Tag Archives: Death

Deaths from U.S. lightning strikes this year at highest since 2010

Lightning strikes

By Chris Prentice

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A pair of fatalities from lightning strikes over the weekend lifted the U.S. death toll from such accidents this year to 29, the most since 2010, the National Weather Service said on Monday.

The latest lightning-related deaths occurred in Colorado and Michigan on Friday, the NWS said in a report. With four months left in the year, the 2016 toll has already surpassed last year’s 27.

Eight people have died from lightning this month, making it the deadliest August since 2007. In July, typically the month with the most fatalities, 12 people were killed by lightning.

“People are outside, enjoying beaches in the summer time,”

said John Jensenius, an NWS lightning safety specialist based in Gray, Maine.

“There’s not much variance in lightning activity,” he told Reuters, saying the rise was due more to behavior.

Fridays have been the deadliest day of the week this year, which Jensenius said was unusual. Typically, the highest number of incidents occur on Saturdays and Sundays, when Americans are outside barbecuing and enjoying other weekend activities.

This year, as is typical, Florida has posted the highest number of lightning deaths, with six. Louisiana and New York were next, with four and three fatalities, respectively.

Deaths from lightning have fallen sharply from the hundreds reported each year in the 1940s and 1950s, when there were more farmers riding tractors in open fields, Jensenius said.

The odds of being struck in a lifetime remain relatively low, about 1 in 12,000, NWS statistics showed. There is about one death for every 10 people hit by lightning.

But Jensenius advised caution, saying people should get inside during thunderstorms.

“If you can hear thunder, you’re close enough to be struck,” he said.

(Editing by Frank McGurty; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Bomb attacks kill seven, wound 224 in southeast Turkey

Turkey blast

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) – Two bomb attacks blamed on Kurdish militants killed seven members of the security forces and wounded 224 people in southeast Turkey on Thursday, officials and security sources said, in a renewed escalation of violence across the region.

A car bomb ripped through a police station in the city of Elazig at 9:20 a.m. (0620 GMT) as officers arrived for work. Three police officers were killed and 217 people were wounded, 85 of them police officers, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said.

Offices in the police station were left in ruins and filled with smoke after the bomb exploded in front of the complex, destroying part of the facade, CNN Turk footage showed.

Less than four hours later, a roadside bomb believed to have been planted by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants tore through a military vehicle in the Hizan district of Bitlis province, security sources said.

They said the blast killed three soldiers and a member of the state-sponsored village guard militia and wounded another seven soldiers.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombings, but Yildirim said there was no doubt they were carried out by the PKK, deemed a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

“The (PKK) terror group has lost its chain of command. Its elements inside (Turkey) are carrying out suicide attacks randomly wherever they get the opportunity,” Yildirim told reporters in Elazig.

“We have raised the state of alarm to a higher level,” he said at the scene of the attack, where a crowd chanted “Damn the PKK!”

The PKK has carried out dozens of attacks on police and military posts since 2015 in the largely Kurdish southeast in its fight for greater autonomy for Turkey’s 15 million Kurds.

Elazig, a conservative province that votes in large numbers for the ruling AK Party, had been spared violence until now.

Video footage showed a plume of black smoke rising above the city after the blast, which uprooted trees and gouged a large crater outside the police complex, which is situated on a busy thoroughfare in the city of 420,000 people.

In Van province, further east, two police officers and one civilian were killed and 73 people were wounded late on Wednesday when a car bomb exploded near a police station, the local governor’s office said in a statement.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack in Van, a largely Kurdish province on the Iranian border. The Van governor’s office said the PKK was responsible.

The southeast has been scorched by violence since a 2 1/2-year ceasefire with the PKK collapsed in July last year. Thousands of militants and hundreds of soldiers and police officers have been killed, according to official figures. Rights groups say about 400 civilians have also been killed.

On Thursday, PKK militants also attacked a police checkpoint in the southeastern town of Semdinli, near the Iraqi and Iranian borders, wounding two police officers, Dogan news agency said.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in violence since the PKK first took up arms in 1984.

(Reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley, Akin Aytekin and Tuvan Gumrukcu; Writing by Daren Butler and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Larry King)

Eleven dead, thousands of homes ravaged in Louisiana floods

Residents use a boat to navigate through the floods in Louisiana

By Sam Karlin

BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) – Search-and-rescue operations were still underway on Tuesday in Louisiana, where at least 11 people have died in severe floods that damaged about 40,000 homes, state officials said.

Emergency crews had already plucked more than 20,000 people and 1,000 pets from flooded areas after a storm that broke records for 24-hour rainfall in multiple locations, Governor John Bel Edwards told reporters.

Rain-swollen rivers are receding in much of the state, but state officials warned of remaining dangers. Some communities in southern Louisiana could see waters crest later in the week, according to national forecasters.

More than 8,000 people slept in emergency shelters on Monday night, unable to return to their homes, Edwards told a news conference. The state planned to impose curfews on Tuesday night in the parishes with widespread damage.

“This is a historic flooding event,” Edwards said. “It’s unprecedented.”

The storm dumped more than 2-1/2 feet (76 cm) of rain near Watson, Louisiana, from Thursday to Monday morning, the highest total reported, according to the National Weather Service.

In Abbeville, Louisiana, a 125-year-old record for 24-hour rainfall was shattered with 16.38 inches (41.61 cm) reported from Friday to Saturday, the weather service reported.

In some water-ravaged areas, houses flooded to rooflines, and coffins floated away. Motorists were trapped on highways. U.S. President Barack Obama issued a disaster declaration on Sunday, with a total of 20 parishes approved by Tuesday for federal assistance.

Already, 40,000 residents have registered for disaster aid, Edwards said.

In hard-hit Denham Springs, residents were gutting waterlogged homes, dumping soaked carpets and mattresses.

Sonya Mayeux was still in disbelief. On Saturday, she awoke at 9 a.m. to rising, knee-deep water in her backyard. By 11:30 a.m., the water was nearly above her white SUV.

A neighbor rescued her family by boat. Ultimately, her house flooded nearly to the roof.

“The water just came up so fast,” she said.

“VERY LARGE DISASTER”

Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told reporters the “very large disaster” was affecting more people than flooding in March that left at least four dead and thousands of homes damaged in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Louisiana will mark the 11th anniversary this month of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people when floods overwhelmed levees and broke through flood walls protecting New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005.

Louisiana’s confirmed death toll from the latest flooding rose to 11 on Tuesday, the state Health Department said. By parish, it reported five fatalities in East Baton Rouge, three in Tangipahoa, two in St. Helena, and one in Rapides.

Among those killed was Bill Borne, the founder and former chief executive of Amedisys Inc, a provider of home health and hospice care. Officials said he drowned near his home in East Baton Rouge Parish.

(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington, Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Bryn Stole in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Writing by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida; Editing by Tom Brown)

Naming the nameless: experts struggle to identify drowned migrants

Wooden crosses for an unmarked refugee grave

By Isla Binnie and Michele Kambas

ROME/ATHENS (Reuters) – Mose tapped the screen of his mobile phone to zoom in on a photograph of his wife, Yordanos, pointing to a mole under her eyebrow.

“She has a recognizable mark here,” the 26-year-old Eritrean said in a park in Rome; after fleeing compulsory military service back home, Mose now lives in an Italian reception center for migrants.

He has not seen Yordanos since May 26 when they left Libya, packed by people smugglers on to two separate boats bound for Italy. He was rescued, but her boat sank in the Mediterranean.

Helping people like Mose find out their loved ones’ fate is becoming ever more pressing as Europe’s migrant crisis drags on in its third year and the death toll rises.

Teams of forensic scientists in Italy and Greece are painstakingly trying to identify the victims of drowning found at sea, washed up on shores or recovered from wrecks.

However, there is no common practice to collect information about these deaths between states or even sometimes within the same country, and a plan by the Dutch-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) to start tracing lost migrants is still awaiting funding.

Kathryne Bomberger, director general of the ICMP, said the problem was too big to be left solely to front-line countries such as Italy and Greece.

“This is a complex, international problem,” she said, as the task of identification and notification involves tracking down relatives who may be in their home countries, in refugee camps, or building new lives in the likes of Germany or Sweden.

“We are ready to go, we have the necessary database systems, we have an agreement with Italy, we have done our homework. We just need the financial support.”

The ICMP and International Organization for Migration (IOM) are calling for a strategy to process the data, and a system for repatriating migrants’ remains.

REPLACING NUMBERS WITH NAMES

Mose, who withheld his surname for fear of reprisals from Eritrean authorities, clings to the hope that Yordanos was rescued and that she could be recognised from the photograph.

If she did not survive, and her body was recovered, her remains are likely to have been buried in one of hundreds of numbered graves in Sicily or the southwestern Calabria region for migrants who have drowned.

Both in Italy and Greece, which migrants have also tried to reach on a shorter but still dangerous sea crossing from Turkey, the forensic experts are trying to replace the numbers with names.

Sometimes they succeed, despite the practical and financial problems, as in the case of a baby boy found floating near the Greek island of Samos in January.

The child, no more than six months old, had been lost in a shipwreck on Oct. 29, 2015 when 19 migrants drowned. For over two months, his body drifted more than 150 km (95 miles) north until it was recovered from the water.

In the end, police identified the little boy from a DNA sample given by his Syrian father, who was among 139 people rescued when the boat sank in the Aegean off the island of Kalymnos.

“It is the least we can do for these people, under very difficult circumstances,” said Penelope Miniati, director of the Greek police’s Forensic Sciences Division.

For some, the tragedies recall Greece’s own history of migration, including in the 1950s and ’60s when many escaped poverty for a new life in countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia, breaking up families who sometimes lost contact with each other.

“We are Greeks, we also migrated and some people were lost in the journey … and each time people wondered what had happened to them,” said Miniati.

“IMPROVISATION”

More than three quarters of the 4,027 migrant and refugee deaths worldwide in 2016 so far happened in the Mediterranean, according to the IOM.

Most died between Libya and Italy. Hundreds also drowned on the Turkey-Greece route, although arrivals have fallen sharply since a deal between the European Union and Ankara on curbing the flow in March.

Many shipwreck victims are never recovered, but about 1,500 have been brought to Italy since 2013. So far, just over 200 have been identified.

In a “policy vacuum” the action in Italy and Greece has been driven by “improvisation”, the IOM said in June in a joint report with City University London and the University of York.

The report praised a deal that Italy’s special commissioner for missing persons struck with a university laboratory, which provides free forensic work, and the interior ministry, to adopt a protocol to identify victims and inform relatives.

The commissioner records details of corpses and sends notices through embassies and humanitarian organizations asking survivors for photographs of the missing, and personal effects such as toothbrushes that could harbor DNA.

In Athens, Miniati’s division has a database with information on 647 people who need identifying, about 80 percent of them the nameless dead of the migrant crisis.

People who drown and stay trapped underwater for months are often unrecognizable, so accounts of scars, tattoos and dental cavities help. Some people come to Italy to look for missing relatives in the commissioner’s files and some take DNA tests.

VALUES THAT COUNT

Deputy Italian Commissioner Agata Iadicicco said a shared international database would make it easier to reach migrants’ home countries and diasporas across Europe. “We need money to standardize this model and to involve all the migrant communities that mainly live in northern Europe,” she said.

With no sign of a let-up in the perilous voyages from North Africa, Italy feels that fellow EU countries should pull their weight more in handling the crisis.

The issue of graves for the victims has become caught up in the ill-feeling. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he sent the navy to raise a ship that sank last year and bury the more than 450 people found in the wreck to “tell Europe which values really count”.

For Mose, whose young son is still in Eritrea, even being sure Yordanos had died would be some comfort. “If I find her body, I can find some serenity,” he said. “If my son asks whether his mother is, at least I can say where she is buried.”

(editing by David Stamp)

Magnitude 5.3 quake in southern Peru kills at least four

LIMA (Reuters) – A 5.3 magnitude earthquake in southern Peru killed at least four people and injured more than two dozen, authorities said on Monday.

At least 40 houses were destroyed by the Sunday quake, the country’s National Civil Defense Institute said on Monday.

The quake, in the Caylloma province of the copper-producing region Arequipa, struck 8 kilometers (5 miles) deep at 9:58 p.m. local time (0258 GMT) on Sunday, the Geophysical Institute of Peru said.

The USGS reported the earthquake as having a 5.4 magnitude.

(Reporting By Mitra Taj; Editing by Bill Trott)

Disaster declared for Louisiana floods that have killed five

Verot School Rd is seen covered in floodwaters in this handout picture taken by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development in Lafayette

By Byrn Stole

BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama issued a disaster declaration on Sunday for flood-ravaged Louisiana, where at least five people have died and emergency crews have rescued more than 7,000 people stranded by historic flooding.

Governor John Bel Edwards said residents had been pulled from swamped cars, flooded homes and threatened hospitals across the southern part of the state. The already soaked region is expected to get more rain from a storm system stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Ohio Valley.

While the brunt of the storm that brought torrential rains was moving west toward Texas, Louisiana residents should remain cautious, the governor said at a news conference.

“Even with the sunshine out today intermittently, the waters are going to continue to rise in many areas, so this is no time to let the guard down,” Edwards said, calling the flooding unprecedented.

Obama issued the disaster declaration after speaking with Edwards, the White House said in a statement.

The initial declaration makes federal aid available in the parishes of East Baton Rouge, Livingston, St. Helena and Tangipahoa. Edwards said in a statement that other parishes could be added to the list.

Emergency officials still were working on strategies to rescue an undetermined number of people trapped by the waters.

“We’re very much still in the search and rescue mode,” said James Waskcom, director of the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

In Livingston Parish, phone service was spotty due to the high waters and most shelters were full. A Greyhound Bus traveling from Memphis, Tennessee, to Baton Rouge was diverted to a shelter because of flooded roadways.

About 5,000 people had been forced to sleep in shelters overnight around the state, said Marketa Walters, head of Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services.

Louisiana State Police Colonel Michael Edmonson said helicopters were transporting food and water to those still trapped by floods. Helicopters also were transporting some seriously ill people to areas outside the high waters.

Some 1,700 members of the Louisiana National Guard have been deployed for rescue efforts.

Even as the state grappled with high waters, the National Weather Service forecast heavy rain from the Gulf Coast as far north as the Ohio Valley through Monday, with a threat of flash flooding.

A flash flood watch was in place until Monday morning for Houston, where rains killed at least eight in late April.

At least five people had died in Louisiana from the high water. Ronda Durbin, a spokeswoman for Tangipahoa Parish, said by telephone that searchers on Sunday recovered the body of a man reported swept away on Friday.

The body of a woman also was recovered from a submerged vehicle in the parish, she said.

On Saturday, the body of a woman was recovered from the Tickfaw River, in St. Helena Parish northeast of Baton Rouge, after a car in which she was riding was swept away.

A 54-year-old man in Greensburg in the northern part of the state died when his vehicle was swept off the road, state police said.

The body of a 68-year-old man was recovered on Friday near Baker after he drowned, said William “Beau” Clark, the coroner in East Baton Rouge Parish.

Another person is also believed missing in St. Helena Parish, Edwards said.

(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington and Laila Kearney and Chris Prentice in New York; Editing by Bill Trott and Richard Chang)

Fourth worker in a year dies at Virginia Goodyear plant

(Reuters) – A worker died at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant at Danville, Virginia, on Friday, the fourth fatality in a year at the site, state officials said.

Goodyear said it had reported the death to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and would cooperate with it.

“Our hearts go out to the family, friends and co-workers of the employee during this very difficult time,” the statement said.

The employee’s identity and the circumstances of the death at the plant about 250 miles southwest of Washington were not announced.

The death at the plant was the fourth since August 2015, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry said. The department has sent a team to the Goodyear site, she said.

Investigations into the previous three deaths have not been concluded, said Ron Graham, health director of the Virginia Occupational Safety and Health Program, which oversees federal workplace rules in the state.

The Virginia agency issued three violations totaling $16,975 in fines in February for the accident last year, according to an inspections report on the OSHA website. Goodyear is contesting the penalties. The other two accidents, prior to Friday, took place this year.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Series of blasts hit resort towns in southern Thailand

Line of police looking for bombs

By Prapan Chankaew

HUA HIN, Thailand (Reuters) – A series of blasts hit three of the most popular tourist resorts as well as towns in southern Thailand on Thursday and Friday, killing four people and wounding dozens, days after the country voted to accept a military-backed charter in a referendum.

Four bombs exploded in the upscale resort of Hua Hin, about 200 km (125 miles) south of Bangkok on Thursday evening and Friday morning, killing two people and wounding at least 24.

Other blasts hit the tourist island of Phuket, a resort town in Phang Nga province, and Surat Thani, a city that is the gateway to islands such as Koh Samui in Thailand’s Gulf.

Hua Hin is home to the Klai Kangwon royal palace, which translates as “Far from Worries Palace”, where King Bhumibol Adulayadej, the world’s longest reigning monarch, and his wife, Queen Sirikit, have often stayed in recent years, until both were hospitalized.

Friday was a public holiday in Thailand to mark the queen’s birthday, which is celebrated as Mother’s Day.

No group has claimed responsibility, though suspicion could fall on groups fighting an insurgency in Muslim-majority provinces in southern Thailand.

SEVEN ATTACKS

Police had intelligence an attack was imminent, but had no precise information on location or timing, national police chief Chakthip Chaijinda told reporters in Bangkok on Friday.

“We just didn’t know which day something would happen,” he said.

Since Sunday’s referendum on the constitution, there have been attacks in seven provinces using improvised explosive devices and firebombs, Chakthip said.

The devices were similar to those used by separatist insurgents in southern Thailand, but that did not conclusively show they were the perpetrators, he said.

Police ruled out any links to international terrorism, as did Thailand’s Foreign Ministry, which said in a statement on Friday: “The incident is not linked to terrorism but is an act of stirring up public disturbance.”

Thai authorities beefed up security at tourism spots, airports and on public transport in Bangkok, while Thai junta chief and Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha expressed frustration about the motives for the attacks.

“Why now when the country is getting better, the economy is getting better, and tourism is getting better? We have to ask why and who did it,” he told reporters.

TRAVEL ADVISORY

The attacks are bad news for Thailand’s tourist sector, which has been one of the few bright spots in a sluggish economy.

Tourism accounts for about 10 percent of gross domestic product and Thailand was expecting a record 32 million visitors this year.

Australia issued a travel advisory saying Australians should “exercise a high degree of caution” and warned: “Further explosions in any part of Thailand are possible.”

Two blasts on Friday morning in Hua Hin came after twin explosions on Thursday. One of those was near a bar in a narrow alley in the town late on Thursday, killing one Thai woman and wounding 21 people, Krisana said.

Ten of those injured in the Hua Hin blasts were foreigners, Krisana said, and eight of them were women.

The two explosions in Hua Hin late on Thursday were detonated by a mobile device, police said. The first took place 20 minutes earlier and about 50 meters from the second, but injured nobody.

Such twin blasts are common in the three Muslim-majority southernmost provinces of Thailand, where a long-running insurgency intensified in 2004, with more than 6,500 people killed since then.

The three provinces near the border with Muslim-majority Malaysia soundly rejected the referendum on the new military-backed constitution, which passed convincingly in most of the rest of the country in Sunday’s vote.

Violence has occasionally spilled over to areas outside the three provinces, which were part of a Malay sultanate until it was annexed by Buddhist-majority Thailand a century ago.

Hua Hin, Phuket and Phang Nga are far from the usual conflict zone, where attacks are typically aimed at the security forces and government representatives, not tourists.

In a separate incident on Friday, media reported two bombs had exploded in the southern province of Surat Thani, killing one person and wounding five. That came after a blast in Trang, also in the south, on Thursday, in which one person died and six were wounded.

No one was killed or seriously wounded on Friday in two blasts in the beach town of Patong on Phuket island or the two explosions in the beach province of Phang Nga. Authorities also defused two explosive devices in Phuket on Wednesday, police said.

The head of Interpol in Thailand, Police Major General Apichat Suriboonya, told Reuters it appears the bombs were meant more to send a message rather than cause death and destruction. “But the thing is, if you observe the bombs, they are not targeted to kill people but to send a message to some groups. It could be a domestic issue.”

Small bombs have been used frequently for attacks during periods of unrest over the past decade of political turmoil but have been rare since the military seized power in a 2014 coup in Thailand.

The latest bombings came almost a year after an attack on a Hindu shrine, crowded with tourists in central Bangkok, killed 20 people and wounded more than 120. Police have accused two ethnic Uighur Muslims from China for the Aug. 17, 2015, attack.

(Additional reporting by Orathai Sriring, Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Panarat Thepgumpanat, Surapan Boonthanom and Kitiphong Thaichareon; Writing by Simon Webb; Editing by Paul Tait and Bill Tarrant.)

Destructive California fire was started by faulty hot tub wiring

A firefighter from the Sonoma Valley Fire & Rescue Authority work on a a hotspot during the Rocky Fire near Clearlake, California

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) – The third most destructive wildfire in California’s recorded history, which killed four people and destroyed more than 1,300 homes and buildings, was started by a spark from an improperly wired hot tub, state fire officials said on Wednesday.

The so-called Valley Fire charred more than 76,000 acres (30,756 hectares) in California’s storied wine country in Napa and Sonoma Counties north of San Francisco last fall, killing among others an elderly disabled woman trapped in her home, injuring four firefighters and costing $56 million to suppress.

On Wednesday, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the blaze started after a copper wire at the poorly connected hot tub heated to 1,981 degrees (1,082 Celsius), melted and set ablaze dry brush that was nearby at a home in the town of Cobb.

According to a report posted online and filed with local prosecutors, homeowner and primary resident John Pinch admitted to investigators that he had installed the circuit that caused the fire.

It was not clear whether charges would be filed against Pinch, who was not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Wildfires kill 4 people on Portugal’s Madeira, 1000 evacuated

A general view of Sitio de Curral dos Romeiros during the wildfires at Funchal, Madeira island, Portugal,

LISBON (Reuters) – At least four people died and more than a thousand were evacuated on the Portuguese island of Madeira when forest fires, raging for a third day, spread to the regional capital and tourist destination, Funchal, authorities said on Wednesday.

Set off in a summer heatwave and fanned by strong winds, the fires have destroyed about 40 homes and a five-star hotel in the hills above Funchal.

On mainland Portugal, thousands of firefighters were still struggling to control hundreds of forest fires – mainly in the north – that have destroyed homes, shut major motorways for hours, and forced the evacuation of several villages this week.

The fire in Funchal was mostly under control, regional governor Miguel Albuquerque told a televised news conference, but several were still raging across the island.

He said 80 people were in hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation, including two in a serious condition.

All those killed and injured by the fires were local residents. One person was missing, Albuquerque said.

More than a thousand residents and tourists were sent to makeshift shelters and army barracks during the night although some had been allowed to return since. Two hospitals in the area were also evacuated.

(Reporting by Andrei Khalip; Editing by Louise Ireland)