The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: rescue
Japan Volcano Rescue Suspended As Death Toll Rises To 36

Japan Volcano Rescue Suspended As Death Toll Rises To 36

Tokyo (AFP) — Five more bodies were found near the peak of an erupting Japanese volcano on Monday, as rescuers suspended their search because of the growing danger from toxic gas.

The grim discovery takes to at least 36 the total number of people feared to have died when Mount Ontake erupted without warning during a busy hiking weekend.

A police spokesman told AFP the five bodies were in addition to 31 discovered Sunday.

Hundreds of firefighters, police and troops had spent much of Monday around the peak, with helicopters flying overhead, despite the gases and steam billowing from the ruptured crater of the 3,067-meter (10,121-foot) volcano.

A Japanese army official who took part in the search said rescuers had been wearing helmets, bullet-proof vests, goggles, and masks to protect themselves from any fresh eruption.

“I saw rocks up to probably one meter (3.3 feet) across (that had been thrown through the air by the force of the eruption),” he said, adding the search had been difficult and involved digging through ash.

Heartbreaking stories have begun to emerge from survivors who made it down the mountain as rolling clouds of volcanic debris swept down its flanks, smothering everything in their path.

“Some people were buried in ash up to their knees and the two in front of me seemed to be dead,” one woman told the Asahi television network.

Another told how she had heard the last moments of a victim battered by a cascade of rocks.

“There was someone lying outside the hut after being hit in the back,” she said. “He was saying ‘It hurts, it hurts,’ but after about half an hour he went quiet.”

Seiichi Sakurai, who had been working at one of the huts around the top of the volcano, told public broadcaster NHK that he had tried his best to help people but could not save them all.

“Ash was constantly falling… Some people were buried alive but I could do nothing but tell (rescuers) about them over the radio,” he said.

Another survivor told the Yomiuri newspaper he had seen a boy shouting “It’s hot” and “I can’t breathe!” near the peak, before the ash clouds brought blackness and silence.

– ‘It’s over. I’m dying now’ –

On Monday morning, eight bodies — both men and women — were airlifted from the mountain.

About 60 people suffered injuries in the disaster, the government has said, including people who were hit by flying rocks and inhaled hot or poisonous fumes.

For anguished families, the wait for news was taking its toll.

A tearful father sobbed as he clutched a photograph of his son and the young man’s girlfriend, who had not been heard from since the eruption.

An elderly woman told the Asahi network that her son had telephoned her just after gas, rocks, and ash began spewing from the volcano.

“He told me it erupted… He said ‘It’s over. I’m dying now’ and then the line was cut off,” the woman said.

The meteorological agency forecast further eruptions, warning that volcanic debris may settle as far as four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the peak.

Japan’s meteorological agency keeps a round-the-clock watch on 47 volcanoes thought to be at risk of violent activity over the next century, including Mount Fuji, whose eruption could have catastrophic effects.

But Toshitsugu Fujii, a volcanologist at the agency, admitted accurate forecasting was very difficult.

Steam explosions such as those on Ontake often occur without warning, he said.

“People may say we failed to predict this (because there were earthquakes in September) but this is something that could not be helped, in a sense. That’s the reality of the limit of our knowledge,” he said Sunday.

AFP Photo

Interested in more world news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

IMF Throws Lifeline To Ukraine As Russia Masses Troops

IMF Throws Lifeline To Ukraine As Russia Masses Troops

By Dmitry Zaks

Kiev (AFP) – The International Monetary Fund announced on Thursday a $14-$18 billion bailout for Ukraine that requires the crisis-hit country to pursue painful and unpopular reforms to avert bankruptcy amid its escalating standoff with Russia.

The vital pledge of Western support for the untested leaders who last month toppled a pro-Kremlin regime came amid growing worries about a rapid Russian buildup at Ukraine’s eastern border that one Kiev official said has now reached 100,000 troops.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday she hoped the threat of further sanctions would be enough to keep Russia’s expansionist ambitions in check following its annexation of Crimea — an incursion that has left the Kremlin more isolated from the West than any stage since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

Washington and its EU allies now hope that the rescue package and diplomatic offensive against Russia should keep Ukraine on a stable enough footing to conduct snap presidential polls on May 25 that could help unite the culturally splintered country behind one democratically elected leader.

The political season formally opened in Kiev with the announcement by the divisive opposition icon Yulia Tymoshenko that she intended to contest the race to see who will replace the ousted pro-Russian president whose regime sent her to jail.

But polls suggest that the 53-year-old former premier will have a tough time beating Petro Poroshenko — a billionaire also known as the “chocolate baron” who stood at the barricades during three months of deadly Kiev protests against Viktor Yanukovych’s rule.

Kiev’s International Monetary Fund agreement — worth the equivalent of 10.8-13.1 billion euros — imposes tough economic conditions that will alter the lives Ukrainians who have grown accustomed to the comforts of Soviet-era subsidies and welfare benefits.

But it also appears to herald a fundamental shift from a reliance in Kiev on Russian help to save a crumbling system to a commitment to the types of free-market efficiencies that could one day bring Ukraine far closer to the West.

“This significant support will help stabilize the economy and meet the needs of Ukrainian people over the long term because it provides the prospect for true growth,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in Rome.

The Fund’s rescue will form the heart of a broader package released by other governments and agencies amounting to $27 billion (19.6 billion euros) over the next two years.

The IMF has made an immediate end to Ukraine’s costly gas subsidies its main condition for the program’s approval.

It also wants the central bank to stop propping up the Ukrainian currency and for the government to cut down on corruption and red tape.

The Fund’s Ukrainian mission chief Nikolai Georgiyev called these steps “the foundation for stable and sustainable growth.”

The agreement was unveiled one day after Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz said it would increase domestic heating gas prices by 50 percent on May 1.

Ukraine’s central bank has already limited its currency interventions — a decision that has resulted in the hryvnia losing about a third of its value against the dollar since the start of the year.

The Fund’s package became essential for Ukraine once Russia froze payments on a $15 billion (10.9 billion euro) loan it awarded Yanukovych for his decision to ditch an historic EU trade and political relations pact.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has now made sure that Ukraine will be getting even more money from the West after earlier signing the political portion of the EU deal ditched by Yanukovych — moves that are likely to further unsettle the Kremlin.

One of Yatsenyuk’s main outstanding worries is that higher gas prices and limited state subsidies will most dramatically impact the big steel mills and other heavy industries that dot the heavily Russified southeast of the vast nation of 46 million people.

Big eastern cities such as Donetsk and Kharkiv have recently witnessed bloody protests against the pro-European authorities in Kiev that rely on political backing from the ethnic Ukrainian west.

“Many of these reforms will be unpopular or will run into opposition from vested interests,” the London-based Capital Economics consultancy warned.

The United States has betrayed growing unease about the steadily growing presence of Russian soldiers at Ukraine’s eastern border — a buildup that is putting psychological pressure on the interim government and leaving Western leaders guessing about the Kremlin’s next move.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel noted on Wednesday that “they continue to build up their forces” despite Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s assurance that no broader invasion of Ukraine was planned.

Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council chief Andriy Parubiy on Thursday put the figure of Russian soldiers around Ukraine at “almost 100,000”.

“Russian troops are not in Crimea only, they are along all Ukrainian borders. They’re in the south, they’re in the east and in the north,” Parubiy said.

There was no initial response to Parubiy’s comments from Russia.

©afp.com/Sergei Supinsky

Washington State Mudslide Rescuers Share Their Stories

Washington State Mudslide Rescuers Share Their Stories

By Maria La Ganga and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

DARRINGTON, Wash. — The stories rang with fear and frustration, pain and the occasional flicker of joy. But the storytellers Wednesday were not the survivors of the deadly mudslide that slammed into the Stillaguamish Valley.

For the first time since a mountain of mud buried a small rural enclave called Oso and largely cut Darrington off from the rest of the world, a small number of rescuers spoke at length of their long hours on “the pile,” of plucking the living from a square mile of mud and debris, of tagging the dead bodies of neighbors.

They described clawing their way through the slurry with gloved hands, discovering the remains of a nursery, the crib in splinters. Crying, “maybe 100, 200 times” a day since Saturday, when a few seconds of geological violence shattered this placid region.

Sixteen bodies have been recovered from the slide and an additional eight remain stuck in the mire, officials said at a Wednesday evening briefing in Arlington. About 90 people are believed to be missing, and 35 others possibly unaccounted for. That is down from an estimated 176 Monday night.

At a late-night community meeting in Darrington, however, a spokesman for the Northwest Incident Management Team, Brian McMahan, said one more body had been found in the late afternoon.

What drives the volunteer firefighters in this logging town of about 1,300 is what Jeff McClelland called “rescue mode,” even “a slight possibility of somebody being alive, in an air pocket or wherever. It may sound totally crazy to people, but if we could find one viable person.”

McClelland and his wife, Jan, spend most of their time running a goat farm just outside Darrington, and it’s birthing season, hopeful and busy. But they also are firefighters and emergency medical technicians. They arrived at the disaster site just minutes after the slide. They were looking for life. And they still are.

“There’s a dog that came out Sunday afternoon, a chocolate Lab,” rescued from the mud, McClelland told reporters in Darrington. “It was wonderful because it was a life. A life. Something living. If a dog could live, a human could live. That’s what drives us. We don’t give up hope. We don’t get despair.”

The McClellands and their firefighting colleague, Eric Finzimer, said that they were not trained for this kind of duty. But then, who could be? they asked. They rescue drowning people from rivers, hypothermia victims from mountains, screaming people from burning buildings.

“We’re prepared for any emergency,” McClelland said, “but things that we have not experienced before, we don’t know what to do. It would be like being called to go to a nuclear blast.”

“How would we be trained to deal with that?” he asked on his first day off after working the disaster site since Saturday morning. “These types of disasters tax us to our limits.”

Shortly after arriving at the scene, the McClellands and other first responders donned swift-water gear and tied themselves to trees. The meadow they were searching was awash in mud, water and debris from houses that Jan McClelland said had been “pancaked and pushed around.”

They were trying to reach an injured man in his 30s whom they could hear but could not see. He was about 100 feet away. Jeff McClelland kept sinking. When they finally spotted the man, they shouted out, asking how badly he was injured.

“And he said, ‘My arm is just barely hanging on,’ ” Jan McClelland recounted. “We knew it was something where we had to get to him as quickly as we could. So we just kept pushing through.”

When they finally stabilized the injured survivor, they looked around for a way to get him out. There was none. So they called for a helicopter.

“We took him out by helo,” Jan McClelland said before tears welled up. “And I understand he was upgraded to serious from critical a day ago or whatever and that he’s going to be all right. That is the biggest blessing to me.”

Randy Fay, one of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office helicopter crew chiefs, recounted plucking mudslide victims from a mix of “mushy slurry” and debris scattered like massive pickup sticks.

Helicopters darted around trees, he told reporters in Arlington, which is separated from Darrington by the massive slide. They hovered low to the ground, searching for anyone waving or moving.

At one point, Fay said, he spotted two women waving for help atop a house that had been pushed off its foundation and plopped into freezing water. They were coated in mud. One had freed herself from beneath a toppled tree.

When he landed on the roof, they stared at him in shock.

Robin Youngblood, 63, pleaded with Fay to save one of the few belongings she had salvaged from the muck: a Native American portrait, a nod to her heritage that she called “Night Warrior.”

After strapping Youngblood and her friend into rescue suits and hoisting them into the helicopter, Fay followed — with the painting.

He dropped off the women and returned to the slide, where he soon spotted more movement: a 4-year-old boy, alone and stranded after mud had enveloped his house.

Two men had been trying to rescue the child, dropping pieces of wood to form a walkway. But one of them had started sinking into the muck.

Fay managed to rescue the foundering rescuer, then grabbed the boy, shivering in a T-shirt and underwear.

Once on the ground, Fay carried the frightened child to an ambulance, where Youngblood was recovering. She didn’t know the boy, but she opened her arms.

“I’m a grandma,” she said. Fay, 61 and a grandparent too, let the boy go to her. Youngblood rocked him and sang.

Four days later, Youngblood sought out her rescuer after Wednesday’s briefing in Arlington. They hugged, and Fay asked about the boy’s family.

He has been reunited with his mother, Youngblood said.

But his father and three siblings are missing.

Marcus Yam/Seattle Times/MCT