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from Photographers Blog:
A dramatic rescue outside my window
Athens, Greece
By John Kolesidis
Today I woke up to the deafening sound of thunder. The rain was pouring hard.
I made myself a cup of coffee and watched the rain out the window flood the surrounding streets. I was at a loss as to how I would get to the office without getting soaked, so I decided to stay put until things calmed down a bit. When I finished my coffee, I looked out the window again, and things had taken a dramatic turn.
A bit further down the street I could see an immobilized car getting swollen by the flood. Then I heard some muffled voices. I put on my galoshes and raincoat, took my cameras, and tried to get there. I walked through a small park, but that led me behind barbed wire which I couldn't get over. I saw a woman trying to hold on to her car door, while the water was at waist level. I called out to her not to be scared, urging her to hold on to the door until I could get closer.
I took some pictures behind the barbed wire, and then I tried to find a way to cross the flooded park so that I could get to her. When I got in front of the fence, there was a cascade between me and the woman, as she was on the other side of the road. People were looking on from their balconies, and I started shouting out to them to call the fire brigade. Then a man on the same side of the street climbed on top of her car, and another man managed to approach as well.
The woman's leg was trapped among the branches that were being washed away under her car door, and she could easily get swept away too. She was panicking, and the look on her face was crying for help. I called out to her to hang on, and urged the men who had got to her to try and encourage her.
from The Great Debate:
Rebuilding post-Sandy: Whole greater than parts
President Barack Obama asked Congress for more than $60 billion to help repair and rebuild infrastructure damaged by Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast. The House of Representatives finally voted Friday on a small down payment, roughly 10 percent.
As in the past, engineering experts will likely seek to build in added protections for the specific pieces of the infrastructure that failed in the storm - for example, flooded subway lines or power substations. What they don’t usually address, however, is how to protect networks as a whole.
from India Insight:
Rhino attacked, tiger killed as floods ravage Northeast
Northeast India is home to several rare and endangered animal species, which means that Northeast India is also home to poachers. With floods ravaging Assam and other northeastern states and displacing some 2 million people, poachers appear to be using the opportunity to murder animals.
Suspected poachers attacked a rare one-horned rhino by shooting it and cutting off its horn, the BBC reported:
from Photographers Blog:
An extreme year
2012 is the year of extremes in northern Brazil. Two regions of the country's vast north suffered their worst natural disasters in recorded history, but they were opposite disasters, with floods in the Amazon and drought in the northeast. Reuters photographers Ricardo Moraes and Bruno Kelly covered both stories. Their contrasting accounts follow:
Ricardo Moraes writes from northeastern Bahia State:
People suffering without water but full of hope, was what I found in the state of Bahia, facing its worst drought in half a century.
from Photographers Blog:
When December turns tragic
By Erik de Castro
December is normally a festive month in the Philippines with the Christmas season a big deal in this country of predominantly Roman Catholics. However, based on experience, heavy rains that can bring flash floods, landslides and lead to ferries sinking are also likely to happen during this period. For some Filipinos who have survived the worst kind of such disasters, December reminds them of the trauma they experienced.
Several villages in Cagayan de Oro City and Iligan City were caught flat-footed as they slept last Friday night when tropical storm Washi swept across Mindanao and Eastern Visayas, bringing strong winds and heavy rains that caused massive flooding, flash floods and landslides.
from Photographers Blog:
Lessons from the floods
By Damir Sagolj
In the beginning it was business as usual. Children played in the water, women moved around on makeshift rafts and people ignored the rising water from the north of Thailand. There were lots of smiling faces and very few worried ones. Looking from the outside, one could say people were having fun and soon all would be forgotten.
Then, suddenly it was not fun any more. As the murky water rose and moved towards the capital it was obvious the scale of this year's floods would be something very few expected. The land of smiles turned into the land of worry, then anger.
from Environment Forum:
Floods? Droughts? Wildfires? Hurricanes? Yes, there is a climate change connection
For years, climate scientists were circumspect when asked if a specific bit of violent weather -- for example, Hurricane Irene, the late-summer storm that slammed the heavily populated U.S. East Coast -- could be blamed in some way on climate change.
"Climate is what you expect," the scientists would say, "while weather is what you get." They would often go on to say that while increasingly severe weather and correspondingly serious costs and consequences were forecast in climate change computer simulations, there was no way to directly blame a given storm on human-generated heat-trapping gases in Earth's atmosphere.
from Photographers Blog:
Retracing my steps in Pakistan
On August 7, 2010, with a camera in hand, I dropped into a flooded village on an army helicopter that was delivering food aid to marooned villagers. As a crewman slid the door open to find solid ground, I leaped out, took some photographs, and managed to get back on before the chopper departed.
Time stamps on the images show the hover-stop lasted less than the length of an average song. For those three minutes, my thoughts were focused on finding an image that would bring the Pakistan floods story to life.
from Full Focus:
Pakistan revisited
Last year's floods in Pakistan killed 2,000, left 11 million homeless and affected the lives of another 7 million. The country is still struggling to recover from $10 billion in damage to infrastructure, irrigation systems, bridges, houses and roads. Reuters award-winning photographer Adrees Latif traveled back to the affected region to document the changes over the year in this dramatic series of combination images. Read about how Adrees took these images here.
from Photographers Blog:
Their scars, our scars
May 1, 2011
I’m on a plane from Los Angeles to JFK. About an hour before we touch down, the word goes out that the U.S. military has found and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. I land, make a few frames at baggage claim of people watching television while I wait for my bag. Then it’s talk my way to the front of a very long taxi line and make my way to Times Square and the site of the former World Trade Center towers, which many now refer to as Ground Zero. I notice an air of celebration.
People are cheering, waving American flags. There is quite a bit of media. I wonder what this must look like to the rest of the world, here we are celebrating the killing of a man. True, he came to represent the war against terror in the United States, but it seemed to be a celebration of death, at a place that had come to symbolize the death of many at the hands of extremists. Remembering the scenes of some burning American flags and cheering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the outrage it caused, I make pictures of the scene. This is a historic milestone in a war that had begun nearly ten years earlier, and this is a turning point in the psyche of America.
