Earth ChangesS


Bug

West Nile Virus Outbreak Triggers Dallas, Texas State of Emergency declaration: City to begin first aerial spraying in 46 years


The Extinction Protocol
Thu, 16 Aug 2012 10:47 UTC
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Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings on Wednesday declared the city's recent West Nile virus outbreak to be a state of emergency and authorized the first aerial spraying of insecticide in the city in more than 45 years. Dallas and other North Texas cities have agreed to the rare use of aerial spraying from planes to combat the nation's worst outbreak of West Nile virus so far this year. Dallas last had aerial spraying in 1966, when more than a dozen deaths were blamed on encephalitis. More than 200 cases of West Nile and 10 deaths linked to the virus have been reported across Dallas County, where officials authorized aerial spraying last week.

State health department statistics show 381 cases and 16 deaths related to West Nile statewide. "The numbers of cases, the number of deaths are remarkable, and we need to sit up and take notice," Rawlings said during a city council briefing. "We do have a serious problem right now." Aerial spraying for mosquitoes could begin Thursday evening, depending on weather conditions. The state health department, which will pay for the $500,000 aerial spraying with emergency funds, has a contract with national spraying company Clarke. Clarke officials have said two to five planes will be used in Dallas County. Dallas City Council members voiced concerns about aerial spraying's health effects on humans and animals. Rawlings said the aerial dosage will be much lower than the dosage used so far during ground spraying. He also said aerial spraying recently has been safely used in California, Massachusetts and New York.
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Nuke

Fukushima's Nuclear Casualties

Joseph J. Mangano
Counterpunch
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 21:51 UTC
radiation suit
© Krasowit
Let the Counting Begin

It's been nearly 18 months since the disastrous nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. There have been many reports on the huge amounts of radioactivity escaping into the air and water, unusually high levels in air, water, and soil - along with atypically high levels of toxic chemicals in food - that actually "passed" government inspection and wasn't banned like some other food.

Conspicuously absent are reports on effects of radiation exposure on the health of the Japanese people. Have any health officials publicly announced post-March 2011 numbers on fetal deaths, infant deaths, premature births, birth defects, cancer, or other health conditions? The answer so far is an emphatic "no."

The prolonged silence doesn't mean data doesn't exist. Japanese health officials have been busy with their usual duties of collecting and posting statistics on the Internet for public inspection. It's just that they aren't calling the public's attention to these numbers. Thus, it is the public who must find the information and figure out what it means. After locating web sites, translating from Japanese, adding data for each of 12 months, and making some calculations, mortality trends in Japan after Fukushima are emerging.

The Japanese government health ministry has posted monthly estimated deaths for the 12 months before and after Fukushima, for the entire nation of Japan. These are preliminary figures, but they have historically been very good estimates of final numbers. A further look is in order.
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Bizarro Earth

Eagle Attacks Villagers in Revenge, Locals Say


China Daily
Tue, 14 Aug 2012 20:41 UTC
Golden Eagle
© J. Glover - Atlanta, Georgia/Wikimedia CommonsNova - an American golden eagle in the care of the Southeastern Raptor Rehabilitation Center at Auburn University.

Two villagers in Muling county, Heilongjiang province, were attacked by a golden eagle several times within two years after they ate a young golden eagle, Heilongjiang Morning Post reported on Tuesday.

A golden eagle attacked a man named Yang for more than 20 minutes when he was harvesting wheat on Saturday morning. After Yang was helped into a police car, the golden eagle continued the attack, diving at the windshield and chasing the car for 700 meters, the report said.

Yang was badly injured in his face, neck and arms, but it was not the worst time he was injured by golden eagles, according to the report. In April 2011, when he was planting in the mountain, a golden eagle attacked him, cutting his head, and he got 21 stitches.

A fellow villager named Wu has also been attacked by the golden eagle several times since August 2010. In April 2011, he received gashes in his head and hands in an attack and piece of flesh was ripped from his forehead. Wu received more than 40 stitches to close his wounds from that attack, the report said. He moved out the village to avoid further attacks.

According to the report, Yang said they had stolen a young golden eagle from its nest and ate it in August 2010, because they heard that eating golden eagles could cure hemorrhoids. Villagers say the golden eagle is seeking revenge.

For hundreds of years, golden eagles have been famous in China for their ferocity and strength, the report said. In Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), Mongolian hunters used to train them to hunt wolves. It is said that one golden eagle caught 14 wolves.
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Arrow Down

Scouts Stone Rabid Beaver to Death After Attack


CBS/Associated Press
Mon, 13 Aug 2012 07:01 UTC
Beaver
© CBS News

Pine Plains, N.Y. - A rabid beaver that attacked a Boy Scout leader swimming in the Delaware River was killed after Scouts in the troop pelted it with rocks.

The Poughkeepsie Journal reports that 51-year-old Normand Brousseau, of Pine Plains, N.Y., was swimming in eastern Pennsylvania on Aug. 2 when a beaver swam through his legs and bit him in the chest.

"I thought it was a giant carp fish," he told the paper.

After initially throwing the animal from his body, it returned to continue the attack, biting Brousseau in the leg, buttocks, arm, hand and torso before he managed to grab it and hold its jaw closed.

Brousseau threw the beaver ashore while Scouts helped him out of the water. After being momentarily stunned, the beaver began attacking a pool noodle.

At that point, the Scouts stepped in to put down the animal.

"We started throwing rocks at it," Nick Hedges, 16, said. "We could see it was still dangerous."

A doctor confirmed the beaver had rabies a day after the attack.

Dutchess County health officials say a rabid beaver attack is unusual.
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Attention

Louisiana sinkhole remains unexplained by Texas brine company


Clarion Ledger
Sat, 11 Aug 2012 14:30 UTC
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© Associated PressBubbles come to the surface where pipelines come across Bayou Corne near Pierre Part, La.
Officials at a Houston-based brine company said Friday it will be at least 40 days before they get definitive answers about an enormous Louisiana sinkhole that opened up in Assumption Parish.

Mark Cartwright, president of United Brine Services, a subsidiary of Texas Brine Co., said the company spent the last week "intensely focused" on an emergency response as they try to figure out the cause behind a sinkhole near Bayou Corne.

Cartwright said they'll be drilling a relief well to investigate a brine cavern they own, which is housed within the Napoleonville salt dome. It will take at least 40 days to drill the well, and scientists have speculated that the 372-foot-wide and 422-foot-deep sinkhole might be related to structural problems within the cavern, he said.

"Our efforts are going to be more focused on diagnostics, and looking into what caused this event," Cartwright said at a press conference in Gonzales.

Commissioner of Conservation Jim Welsh ordered the company Thursday to drill a well and investigate the salt cavern and "further evaluate potential causes of the subsidence near its well site," as well as obtain samples of cavern content.
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Cloud Lightning

Duluth, Minnesota tornado might not have been a first


TwinCities.com
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:02 UTC
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After initially reporting that last week's waterspout was also Duluth's first tornado, the National Weather Service says it has found record of another Duluth tornado more than 50 years ago.

The waterspout on Thursday, Aug. 9, churned across Sky Harbor Airport in Duluth and Barker's Island in Superior. For the few seconds it was on land, the waterspout was classified as a weak tornado.

First checks with the Weather Service office in Duluth turned up no previous Twin Ports tornadoes. But meteorologists there kept digging through the records.

"After doing more research, it was discovered that there was a tornado in Duluth on May 26, 1958," meteorologist Carol Christenson wrote in a memo on Monday to Duluth weather reporters.

The Duluth News-Tribune at the time called the 1958 storm a "miniature tornado" that collapsed a garage and damaged two Duluth-area lake cabins.
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Cloud Lightning

Stantonsburg, North Carolina hit hard by tornado

Jon Jimison and Olivia Neeley
The Wilson Times
Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:55 UTC
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© Brad Coville, Wilson Times
Stantonsburg took a hard strike from an apparent tornado late Saturday afternoon.

About seven houses along R.B. Avenue and Moyton Drive received major damage and some are beyond repair.

The Stantonsburg Police Department, Wilson County Emergency Management, firefighters, the Wilson County Sheriff's Office and the American Red Cross all responded to the emergency scene.

Judy Watson helped guide customers to the back of the Piggly Wiggly store in town as the storm approached. Her husband, Robert, who owns the store with her, was at their home on Saratoga Street when the storm hit.

"I saw the funnel cloud as it was leaving the area," Robert said. "It was an intense moment."

Their carport has been ripped away from their home. The whole end of their home's roof was lifted up by winds. You can spot cracks of daylight from inside the house where the ceiling became unhinged from the wall. Housing insulation litters the area where the carport used to stand. The carport itself has been reduced to dozens of shredded boards.
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Arrow Up

Sulphur smell across lower North Island, New Zealand

Paloma Migone
stuff.co.nz
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 13:40 UTC
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The smell of sulphur from Mt Tongariro has crept back to the lower North Island, with some residents complaining about irritation to their skin and eyes.

The smell has become common since the volcano erupted at 11.50pm on August 6 with residents as far as Blenheim noticing it.

The Horizon Regional Council today received "multiple complaints" about the smell being back and some residents said the sulphur had become an irritant.

Council emergency manager Shane Bayley said the smell was the result of wind drift from the mountain and was not a cause for concern.

"Our air quality monitoring sites in Taumarunui and Taihape are not showing any elevated presence of fine air particles.
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Bug

Armyworm outbreak threatens China grain output


The Extinction Protocol
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:17 UTC
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The armyworm outbreak in China's key grain producing areas has posed a major threat to the corn and rice crops this year, authorities said Tuesday. The agriculture ministry has warned the local governments to heed to its pest control advice to ensure grain security, the China Daily reported. "We haven't seen such a pest plague in so many places in almost a decade," a spokesman for the ministry's crop production department said.

To date, at least two million hectares of autumn crops nationwide have been affected. The areas include Hebei, Jilin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang and Shanxi provinces, the Inner Mongolia region and Beijing and Tianjin municipalities. The government will allocate 200 million yuan ($3.5 million) to fight the pests, the official added. - NY Daily
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Bizarro Earth

Simmering giant: 38 gas emissions reported from Mexico's Popocatepetl volcano


The Extinction Protocol
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:15 UTC
The Popocatepetl volcano registered 38 exhalations in the last 24 hours and one on the morning of Tuesday, was accompanied by slight amount of ash, as reported by the National Center for Disaster Prevention (Cenapred). In his report at 11:00 hours, indicated that all the exhalations of the last 24 hours were of low intensity, of which the most important were: one at 15:47 hours on Monday, another at 3:23 and most recently at 8:29, which was accompanied by ash. Bad weather conditions that prevailed during the Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning has obstructed visibility and, therefore, it is unclear which direction dispersed emissions from the volcano traveled.

From the morning until the time of writing this report there is a plume of water vapor and gas that rises a few meters above the crater, due to strong wind that goes to the northwest. The report makes no reference to seismic activity associated with the volcano or possible ashfall in neighboring towns.
- Noticieros Televisa
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