West survivors were sheltering with neighbors and relatives, relying largely on donations and charity. Nearly 1,500 volunteers had signed in at a donation site to help on Friday.

Many other newly homeless residents, according to the Dallas Morning News, were “crammed into a hotel” and were “tired of waiting” for information. “We need to get some straight answers,” said one resident. “Don’t leave us hanging.”

Another resident told the paper she had not been allowed to return to her home to retrieve her son’s medication. Mayor Pro Tem Vanek said that he would not answer questions, the Morning News reported, “until the ATF says he can.”

Survivors expressed anger over the lack of safety enforcement and warnings about the danger the plant presented. Mandy Williams, who fled from her home barefoot along with her grandmother and 3-year-old son after the explosion, told the Morning News, “If I were a reporter and could ask one question to the mayor, and to Perry, and to all those people at the podium, it would be this: Do you have a siren in town that could alert us to a problem at the plant, instead of letting it be on fire and none of us know that an explosion could happen?”

Texas explosion: questions over safety record of West Fertilizer Co: here.

The Boston bombings continue to dominate the American media, while the Texas fertilizer plant explosion has virtually dropped out of the news: here.

West Fertilizer Plant’s Hazards Eluded Regulators For Nearly 30 Years: here.

The small farming community of West, Texas remains crippled more than a week after an explosion at a fertilizer plant leveled part of town. The official death toll has risen to 15, although local news outlets have featured at least 16 profiles of the dead. More than 200 were injured: here.

Related articles

• Texas fertilizer fire lethal disaster (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Time for Media Talking Heads to Get Out of Boston and Head Down to Texas (skydancingblog.com)
• ‘Total destruction’ in deadly fertilizer blast (usatoday.com)
• CORRECTED-Texas fertilizer company didn’t heed disclosure rules before blast (xe.com)
• West Fertilizer Violated Federal Anti-Terror Regulations (lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)

Texas fertilizer fire lethal disaster

Shortly after the criminal bomb outrage in Boston, still many more tragic dead and injured people in the USA.

Explosions rocked a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, Wednesday evening as firefighters were battling a fire, causing multiple injuries, authorities said.

More about West in Texas is here.

The disaster still continues. From the New Civil Rights Movement site in the USA:

There are reports of dozens possibly dead and hundreds injured but it’s impossible at this moment to know any actual numbers of victims.

From Mother Jones in the USA:

Hundreds are injured and many feared dead in the small central Texas town. …

Complicating matters is the location: A volunteer fire department serves the town of 2,700, and casualties are being transported to the nearest hospital in Waco—20 miles away. …

The clearest footage we have of the blast itself comes from a man who appears to have been watching the fire from his car with his young daughter. The explosion comes about 30 seconds in (warning: not for the faint of heart):

First of all, I wish recovery and strength for the survivors, for the families and friends of the injured and dead of this horrible fire.

We still don’t know the total figures of dead and injured people, of damage to houses, to the environment, etc.

We still don’t know the exact cause of this horror.

Yet, one may ask: how was safety at this plant with its inflammable fertilizer?

How is health care organized in that area, with injured people having to travel for twenty miles?

And: how wise was Texas governor Rick Perry when he made cuts in fire fighting services?

Related articles

• Deadly explosion, fire rips through Texas fertilizer plant – Reuters (reuters.com)
• Fertilizer Plant Explodes Near Waco; Mass Casualties Reported (ktla.com)
• The West, Texas Disaster (lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)
• EMS: 60 Dead, Over 100 Injured In Texas Fertilizer Plant Blast (cbsnews.com)
• Texas fertilizer plant blast injures dozens (bostonherald.com)
• Video Of Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion Captured By Dad In Truck (jalopnik.com)
• Hundreds Believed Injured in Texas Fertilizer Plant Blast (kcrg.com)
• Texas fertilizer plant explosion injures dozens (cbc.ca)