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.
Early the next day, when a colleague told me that there were scores dead and hundreds still missing, I jumped from my bed, collected my disaster gear and asked for permission from Reuters to fly to the area. As soon as I got the approval, I rushed to the airport to get a flight. It was chaos at the airport as people were going home to the provinces for the holidays. The flight to Cagayan de Oro City was fully booked because flights were cancelled the previous day due to the storm. Many of the passengers were hoping they could finally get a flight, even more so after the disaster as they had to get home to check on their families. The names on the waiting list for stand-by passengers was already in the hundreds, with my name included. By luck, I was able to board one of the flights later in the afternoon.
Immediately upon arrival in Cagayan de Oro City before sundown, I went straight to one of the villages inundated by the storm. It was one of the villages near the riverbank, which became the main path of the flash floods. It was already getting dark so I hurriedly snapped some pictures. Even from afar, one could see the extent of the damage caused by the disaster. Nearly each and every single house near the river was toppled by the raging water with plenty of logs and debris from the mountain. Those that remained standing were nonetheless ruined.
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.
Pictures of destruction and despair were on every corner, the joy and smiling faces had begun to fade-out. We witnessed catastrophe and damage on a scale that would be difficult to calculate. The floods in Thailand occur every year and they hit the same provinces at about the same time. People know what to expect, and some have even use to it. But, what happened in the past two months left everyone totally shocked.
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.
After getting back to base, I worded the caption, “Marooned flood victims looking to escape grab the side bars of a hovering Army helicopter which arrived to distribute food supplies in the Muzaffargarh district of Pakistan’s Punjab province August 7, 2010.”
I never got a chance to speak to the villagers in my image. Trapped in the belly of the chopper, I did not even know where we had descended. All I could confirm was that I had leaped onto a graveyard, where the winds from the propellers threw me from one dirt mound to another.
On July 30, 2011, nearly one year later, I found the village and my subjects.
Adrees as ever amazing pictures and a great story
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.
Less than 24 hours later, I’m behind a barricade at the Met Gala, an event that is on par with some of the more high profile celebrity events in the United States. It’s sort of an Oscars for the East Coast, with a high level of star participation. But it’s a grueling parade of celebrities, all walking past a long line of photographers. There is Beyonce in a dress that rendered her nearly unable to walk up the stairs, there are Tom and Gisele, there is Rhianna, and there is the last minute arrival of Madonna.
As a resident of Joplin, I am grateful that he didn’t put down his camera, because he documented our humanity as it happened. The photographs are devastatingly beautiful, and they tell the story of those days as only photos can. I am sure that had anyone asked you for a hand, you would have gladly put your camera down and given it. I read nothing in the tone of your piece that sought glory, rather, it showed only empathy and respect for the people that were photographed and the tragedy that they were living.
Natural disaster strikes Sri Lanka, again
The recent floods in eastern Sri Lanka disrupted the lives of more than 1 million people and forced up to 400,000 people to seek refuge in temporary shelters like huts, schools and mosques. Rice crops in the east were devastated. Many fields were flattened by the water that burst through broken dams. Standing water 4 feet deep saturated the fields for days. Much of the rice that remained standing, while it looked healthy, had no grain remaining in it. The worst-affected districts were Batticaloa, Ampara and Trincomalee and these were also regions hit hard by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and decades of separatist conflict which ended nearly two years ago.
Adrees Latif wins ICP Infinity Award for Photojournalism
Pakistan chief photographer Adrees Latif has won the prestigious ICP Infinity Award in Photojournalism for his outstanding coverage of last year’s Pakistan floods. Working under the most difficult of conditions he led the Reuters pictures team to tell the story from every possible angle. His images were published daily across international front pages, bringing attention to the enormity of the catastrophe from its early stages. Latif’s work has received numerous industry accolades including the Pulitzer prize for Breaking News Photography in 2008.
Adrees recounts how he took the award-winning image of marooned flood victims grasping on to an army helicopter as they tried to escape.
Adrees, your pictures have inspired as an upcoming photographer. Keep up the spirit.
Chasing the floods in Malaysia
As I pondered whether to cover the floods that hit southern Malaysia, the first question that came to my mind was “will the floods still be there?”
Nonetheless, I decided to take the risk by driving more than 4 hours to get to the area. I was proven wrong. A villager said “You should have come yesterday.”
I grew up in the northeastern part of Malaysia where floods are a common phenomenon. When I was a young child, I enjoyed playing in the floods. Now, faced with the prospect of going home empty handed, I chose to stay put and do my best. Luck was on my side. A speeding ambulance whizzed by and I decided to chase the vehicle.
The ambulance took me to the village of Kundang Ulu. The ambulance managed to get through the floods but I was stranded on the edge of the water. But “mission accomplished”, I could see water. I started to make friends with some teenagers hoping they could bring me around to see the hardest-hit areas. They informed me that there was an area about 5 km (3 miles) away where the water was up to the roof. I asked them to bring me as close as possible with their bikes and of course they were very proud to show off their village – it was a sort of water festival in a way.
The kids dropped me off at high ground on the other side of the floodwater but the water on that side was too high to go further by motorcycle. Villagers helped me to locate Pakcik Kassim, or Uncle Kassim, who has a boat and he welcomed me to his submerged village.
Floods and landslides: A global view
In recent months floods and heavy rain have affected many different parts of the world, from Australia where an area the size of France and Germany combined was under water to the devastating landslides in Brazil that killed over 500 people.
Here are three stories from photographers, Tim Wimborne in Australia, Tom Peter in Germany and Bruno Domingos in Brazil, detailing how they overcame the challenges they faced to get pictures on the wire.
AUSTRALIA Tim Wimborne
Huge floods have wreaked havoc across the globe. Australia has experienced some of the worst of it with headlines dominated by an “inland tsunami” killing many around the town of Toowoomba. The much larger flooding however was far more passive in its advance over millions of hectares and into the heart of Australia’s third largest city.
You can’t beat wrapping your camera in plastic and getting your wet feet to get great flood pictures. After all, papers are filled with images of people wading through the brown muck where once steps led to their front door but this story was a lot more about helicopters and social media.
from Russell Boyce:
Asia – A Week in Pictures January 16 2011
Our thoughts are with photographer Lucas Mebrouk Dolega who was covering the street protests in Tunisia who is now in a critical condition after sustaining head injuries on Friday from a tear gas canister fired by a nearby police officer.
A passenger in a car waves for assistance as a flash flood sweeps across an intersection in Toowoomba, 105 km (65 miles) west of Brisbane, January 10, 2011. Tsunami-like flash floods raced towards Australia's third-largest city of Brisbane on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of its outskirts, flood warnings for the financial district and predictions that the death toll is likely to climb. REUTERS/Tomas Guerin
Rupert Murdoch's iPad only newspaper "The Daily" is getting closer to launch (reports say the proposed launch of January 19th was delayed due to technical glitches) and others are launching similar pay-for publications. Along with rumours of an imminent iPad2 and Apple's competitors rushing to launch their own tablet devices, it seems to me much more likely that people will once more expect to pay for their news as opposed to expecting to get it free. They will now have a device to easily download and read news and look at pictures and video immediately. Maybe the much heralded notion that the sometimes faster, but unsubstantiated, social media generated news would be the death knell of main stream media (why should I pay for the news when I get it free from the net quicker?) might have been a little premature and could actually be one of the factors that contribute to people expecting to pay for quality news viewed on hand held devices. What do you think?
What makes me raise this question is the fact that many of the pictures on the Reuters wire from the floods in Australia were sourced from Facebook and Twitter to compliment the pictures shot by our staff photographers. The key differentiating factor was that Australia chief photographer Tim Wimborne was able to track down the originator of the material to verify its authenticity, pay for it and then transmit it for publication on mainstream media. The viewer of these pictures is able to trust what they see and read even though it was generated by a citizen journalist. Maybe I am wrong and people just want to believe what they see on social media and place no value on news and pictures checked and doubled checked by journalists?
Heavy equipment sits submerged in flood waters in an industrial area of Brisbane January 13, 2011. Flood water in Australia's third-biggest city peaked below feared catastrophic levels on Thursday but Brisbane and other devastated regions faced years of rebuilding and even the threat of fresh floods in the weeks ahead. REUTERS/Tim Wimborne
from Russell Boyce:
Asia – A Week in Pictures September 26, 2010
A tough week for India as athletes began arriving for the start of the Commonwealth Games. On September 21, a pedestrian walkway outside the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in New Delhi collapsed; the very next day a portion of the ceiling in the weightlifting arena also collapsed. Social and mainstream media showed pictures of blocked drains, dirty bathrooms, soiled matresses and unfinished work in the athletes' accommodation. Team members started to pull out of the games, undermining the status of the event. The enormity of the clean-up task seemed insurmountable, this concern beautifully illustrated by Parivartan Sharma's picture of a man sweeping dust in the streets with a hand brush - a seemingly pointless task when CWG president Fennell said that there was still "considerable work to be done". Have a close look at Reinhard Krause's picture of the roof of the weight lifting arena and make your own judgement on the workmanship of the construction. As someone who has not got a great head for heights I fear for the safety of the workers walking on the roof of the building.
A man sweeps under a flyover in front of the Commonwealth Games athletes village in New Delhi September 25, 2010. Commonwealth Games Federation President Michael Fennell said on Saturday there was still a considerable amount of work to be done and there was great concern about the security and safety of athletes and officials. REUTERS/Parivartan Sharma
Workers climb down the roof of the weightlifting venue for the upcoming Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, September 22, 2010. A portion of false ceiling in the Commonwealth Games weightlifting venue in India's capital caved in on Wednesday, a day after 27 workers were injured when a footbridge collapsed near the same sports complex. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause
Adding to the woes of the Indian government, a court ruling was expected on the ownership of the land around the demolished 16th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya that sparked riots between Hindus and Muslims in 1992, the worse violence seen since Partition in 1947. The decision, which was expected to spark more violence throughout the country, was postponed. The tension etched in every line on the face of this aging security guard who could have faced the task of keeping apart two groups of people, intent on killing each other.
Why wait? Republicans in Congress have been blocking higher CAFE standards for cars for over 20 years. Maybe it would help them get "back on their feet" if they actually built cars people wanted.
-
Resident Photographers Blog Expert
-
The Wall
Thank you for sharing this Erik. You are truly one of the best photojournalist in the Philippines. Your dedication to the profession inspires us.