Tag Archives: Survivors

Survivors in Ecuador clamor for food, water and medicine

People receive donations from volunteers as rescue efforts continue in Pedernales

By Ana Isabel Martinez and Julia Symmes Cobb

SAN JACINTO/PEDERNALES, Ecuador (Reuters) – Survivors of an earthquake that killed 570 people and shattered Ecuador’s coast clamored for food, water and medicine on Thursday as aid failed to reach some of the remotest parts of the quake zone.

President Rafael Correa’s socialist government, facing a mammoth rebuilding task at a time of slashed oil revenues in the OPEC nation, said there was no lack of aid – just problems with distribution that should be quickly resolved.

“We’re trying to survive. We need food,” said Galo Garcia, 65, a lawyer, waiting in line for water from a truck sent to the beachside village of San Jacinto. “There’s nothing in the shops. We’re eating the vegetables we grow.”

A crowd nearby chanted: “We want food.”

The government quickly moved supplies to the main towns and set up shelters for nearly 25,000 people in soccer stadiums and airports but the shattered state of the roads has impeded aid reaching remoter areas.

Many people left their villages seeking help while on roads near Pedernales, one of the worst-hit towns, children from rural areas held signs begging for food.

CHILDREN CRYING

Jose Rodriguez, 24, drove two hours from Calceta village to a food storage point outside Pedernales.

“It’s not reaching us,” he said, giving his address and phone number to a military office. “I came here to see if they could give me something but it’s impossible.”

A government official asked another supplicant, Jose Gregorio Basulor, 55, to stay calm. “I can be patient but not the children!” he shouted back. “They are crying.”

Correa has said Ecuador will temporarily increase some taxes, offer assets for sale and possibly issue bonds on the international market to fund reconstruction after Saturday’s 7.8 magnitude quake. He has estimated damage at $2 billion to $3 billion.

Lower oil revenue already had left the nation of 16 million people facing near-zero growth and lower investment.

“There are rumors there’s a shortage of water,” Correa said late on Wednesday, responding to complaints about the aid operation. “We have plenty of water. The problem is distribution,” he added, promising speedy solutions.

Ecuador’s worst earthquake in nearly seven decades injured 7,000 people and damaged close to 2,000 buildings. Scores of foreign aid workers and experts have arrived and 14,000 security personnel are keeping order, with only sporadic looting.

Correa said the death toll would have been lower had Ecuadoreans respected construction regulations beefed up after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed more than 300,000 people.

(Additional reporting by Alexandra Valencia and Diego Ore in Quito; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Bill Trott)

Japan quake survivors face low food supply, closed factories

By Minami Funakoshi and Kaori Kaneko

TOKYO (Reuters) – The Japanese share market fell more than 3 percent on Monday after a series of earthquakes measuring up to 7.3 magnitude struck a southern manufacturing hub, killing at least 42 people and forcing major companies to close factories.

About 30,000 rescue workers were scouring the rubble for survivors and handing out food to those unable to return to their homes following the quakes which struck Kyushu island from Thursday. The biggest hit near Kumamoto city early on Saturday.

“There are still missing people. We want to make further efforts to rescue and save people and prioritize human lives,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told parliament, adding he aimed to declare the region a disaster zone to free up reconstruction funds.

The Nikkei stock index ended 3.4 percent lower, hit by a stronger yen and as investors weighed the impact of the disaster on manufacturers’ supply chains and insurers.

Factories for major manufacturers including Toyota, Sony and Honda were closed, disrupting supply chains around the country.

Japan’s atomic regulator declared three nuclear plants in the region safe, giving a degree of comfort to a country deeply scarred by the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 that was sparked by an earthquake and tsunami.

All commercial flights to the damaged Kumamoto airport were canceled and the bullet train service to the region was suspended.

Food was in short supply as roads remained cut off by landslides. Evacuees made an SOS signal out of chairs at a school playground, hoping to catch the attention of supply helicopters, Japanese media reported.

“Yesterday, I ate just one piece of tofu and a rice ball,” said the mayor of one of the areas affected. “What we’re most worried about now is food.”

Of more than 500 quakes hitting Kyushu since Thursday, more than 70 have been at least a four on Japan’s intensity scale, strong enough to shake buildings.

DESPERATE SEARCH

The Kumamoto region is an important manufacturing hub and home to Japan’s only operating nuclear station.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government would “take all the necessary measures” to support companies affected by the disaster and the economy more broadly, including tapping into reserve funds of 350 billion yen ($3.24 billion).

Abe said a sales tax increase next year would go ahead barring a financial crisis or major natural disaster, without elaborating on whether the quakes qualified as such a disaster.

On the stock market, Sony Corp and Toyota Motor led the sharp falls among manufacturers, dropping 6.8 percent and 4.8 percent respectively. Nissan Motor and Honda Motor both lost about 3 percent. Insurers and utilities were also sold, with nuclear plant operator Kyushu Electric Power slumping nearly 8 percent.

Toyota said it would suspend production at plants across Japan after the quakes disrupted its supply chain.

Electronics giant Sony said its Kumamoto image sensors plant would remain suspended. One of the company’s major customers for the sensors is Apple. Honda said production at its motorcycle plant in southern Japan would remain suspended through Friday.

Numerous aftershocks have rattled the region with one of 5.8 magnitude on Monday evening. There were no immediate reports of new damage or injuries.

Automotive chipmaker Renesas Electronics said earlier the aftershocks were keeping it from installing replacement equipment at a quake-hit plant.

The Kumamoto government said 42 people had been killed and nine were missing.

Thirty three people have been confirmed dead in Saturday’s quake and nine in the smaller tremor just over 24 hours earlier. The government said about 190 of the injured were in serious condition and some 110,000 people had been displaced.

Rescuers digging with their bare hands dragged some elderly survivors, still in pyjamas, out of the rubble and onto makeshift stretchers made of tatami mats.

“We can’t take a bath, we don’t have any clothes to change into – we just have what we ran out in,” a woman at one evacuation center told TBS television.

Public broadcaster NHK showed footage of forests and rice fields torn apart by the quake, saying one 50 km (31 miles) strip shifted almost 2 meters (6 feet) sideways.

Quakes are common in Japan, part of the seismically active “Ring of Fire” which sweeps from the South Pacific islands, up through Indonesia, Japan, across to Alaska and down the west coast of North, Central and South America.

At the other end of the ring this weekend, Ecuador’s biggest earthquake in decades killed at least 262 people, caused devastation in coastal towns and left an unknown number trapped in ruins.

A 9 magnitude quake and tsunami in northern Japan in March 2011 caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, shutting down the nuclear industry for safety checks and sending radiation spewing across the countryside.

Nearly 20,000 people were killed in the 2011 tsunami.

(Additional reporting by Linda Sieg, Elaine Lies, William Mallard, Shinichi Soashiro, Chris Gallagher, Kiyoshi Takenaka, Tim Kelly and Thomas Wilson; Writing by Stephen Coates; Editing by Robert Birsel and Ian Geoghegan)

Floods kill At least 55 in Pakistan

Residents use a bridge covered with floodwater after heavy rain in Nowshera District on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan

By Asad Hashim

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Flash floods triggered by heavy rain in Pakistan have killed at least 55 people and rescuers were trying on Monday to help thousands of survivors including some cut off by a landslide in a mountain valley, officials said.

The weather system that brought the unusually heavy rain was expected to move northeast, towards northern India, although more isolated storms were expected in northern Pakistan, the Meteorological Department said.

Yousuf Zia, a disaster management official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said nearly 150 homes had been destroyed and tents and blankets were being distributed to the homeless.

“There are 30 people stranded by a landslide in the Kohistan Valley where we have sent a helicopter to rescue them,” Zia said.

Forty-seven people were killed and 37 injured in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Zia said, while eight people were killed in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, officials there said.

Landslides caused widespread damage to roads and communication infrastructure in the Pakistani side of Kashmir, they said.

One of the worst-affected districts was the Swat Valley, northwest of the capital, Islamabad, where 121 mm (4.76 inches) of rain fell on Sunday, the Meteorological Department said.

Nepal Death Toll Over 5,000; Survivors Struggling To Survive

The death toll from the weekend earthquake and aftershock in Nepal has flown past 5,000 and is not showing signs of slowing down as rescuers say it’s almost impossible to reach some of the more rural regions because of landslides.

The aid group Samaritan’s Purse says that at least 8 million people are in immediate need of food and water.  A spokesman said that many of the families have lost everything they owned and have no way to support themselves.

“There are a lot of people sleeping out in the streets,” said Samaritan’s Purse team leader Patrick Seger in a report from Tuesday. “They are fearful of the buildings and don’t want to sleep inside. They are sleeping in the rain because they don’t have any other shelter.”

The BBC reported that the government is attempting to provide free services to the residents but they have no way of providing to all those impacted.

“There’s a rush to get out of Kathmandu. Thousands of people are trying to flee — some trying to head out to the remote districts to see how their families are, others including tourists trying to head toward India by road,” BBC’s Sanjoy Majumder said.

“But there simply aren’t enough buses to take them out and the highways are choked with vehicles, people and relief convoys. Tempers are flaring. The police came to the bus station to restrain those trying to board crowded buses, which made it worse.”

The Gorkha district, where the epicenter was located, is out of food.

“We haven’t had any food here since the earthquake,” said Sita Gurung, whose lost his home in Gorkha. “We don’t have anything left here.”

An Army spokesman told reporters they are trying their best to reach the region but admitted remote areas are trapped by terrain.

Witnesses Describe Horrors of Boko Haram Massacre

Survivors of the Boko Haram conducted massacre in northern Nigeria last week are starting to arrive in the southern part of the country and are sharing horrific stories.

Witnesses say that a pregnant woman who was in the middle of delivering a baby boy was killed by the terrorists.  The survivors say that women and children were killed indiscriminately by the terrorists who never stopped to ask if the people were Muslim or of other faiths.

“They killed so many people. I saw maybe around 100 killed at that time in Baga. I ran to the bush. As we were running, they were shooting and killing,” one witness said.

Amnesty International has released satellite photos of the region showing the devastation left in the wake of the terrorists.  Actual ground footage has been unavailable as the Islamists still control the area.

“These detailed images show devastation of catastrophic proportions in two towns, one of which was almost wiped off the map in the space of four days,” Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International, told the Christian Post.

“Of all Boko Haram assaults analyzed by Amnesty International, this is the largest and most destructive yet. It represents a deliberate attack on civilians whose homes, clinics and schools are now burnt out ruins.”

“The numbers are adding up fast and it is becoming clearer and clearer that the Nigerian governments, both federal and states, are failing resoundingly in their responsibility to protect innocent lives and prevent this mass atrocities from going forward. These atrocities are increasingly becoming worse and worse as the times go by,” said Pastor Laolu Akande, the executive director of the Christian Association of Nigerian Americans.