AF Data Digital Pvt. Ltd.,: Mar 3, 2010

FUTURE DISASTERS

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

THE WORLD

DISASTERS

FUTURE DISASTERS

Is life on Earth becoming more dangerous ? In one very important sense, it is. Global population is now 100 times greater than 500 years ago, and it is increasing at a frightening rate. Millions more people are now exposed to natural disasters, and the upsurge in population puts pressure on the quality of people's life across the globe. Many cities now face poverty, epidemics, overcrowding and rising crime.

Meanwhile, human technology causes increasing damage to Earth's environment. By stripping away the farests that once covered much of the land, and by polluting the atmosphere with industrial waste and transport fumes, we have begun the process of global warning. This is already leading to an increase in violent weather and flooding - mand the risk that the ice caps could melt, drowing much of the world.

Technology has made our lives safer. New medicines can combat diseases that were once untreatable. But final triumph over illness is a long way off. Some diseases can be controlled, but none are eradicated.
Another threat comes from space. Giant meteorites have struck Earth before, and sooner or later another will appear. we can only trust that when this happens, our ingenuity will be able to prevent catastrophe.

DISASTERS - London Bridge Fire PArt A

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DISASTERS

Demolition Gangs
In the Middle Ages, there were no water hoses, so water could only be carried in buckets. To prevent the spread of fire between streets, some timber-framed houses were pulled down by teams using hooks attached to long poles and chains. This created a big gap across which the flames could not leap.

Safety measures
After the 1212 disaster. London introduced its fire-prevention laws. Roofs thatched with highly flammable straw or rushes were banned in favour of stone tiles. and every district had to have its own set of hooks for pulling down buildings in an emergency.

Spanning the centuries
Built in the 1170s, the 300-metre London Bridge was home to hundreds of families. It was a shopping street as well as a vital thoroughfare, with a drawbridge and gatehouse at either end, and a chapel in the middle. Although the houses were all destroyed in 1212, the stone piers survived, and the bridge remained an important crossing for another 600 years.

DISASTER - Fire Brokje London Bridge

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DISASTERS

Bridge on fire
On a blustery day in July 1212, fires broke out on London Bridge - at both ends. Sweeping through the thatched buildings, the flames trapped the crowds crossing the bridge along its narrow street. in the panic, about 3,000 people were burned or crushed to death, or drowned in the Thames River below. The fire spread, and most of the city was destroyed in a disaster far worse than London's 'Great Fire' of 1666 - in which only six lives were lost.

Fighting force
In cities today, dedicated fire-fighters can control even the most serious blaze. But it was only in the 19th century that the first full-time fire brigades were established. By then, many of the world's cities, including New York, Rome and Moscow, had been largely detroyed by fire at least once.

DISASTER - FaMINE Part A

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DISASTERS

Perilous Crossing
           Driven from the land, 1.2 million Irish people emigrated in 1847-52, most of them to the United States. The long voyge in crowded, unsanitary ships was a dangerous one - among every 100 passengers, 16 would die at sea.

Help from above
       Today, famine continues to stalk many countries, especially in Africa, where food shortages due to crop failure can turn into disaster because of warfare or corruption. Then, international agencies must bring in emergency food by every means available.

Uncharitable response
       Ireland, then a province of the United Kingdom, was largely owned by English landlords, some of whom reacted to famine by turning tenants off their land when they could not pay the rent. People who refused to leave were evicted by the army, who often burned their homes to ensure they would not return. The British Government did provide some aid to Ireland - but it was too little, too late.

DISASTER - FaMINE

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DISASTERS

Disasters Famine

It was a national tragedy. By the 1840s, half the people of Ireland depended on just one food - the potato. It gave them most of the nutrients they needed, and many had stopped planting any other cop. Then, without warning, a new disease infected the potato plants, wiping out the harvest for years, In the famine that followed, a million Irish people died of starvation and sickness.

Blighted land

In the three generations from 1785 to 1845, the Irish population had grown by three times, rising from 208 to 8.3 million. When the blight struck, million died or emigrated, and the population plummeted. Even after the famine ended, poverty forced people to leave. Today, Ireland is home to only four million people.

Grim harvest

Potato blight turned the crop into a black, evil-smelling slime. the disease, like the potato itself, came from America, reaching Ireland in the summer of 1845. It spread rapidly, until Ireland's reliance on this single 'miracle' crop-one man could plant enough plants to feed 40 people for a year - became a disaster.

DISASTERS - Floods

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DISASTERS

The gift of the river
Over thousands of years, rivers like the Yangtze in China have created fertile farmland, leaving layers of rich silt behind as they flood and then retreat. to protect their fields from severe flooding, farmers build giant dykes of earth. these are reinforced by long nets woven from local crops and filled with stones.

In the breach
Dykes have guarded China's farmland for centuries, and are often big enough to take roads along their tops. But sudden rises in water levels can still cause disaster. after months of rain in 1998, the Yangtze burst through. more than 700,000 rescuers, including thousands of soldiers, struggled to save the dykes - but over a million people lost their homes.

From feast to famine
Living in a flood zone is a balancing act. The fertile land enables farmers to reap two or three harvests a year. But in disasters such as the Bangladesh floods of 1998, families face cruel hardships when rivers overflow. Their homes and fields are flooded, drowning the crops and leaving them buried under a new layer of mud. Than they are faced with months of food and medical shortages before the waters finally subside.

DISASTERS - FLOODS

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DISASTERS

Living on the edge
More than half the people on Earth live in places where floods are a constant danger. It's not as crazy as it sounds, because land regularly flooded by revers is particularly fertile for farming. But the price can be terrible. The flood-plains of the Ganges River in Bangladesh and the Yangtze River in China are two of the world's most heavily populated areas. In 1998, over two-thirds of Bangladesh was submerged and 10 million people were made homeless. Calamity came too in China where the Yangtze stranded millions more.

A nation under water
Bangladesh's population has grown from 80 million to about 140 million since independence in 1971. Most people live in the flood-plains and deltras of tha Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, where fertile soil means good harvests, but floods regularly cover half the entire country.

DISASTERS - LOCUST Part A

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DISASTERS

Disasters Halfway around the world
In 1988, North Africa enjoyed exceptionally good crops of vital cereals such as maize. But the wet weather was also ideal for locusts. Swarms were blown by prevailing winds right across the continent. some even spread across the Atlantic and to India.

Alone in the desert
In the dry conditions usual in Africa, locusts are solitary creatures. They live like ordinary grasshoppers and are a dull, sandy clolour, which camouflages them from predators in the desert.

On the March
       If rain comes, locusts feast on the fresh greenery and breed rapidly. The young become brightly coloured to identify each other as they crowd together, hopping many kilometres to feed.

Ready for take-ff
     If the weather stays wet and food remains plenfiful, the hoppers mature into their adult, winged form. They continue breeding, and soon the first large swarms fly off to hunt for food.

Biting back
       for thousands of years, locusts have provided a plentiful source of food for birds, animals - and humans. These people in Morocco have collected a large harvest, ready to be fried and eaten like prawns. Delicious!

A perpetual menace
        Modern pesticides have done little to reduce the locust threat. The 1988 swarms, the most devastating for 30 years, spread across half of Africa, even though the United Nations spent $240 million of spraying. The best control method is to treat locusts while they are immature 'hoppers' foraging in great numbers on the ground. On the wing, swarms can be attacked only from aircraft, which spray the insects from above.

DISASTERs - Locust

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DISASTERS

DISASTERS LOCUST

The swarm is vast. It blocks out the Sun. As many as 50 billion ravenously hungry insects are on the move, As the sinister black cloud, 50 km long, passes over green fields, it suddenly wheels and descends with the deafening beat of countless wings. Minutes later, thousand of tonnes of crops have been devoured. All across Africa, in the summer of 1988, people faced famine because of an old enemy- the locust plague.

Danger in numbers
The African migratory locust is only 5 cm long. but in its adult, winged state it can fly up to 5,000 km between breeding cycles. Each time the swarm feeds,females lay hundreds of eggs, swelling the numbers of locusts by 100 times or more.

1. the wet winter of 1987-88 in Mali and Mauritania was ideal for locust breeding.

2. Early in 1988, the warms moved north to devastate crops in Morocco and Algeria.

3. By june, the swarm had eaten 1m tonnes of crops in Chad, Niger and Sudan.

4. Swarms then spread southeast to Ethiopia, reaching Saudi Arabia in autumn 1988.

5. In October, a swarm was blown 5,000 km across the Atlantic, a record flight of 5 days.

6. In 1989, a swarm of locusts reached India, almost 10,000 km from the first breeding area.

DISASTERS - PANDEMIC Part A

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DISASTERS

Disasters Worsened by war
                    The virus struck towards the end of World War I (1914-18),killing twice as many people as the war itself. It was first called 'Spanish flu,' although it probably started in China. It reached Europe from the USA, carried by american servicemen aboard crowded troopships. In the filthy, wet trenches of the war zones, it spread like wildfire, mostly attacking young adults and causing death from lung infection, often within hours.

Hopeless cases
     Emergency hospitals were set up to isolate patients in the hope of limiting the flu's spread. But there was no effective treatment, and victims who developed pneumonia as a complication were likely to die, literally drowning from the fluid filling their lungs. The antibiotics used today to combat pneumonia were not discovered until 1933. The spread of the virus could not be controlled either - ships carried it to every part of the globe, and by early 1919, nearly half the world's 1.8billionpeople had been infected.

A plague's progress
The black Death of 1347-52 spread to Europe from the East. Carried by rats and transmitted to humans by fleas, the plague killed around 25 million people, reducing the population of some countries by a third.

Grim reaper
   The black Death was a horrific bacterial disease that brought almost certain death. It's name came from the black, blood filled swellings seen beneath victims' skin. so many people died that carts piled with corpses were a common sight in towns and villages. Many medieval people saw the plague as a punishment from God. Paintings of the time depict Death as a skeleton riding a cart over the bodies of victims, rich and poor alike.

DISASTERS - PANDEMIC

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DISASTERS

DISASTER PANDEMIC
"The deadliest killer in human history" is how scientists now describe the influenza virus of 1918. In sex months it killed 20 and 40 million people in a pandemic - a global epidemic - and then vanished. Unlike bubonic plague (the Black Death) which can now be controlled by modern medicine, flu has no known cure.If a similar virus broke out again, it could be the greatest disaster ever to strike humankind.

Flimsy Protection
In 1918, people did not know how the deadly flu spread. Millions wore masks in the hope of avoiding infection when out in public places, but the gauze offered no real protection against the microscopic virus.

DISASTER - BUSHFIRE Part A

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DISASTER

Bushfir Street in Flames

As Australia's fast-growing cities expand further into the surrounding countryside, the danger from bushfires increases. The 1997 blaze burnt out most of this street in the Sydney suburb of Menai,

Fighting fire with fire

firebreaks hilp to stop the spread of a blaze in woodland. All the trees are felled and buildozers clear the wood to the side of the break nearest the approaching flames. This material is then set alight to widen the firebreak.

Bombing the blazes

Bush and forest fires can be fought from the air. Highly skilled pilots skim the aircraft over open water scooping tonnes of it up into special tanks in the fuselage. The load is then released, like a bomb, on the fire below.

DISASTER - BUSHFIRE

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DISASTERS

Bushfire
On 2 December 1997, Australia's greatest city faced catastrophe. Fires raging in bushland on three sides of Sydney suddenly swept into the suburbs. Before firefighters could gain control, dozens of houses were destroyed. The flames, whipped up by high winds, lit the night sky over the city as 5,000 emergency workers battled hundreds of separate fires. Only their courage, and a quick weather change, prevented an even worse disaster.

Spreads like wildfire
In Australia's tinder-dry bush, fires are easily started - by lightning, arson, or even from the sun's rays magnified through the glass of a carelessly discarded bottle. Blazes spread at speeds of up to 2 km a minute. The fires around Sydney reached to within 20 km of the centre, leaving the city darkened by a pall of choking smoke and fumes. Many homes were evacuated until the danger was past.

TSUNAMI - TWISTER

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DISASTERS

Tsunami TWISTER
It emerged from thunderclouds over the state of Missouri, USA, at 1 pm on 18 March 1925. Over the next three hours, the longest-lasting and most destuctive tornado in history ploughed through ten towns. At times over 1 km wide and moving faster than a speeding car, the twister smashed thousands of homes and killed 689 people.

Brewing up a storm
Tornadoes are violent thunderstorms, caused when warm, wet air is drawn up from the ground and meets colder air moving down. The opposing draughts combine in a corkscrew motion, sending a violently spinning funnel of air plunging down to the ground.

Merciless Killer
The most powerful twisters smash and grab everything in their way. Buildings, vehicles and even the ground itself are sucked up into their vortices. The bodies of people caught up in the 1925 storm were hurled 1.5 km from its path.

Torn apart
Buildings in the path of a tornado often look as if they have exploded. Twisters tear at solid structures like a pair of giant hands wrenching savagely in opposite directions.

TSUNAMI - ICE STORM Part A

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DISASTERS

Thick Coat
Water falling as freezing rain turns to ice on impact. It can quickly build up to thicknesses of 10cm, damaging property and killing farm livestock in minutes. Insured losses in Canada's freeze came to massive $1.2 billion.

Deadly hazards of ice
Only a few people were found frozen to death during the storm, but man more died from carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to keep warm with poorly ventilated home-made heaters made from barbecues. More were later reported killed by falling icicles during the thaw.

Toppled by the weight
Layers of ice enlarge electricity cables to three times their usual width, dragging down the steel pylons supporting them. At Drummondsville, south of Montreal, a series of eight giant pylons collapsed, blacking out 482,000 homes in the city. The ice storm raged for six days, but million left freezing in unlit houses at temperatures as low as minus 270C.

TSUNAMI - ICE STORM

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DISASTERS

Ice Storm

Canada is accustomed to the cold, but the storm of January 1998 caused a national emergency. Freezing rain clamped provinces such as Quebec and Ontario under a mantle of ice. Heat and lighting were cut off and the country's economy shut down,as millions were stranded in their freezing homes. Over 11,000 troops were mobilized to help restore power - the biggest military call-up in Canada's peacetime history.

Frozen solid
freezing rain is different from hail or snow. Each drop is a water-filled ice bomb, exploding on contact with a cold surface and freezing instantly into a hard, clear glaze of ice.

TSUNAMI

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DISASTERS

The drowning of an empire

The tsunami that struck the Mediterranean island of Crete around 150BC was one of the greatest natural disasters in history. The colossal 60-metre-high waves swept across the entire island, drowning the Minoan civilization - the oldest and richest in Europe. The destruction of this kingdom is the likely basis for the legend of the Lost of Atlantis.

Waves of destruction
The world 'tsunami' comes from japan, where 'harbour waves' are a constant danger. the 10-metre-high giants that crashedinto Okushiri Island on 13 july '1993, caused widespread devastation, killing more than 200 people.

Ocean racers
1. Undersea earthquakes and eruptions cause massive falls and rises in the ocean floor, convulsing the sea into great wave movements.

2. the waves, 1,000 km or more wide, cause the entire sea level to rise. In open sea, they travel faster than a bullet speeding from a gun.

3. Near land, friction with the rising seabed slows the tsunami. The sea is sucked from the shore into the wave, making it rear up a it hits.

TSUNAMI

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DISASTERS

Tsunami Mediterranean island
Imagine looking out to sea from a sunny beach. Something is wrong. The tide is going out - and not coming back. All the way to the horizon, the sea floor is revealed. Fish flop helplessly, boats are stranded. and now comes the great wave. With a thunderous, deafening roar, it rears u like a moving mountain, crashing ashore with unimaginable force.

Coast to coast
An eruption on Santorini, 130 km to the north, caused the tsunami. Crete stood directly in the way of the huge waves that deluged coasts across the Mediterranean.

TOKYO EARTHQUAKE PART A

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DISASTERS

Danger below
Tokyo stands near a fault line, one of the meeting-points of the moving continent-sized plates that form the Earth's crust. as the plates grind together, they release shock waves that are felt on the surface as violent tremors.

An ever-present risk
Even with the latest construction methods, cities still frace destruction today. The devastating 1995 earthquake at Kobe, 400 km southwest of Tokyo, caused US$ 10 billion in damage, killed 5,391 people and left another 310,000 homeless

TOKYO EARTHQUAKE

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DISASTERS

TOKYO EARTHQUAKE
Before 1 September 1923, Japan's capital was home to 2.5 million people. Then it was struck by one of the most devastating earthquakes in history. The main shock came at midday, when families were cooking lunch. Charcoal burners were overturned, starting fires which spread rapidly among the close-packed timber houses, Half the city burned, and 142,000 people died. A million more, made homeless, moved away,. Once the world's fifth lartest city, Tokyo became the tenth.

Suddcen Collapse
   Measurring 8.2 on the Richter Scale, the quake's epicentre was in Sagami Bay,where the seabed dropped by 400 metres. Near Tokyo, the thriving seaport of Yokohama was also almost completely destroyed.

A million homeless
   More than 500,000 of Tokyo's flimsy wooden homes collapsed or burned in the raging fires. Earth tremors, which continued for days, broke up the underground water pipes, making fire-fighting impossible, people slept out of doors, afraid of being trapped under falling roofs. One eye-witness described the scene: "All day and all night, men, women and children walk the camps and parks searching for lost relatives. "

KRAKATAO - ERUPTION

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DISASTERS

Darkness at noon

Ashfrom big erruptions forms dense clouds and can block out the sun. This photograph was takenen after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 -- at midday.

Pressure Cooker

The first explosions in Krakatau's magma chamber to the sea. Water rushed in through fissures. and reacted with molten rock to cause a huge build-up of steam-pressure. The resulting blast blew the mountain cone to pieces, hurling out red-hot rocks the size of houses.

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