Bharat Rakshak

svinayak wrote:http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/04 ... 2015-04-27

Shreeman wrote:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/a ... ort-supply
Nepal's PM says earthquake death toll could reach 10,000

amitkv wrote:

Shreeman wrote:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/a ... ort-supply
Nepal's PM says earthquake death toll could reach 10,000

Anyone who's been to Kathmandu or other cities in nepal knows that it would be far worse than that.
10K can easily be in Kathmandu itself.

The next day, they are expecting a shipment of 70,000 theplas, a flatbread from the Indian state of Gujarat that has a long shelf life because of the way it's made.
Sonal Shah, a work-at-home mom in Mumbai, tells me by phone that the initiative was started by two women who saw a viral message about the need for food in Nepal. She said women all over Mumbai are taking a half hour out of their day to make theplas, which contain spices and fenugreek.

"We Gujaratis carry this bread with us whenever we travel," she says. "We were overwhelmed by the response we got."
Jasra says he's never had to transport theplas before, let alone 70,000 of them. But he intends to make sure they get on a plane.

Spice Jet's Chief Operating Officer, Sanjiv Kapoor, is pacing the gate with the general manager of corporate affairs, Ajay Jasra. They are both trying to figure out how to get donations and supplies to Kathmandu.
Kapoor tells me he has to be careful; that he learned valuable lessons in last year's flooding in India's Jammu and Kashmir state. There are many people who want to send in boxes of relief materials as cargo, but then there is no one to distribute them on the other side.

Kapoor has ordered his staff not to charge for excess baggage for people carrying supplies with them. People such as Dr. Anita David.

David works with Joyce Meyer Ministries in Hyderabad, in southern India. She's flying in first aid supplies, and she headed to Delhi not knowing how she would get her staff to Nepal. But she was grateful to Spice Jet.

Nearby David are a group of three turbaned men and a woman belonging to the nonprofit United Sikhs. One, Aman Jot Singh, wears a T-shirt with all sorts of messages, including "selfless service," "civil rights" and "ending prejudice."

Bade wrote:http://www.journals.elsevier.com/intern ... -reduction

If there are journals, there are conferences too as well as faculty positions specializing in it.

UlanBatori wrote:It appears that every year there is at least one event requiring mass evacuation (10,000 to 1 million people). Wonder if Indian disaster management ppl are able to develop preparations to handle this on a regular basis. The response has become dramatically better over the past 20 years (Odisha cyclone for instance where there were only like 20 dead this time, but also Kedarnath and now this). Himalayas pose even greater challenges because of the high altitude and access issues. Are there conferences addressing these as a regular field, I wonder.
Just try listing from 2004 (tsunami) onwards and it is mind-boggling.

arun wrote:I guess the twits in Nepal’s Annapurna Post who are the quoted source for the article in Telegraph Nepal, expect Indian Aircraft to fly back empty to India after delivering disaster relief cargo to Nepal .

Meanwhile report of “The Nepali officials are not at all happy with the Indian relief activities” as “Indian media” has “been portraying Nepal negatively and been projecting Nepal as being inefficient to carryout relief works on its own” is to say the least ungracious of Nepal’s bureaucracy :

Nepal: India disaster politics exposed!

In another report in the same Nepal Telegraph quoting the same Annapurna post, the Peoples Republic of China is reportedly upset with India’s aid effort in Nepal:


Disaster Politics: China asks Nepal to limit Indian activities

“There are two major problems. The IAF doesn’t share its sortie schedule with the Nepalese army and takes hell of a time on the ground in an already congested airport,” Brigadier General PS Bogati, a Nepalese one-star officer who is the deputy chief of the airport coordinating centre here, told HT on Tuesday.

New Delhi, April 29: A network of 293 ground motion sensors located across northern, eastern and northeastern India lay crippled during Nepal's 7.9 magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks...

No one knows how many of the 293 sensors designed to measure ground acceleration during earthquakes were actually recording data during the weekend earthquakes because funding for maintenance of the instruments was stopped in September 2014.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, had established the network between 2005 and 2008, installing the sensors in district headquarters across northern and eastern states, including Bengal and Bihar, under a project funded by the Union science and technology ministry.

But the earth sciences ministry stopped funding the project in September last year, and informed IIT Roorkee in February this year to prepare to hand over the sensors to the National Centre for Seismology (NCS), an institution under the ministry.

"During this government takeover, someone perhaps forgot that the sensors need maintenance," said Ram Iyengar, an earthquake engineering specialist formerly with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, who has earlier used similar ground motion data to prepare earthquake hazard maps.
"Academic users have been waiting to receive ground motion data during a big quake," Iyengar told The Telegraph.
The ground motion readings are critical to understanding how an earthquake might affect buildings and other structures in distant cities, whether Calcutta, Delhi or Patna. Such studies are important in planning engineering strategies to reduce the risk of damage from the ground motion.
While the NCS was supposed to take over control and maintenance of the sensors, email exchanges between researchers shared with this newspaper suggest that the NCS did not actually seek access to any of the instruments - whose batteries need to be periodically replaced - until Saturday's earthquakes in Nepal.
In March this year, a faculty member at IIT Roorkee, who was the principal investigator in charge of the ground motion network, wrote to the ministry, cautioning that the network has not been maintained for the past six months and several instruments may not be operational.
"Our country will cut a very sorry face if a big earthquake event occurs as in the present stage of the instrumentation, we may not get any strong motion record(s)," Ashok Kumar, professor of earthquake engineering at IIT Roorkee, had written in the email to the ministry on March 26 this year - a month before the weekend earthquakes.

Researchers in academic institutions across India who have been using the network from 2008 until 2014 have flooded IIT Roorkee with requests for data from the instruments since the Saturday earthquake and its aftershocks.

But IIT Roorkee itself has no access to data because when funds dried up, BSNL snapped lines supporting links to the sensors, managers of the network at IIT Roorkee wrote in an email sent on Monday evening to dozens of the network's users in academic institutions.

"It is a tragedy that earthquake engineers and seismologists of our country have been deprived of a golden opportunity of getting a vast set of strong ground motion data," the email said. IIT Roorkee will send a team to the sites of the instruments in Bengal, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh to retrieve whatever data they can.

Senior officials of the earth sciences ministry told this newspaper that it had stopped funding IIT Roorkee's activities on the network because the network had been established as a time-bound research project whose term-of-funding would end in December 2014.

"The NCS is fully equipped to handle the instrumentation... the process of transferring the network starting in February 2015 is yet to be completed," Brijesh Bansal, a senior scientist at the ministry said. "The MOES (the ministry) is sending its team to find out the status... and take charge of the instruments," he said in an email.

The ground acceleration at any site depends not just on the magnitude of an earthquake but also on the intervening rock and the soil conditions at the site. "These measurements are crucial to understanding how the ground will behave in a specific town or a city," Iyengar said.
Structural engineers are expected to use such ground behaviour studies to determine how best to protect buildings, whether through retrofitting existing civil structures or incorporating special earthquake resistant features in new buildings or structures.

Earthquake experts say Saturday's Nepal earthquake did not release all of the pent-up seismic pressure in the region near Kathmandu. According to GPS monitoring and geologic studies, some 33 to 50 feet (10 to 15 meters) of motion may need to be released, said Eric Kirby, a geologist at Oregon State University. The earth jumped by about 10 feet (3 m) during the devastating April 25 quake, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

"The earthquakes in this region can be much, much larger," said Walter Szeliga, a geophysicist at Central Washington University.

Seismologists have extensively studied the possibility of damaging earthquakes in the central Himalayas. Through analyzing written histories, looking for clues from damaged buildings and digging along faults, researchers know of several damaging earthquakes in the past, but not their precise size. [See Photos of This Millennium's Destructive Earthquakes]

Nepal was overdue for a major earthquake, said Marin Clark, a geophysicist at the University of Michigan. "It has been a long time since the last big rupture, so this is not unexpected," Clark said.
One of the region's most devastating recent quakes occurred in 1934, when a magnitude-8.2 earthquake killed over 8,500 people in Kathmandu. Before then, the last time such an immense quake struck Kathmandu was on July 7, 1255. That quake killed about 30 percent of the population. The region west of Kathmandu has been seismically quiet since June 6, 1505, when a great earthquake toppled buildings from Tibet to India.

Crash zone

Nepal is one of the world's most earthquake-prone regions because it lies at the head-on collision between two tectonic plates. India is slamming into Asia, and neither wants to give. Both India and Asia are continental crust, of the same average density. So instead of one plate sinking beneath the other, such as is happening at the ocean-continent plate collision offshore South America, the Earth's crust crumples. Slices of India peel off and slowly squeeze under Asia, while Asia is mashed upward, forming the Himalayas.

India and Asia collide at about eight-tenths of an inch (2 centimeters) per year. Most of that energy is loaded onto earthquake faults as elastic strain because the faults are stuck together. Loading a fault is like squeezing a spring; an earthquake releases the built-up energy similar to an uncoiling spring.

Scientists think earthquakes that are magnitude 7.8 in size can't release all of the strain between India and Asia. Instead, history suggests most of the stored energy gets uncorked as earthquakes that are magnitude 8 or greater, according to geologic studies. It would take scores of magnitude-7 quakes to accommodate all of the plate motion, but only a handful of midsize, magnitude-8 quakes, or one magnitude 9. (The energy released by a quake increases by a factor of 30 with each additional point in magnitude.) [Video: What Does Earthquake 'Magnitude' Mean?]

"It seems likely that the amount of slip in this earthquake probably didn't make up for the complete deficit," Kirby said.
Earthquakes Play video
Earthquakes

The April 25 earthquake struck on one of the many thrust faults that mark the boundary between the two plates. Thrust faults are the most terrifying of all faults because they lie at an angle. This shallow angle means a massive part of the Earth's crust can lurch during an earthquake. Steeper faults quickly grow too warm and soft to break; as rocks get deeper, they flow like putty, Szeliga said. During the Nepal temblor, a piece of crust roughly 75 miles (120 kilometers) long and 37 miles (60 km) wide jogged 10 feet (3 m) to the south. The fault angled only 10 degrees from the surface, and the quake was only 9 miles (14 km) deep.

"This one was relatively shallow, which intensifies the surface shaking," Clark said.

From seismic readings, many scientists suspect the fault did not break all the way to the surface, like the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles. That's another indication that the earthquake did not unleash all of the stored strain in the region, Kirby said. The seismic instruments can detect where the strongest motion occurred on the fault.

However, even without a surface trace, GPS instruments and InSAR (radar from satellites) will provide precise tracking of how the ground shifted during the earthquake, Szeliga said. The data will help ground-truth scientist's models of Himalayan tectonics.

"Now's the chance to see who made predictions that were even remotely testable, and if they stand up," Szeliga said.

GAURAV C SAWANT ‏@gauravcsawant 1h1 hour ago

People in Nepal refuse to touch food aid sent from Pakistan which includes Beef products like Beef masala. Shocking report in #MailToday

At night, from a descending flight, Kathmandu looks as if it has been enveloped by a dark shroud, the result of power cuts that have followed last weekend’s devastating earthquakes. But in one corner of the city, through the blackness, there are lines of bright, shining lights.

The flames reveal the way to the only service now open around the clock in Nepal: the dead from the disaster have been given their funerals, for five days running, on the burning ghats of the Bagmati river.

Bereaved relations, some needing support from friends and family as they weep – some almost trancelike in their shock – wait their turn in the queue to say goodbye to those they have lost.

The dead are brought here so their ashes can be floated on waters which flow into the Ganges, the sacred river of Hinduism. Just how many bodies have become part of this chain of cremation has become a matter of dispute and recriminations. The figure is 600 in Kathmandu, say officials, but many local people dismiss that number as abjectly low, claiming that at least 2,000 have been burned by the Bagmati. The issue has become enmeshed in charges that the authorities are trying to play down the death toll in an attempt to hide their own failure to save lives.

The priests and their helpers at Pashupatinath Temple need temporal knowledge as well as understanding of Hindu scriptures. Precise calculations are needed to keep the line going under such a pressure of numbers. The priests have worked out that it takes four hours to reduce a man’s body to ashes, three for a woman, while the time for a child varies according to age.

The procession will continue. The death toll across the country has now passed 5,200 and will continue to rise as more bodies are dug out, and more of those injured lose the battle against their injuries. The number of unclaimed corpses is also rising: these bodies are kept for 48 hours before being fingerprinted and burned. “Day and night, night and day, that’s how we have been working,” said Raghunath Lal, at the Temple complex, laying out the bundles of cut straw that will be used for the fire. “It should not be like this – there should not be so many following each other so soon.”

For the families of the dead, each parting is tender and special. Laxmi was dressed in a sari of red Benares silk as she lay on the stretcher taking her to the pyre. There was no sign on her calm, pretty face of the pain she suffered at her sad end. “Do you know how old she was? Eighteen. Do you know what it does to a father having to see his daughter lying there dead?” asked Mahesh Gurung, 52, once a proud Gurkha soldier, now a man broken. His brother Mohan gently led him away.

Afterwards, Mohan Gurung talked of sadness and hope, death and rebirth. “Of course it is terrible to see someone you love being taken away – you are angry, you feel it is unfair. That’s how I felt about what happened to my niece,” he said.

“But being here with all these other families makes you realise that you are not alone in your loss. Just a little while ago I saw a father and mother with their dead son. He was a boy, a boy of perhaps six years. What must they feel?”

A woman stands in silence in front of the historic Bal Krishna Thapa Chhetry temple in Kathmandu, which was been damaged by the earthquake A woman stands in silence in front of the historic Bal Krishna Thapa Chhetry temple in Kathmandu, which was been damaged by the earthquake (EPA)
He waved at the large crowd in colourful clothing which had gathered to watch the cremations. “Death is not a private matter here,” he continued over the blare of conch shells being sounded behind him, as langurs, or tree monkeys, scampered among statues that were hundreds of years old.

“But you know, we are Hindus and we find our religion a great strength. Death is not secret in these ceremonies: at the end you have to accept what has happened. And you must release the spirit to come back again, be reincarnated. What has happened has happened. We must consider the spiritual well-being of the dead.”

There were some who were deeply concerned about what happens to those left behind. Chura Shrestha and his wife, Chetana Lukusshan, were at the ghats for the funeral of cousins, Chandra and Vijaya Shrestha, in Kapon, a town near Kathmandu. “They have a young son and a young daughter who were away when this happened. There are hundreds of others like them. We need to start organising a system to deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder and the other problems all this will mean. We need to reunite the families who have been divided by this terrible thing.”

Dr Shrestha, who has a PhD in conflict resolution, and Ms Lukusshan, who is a child psychologist, are starting to organise sessions, making plans to visit areas that are still cut off. His job, he acknowledges, would help to see this task through: he is a police senior superintendent. Bearing in mind his position, it was surprising to hear his views on what had happened, and about the faults in the system that may have contributed to the slow official reaction.

Locals buy vegetables at a street market in front of a damaged temple in Kathmandu Locals buy vegetables at a street market in front of a damaged temple in Kathmandu (EPA)
“We have moved from an autocratic monarchy to a constitutional one, but in the 25 years since 1990 we have had 22 different heads of government. We have instability and we have corruption and nepotism,” he said.

Superintendent Shrestha, who has been in the force for 30 years, was a pioneer of community policing in Nepal, attending courses on the subject at Britain’s police training college at Bramshill, Hampshire. “We have abolished local government,” he said. “If that had not been the case, there would have been help for many people in their own areas after the earthquake – and they wouldn’t have had to make journeys to Kathmandu, some getting killed in the process. Things worked when they were done at community level.”

Shyam Shekhar Jha, director of the Pashupatinath district, which includes the temple complex, was resigned to the apparently endless cremations. “Now we are seeing the dead being brought from villages 20 kilometres away, but soon they will come from greater distances.

“When something like the earthquake happens people naturally turn to religion: they are mourning their dead, but they are also praying to God not to let this happen again.”

Shreeman wrote:Look -- they call it a h-e-l-i-c-o-p-t-e-r. Who could it possibly belong to? We do know the AP reporters name. She deserves the attention, going there to stand around. Give her a medal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq6jkMd ... e=youtu.be

GAURAV C SAWANT ‏@gauravcsawant 1h1 hour ago

People in Nepal refuse to touch food aid sent from Pakistan which includes Beef products like Beef masala. Shocking report in #MailToday

Cant this be used by Burka Dutt and Arundhoti roey types? No point letting it go to waste?

arun wrote:

“There are two major problems. The IAF doesn’t share its sortie schedule with the Nepalese army and takes hell of a time on the ground in an already congested airport,” Brigadier General PS Bogati, a Nepalese one-star officer who is the deputy chief of the airport coordinating centre here, told HT on Tuesday.