By Dahr Jamil 02 Mar 2011 San Salvador – “We have a very clear position,” El Salvador’s Minister of Environment, Herman Chavez, told Al Jazeera at his office in San Salvador, the capital. “The President of El Salvador, last year on July 20th, in an extraordinary meeting of presidents that was convened here in San […]
Caption by Michon Scott12 April 2011 Monsoon rains fall on Pakistan every summer, but the summer of 2010 was extraordinary. A combination of factors, including La Niña and a strange jet stream pattern, caused devastating floods. The Indus River rapidly rose, and a dam failure in Sindh Province sent part of the river down an […]
Caption by Holli Riebeek6 April 2011 Intense rain triggered widespread landslides in southern Thailand during the last week of March 2011. This photo-like image shows some of the slides in the forested hills of the Krabi province on the western side of the Malay Peninsula. The freshly exposed brown earth and swollen muddy rivers stand […]
JOHANNESBURG, 1 April 2011 (IRIN) – Namibia has declared a state of emergency in response to widescale flooding in the north that has claimed 62 lives since January 2011. “The most severe flooding is occurring in the regions of Oshana, Ohangwena, Omusati and Oshikoto, which form the Cuvelai Basin,” said a situation report by the […]
By Stephanie Pappas25 March 2011 According to just over half of Americans, God is in control of everything that happens on Earth. But slightly fewer are willing to blame an omnipotent power for natural disasters such as Japan’s earthquake and tsunami. A new poll finds that 56 percent of Americans agree or mostly agree that […]
An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters. Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People […]
By Helvy Shaanika 25 March 2011 OSHAKATI – “The 2011 floods situation can probably take us back 1,000 years because no one is able to measure up or compare the effect,” said the Mayor of Oshakati, Ben Kuutumbeni Kathindi. Kathindi was referring to the flood situation, which many have described as the worst of its […]
By Mujeeb Ur Rehman, VOA NewsMarch 23, 2011Washington, D.C. – In Pakistan, rebuilding efforts are still underway from last year’s devastating floods that submerged one-fifth of the country and displaced some 20 million people. Mujeeb Ur Rehman, reporter for VOA’s Pashto-language Deewa radio service, recently traveled to northwest Pakistan to check on the status of […]
By Thin Lei Win; editing by Katie Nguyen24 Mar 2011 BANGKOK (AlertNet) – Pakistan’s reconstruction following the worst floods in recorded history will take a minimum of three to five years, the head of the country’s disaster management body said, adding that more money should have been poured into maintaining dikes and dams. Massive flooding […]
Caption by Michon Scott and Mike Carlowicz20 March 2011 A swath of agricultural fields lies between the Japanese city of Sendai and Sendai Bay, and the area was one of the hardest hit by the tsunami on March 11, 2011. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image […]
