Tag Archives: Survivors

Israel’s Nova massacre site was “where the juxtaposition between good and evil is most apparent”

Nova music festival memorial

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘The pain will never leave’: Nova massacre survivors return to site one year on
  • As mourners gathered at the site of the Nova music festival to commemorate the victims of Hamas’s attack one year ago, low sobs and murmured prayers were punctuated by the sound of artillery being fired by soldiers into nearby Gaza.
  • Relatives gathered around the homemade memorials to the estimated 365 people killed at the festival on that day in 2023, while attack helicopters whirred overhead and occasionally let loose bursts of automatic gunfire toward Gaza, only three miles away from the festival site in Re’im, southern Israel.
  • Police had before the ceremony warned attenders that if they heard a siren, they had just seconds to drop to the ground before a rocket from Hamas could hit.
  • “Many relatives still come here to try to hug the ground and feel the warmth that remains from their relatives. It’s a pain that will never leave them.”
  • Noa Tishby, an Israeli activist and actor, said the Nova site was “where the juxtaposition between good and evil is most apparent”. “That’s really close,” she said, as another artillery round was fired off toward Gaza.
  • Many of the families said they strongly supported the Israeli response in Gaza. Few could predict how or when the war would end.

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US sending aid to Japan after earthquake that shifted Japan seaward by 820 feet

Japan-Earthquake-survivor

Important Takeaways:

  • Japan earthquake death toll rises to 94 with dozens still missing
  • The US has pledged $100,000 in aid for blankets, water and medical supplies
  • Despite rescue efforts, the death toll Friday grew to at least 94 people, and the number of missing was lowered to 222 after it shot up the previous day.
  • More than 460 people have been injured, at least 24 seriously.
  • The Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo found that the sandy coastline in western Japan shifted by up to 250 meters (820 feet) seaward in some places.
  • The earthquakes set off a large fire in the town of Wajima, as well as tsunamis and landslides in the region. With some routes cut off by the destruction, worries grew about communities in which water, food, blankets and medicine had yet to arrive.
  • Experts warned of disease and even death at the evacuation centers that now house about 34,000 people who lost their homes, many of them older.

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Syria and Turkey are still searching for survivors as earthquake labeled deadliest in nearly two decades

Mathew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

Important Takeaways:

  • Earthquakes that killed thousands in Syria and Turkey are world’s deadliest in nearly two decades
  • As of Feb. 16, ten days after the initial 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the region, more than 41,000 people are known to have died. That earthquake was only the start of the growing disaster, with another 5.7 magnitude quake hitting the following day and hundreds of aftershocks in between.
  • The earthquakes are the deadliest to occur in the world since a massive 2005 quake in Pakistan killed more than 70,000 people.
  • In 2011, nearly 20,000 people were killed after a 9.0 quake off of Japan’s coast triggered a tsunami.
  • And the year before [2010] that, a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti devastated the capital city, Port au Prince, with a death toll estimated at 200,000 or more.
  • 2018 in Indonesia at least 4,340 people were killed by the earthquake and its torrential aftermath, including at least 1,200 in the tsunami

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Rescue Operations still underway in Turkey and Syria as Operation Blessing arrives for relief effort

Turkey Quake

Mathew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘Keep Praying’: Survivors Still Being Found in Quake Rubble, Operation Blessing Relief Effort Underway
  • Rescuers are still finding some survivors amid the rubble… in Turkey and Syria. It’s the worst natural disaster in Turkey’s history with at least 35,500 now known to be dead. Nearly 32,000 of those people died in Turkey with at least 3,500 more in Syria.
  • The destruction zone in Turkey after those two massive earthquakes and dozens of aftershocks is stunning in its magnitude. As a comparison, it is the same size as the area north of New York City all the way to the south of Washington D.C., including New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware and part of Pennsylvania.
  • Diego Traverso, Operation Blessing’s international director of disaster relief, says the ministry is rushing to meet needs as quickly as possible.
  • “We want to be in the center of the action where the people need it, where, not only the people that are suffering… Keep praying for us, keep praying for the victims, keep praying for our volunteers, for our teams we’re deploying right now. Our experts are gonna be arriving in the next couple hours, water engineer, doctor, health team… the health is so needed.”

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Hopes fade of finding survivors of Nigeria high-rise collapse as toll rises

By Fikayo Owoeye

LAGOS (Reuters) – Hopes are fading of finding survivors four days after a high-rise apartment block building under construction collapsed and trapped scores of people in the Nigerian commercial capital of Lagos, officials said.

Ibrahim Farinloye, head of the national emergency unit in Lagos, said the death toll stood at 36. The Lagos state emergency agency put the casualty number at 29 and said eight people had been critically injured.

Large crowds, including anxious family members, have been gathering daily near the site of the collapse, now a pile of broken masonry and mangled steel.

Lagos governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Thursday said a six-member panel of engineers, architects and town planers had been appointed to “bring closure to this event and ensure that justice is served”.

The panel has a month to present its findings.

Building collapses are frequent in Africa’s most populous country, where regulations are poorly enforced and construction materials often substandard.

Phone numbers for the project owner, main contractor, project manager, structural engineers and architects listed near the collapsed building could not be reached when Reuters called on Thursday.

The collapsed building, in the affluent neighborhood of Ikoyi, was one of three planned high-end apartment blocks.

Moshood Adesola, a witness who works in a nearby office, told Reuters that more than 50 people worked at the site daily.

(Additional reporting by Lanre Ola in Maiduguri; Writing by Chijioke Ohuocha; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Germany counts cost of floods as hopes of finding survivors fade

By Kirsti Knolle and Riham Alkousaa

BERLIN (Reuters) – A relief official dampened hopes on Wednesday of finding more survivors in the rubble of villages devastated by floods in western Germany, as a poll showed many Germans felt policymakers had not done enough to protect them.

More than 170 people died in last week’s flooding, Germany’s worst natural disaster in more than half a century, and thousands went missing.

“We are still looking for missing persons as we clear roads and pump water out of basements,” Sabine Lackner, deputy chief of the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW), told Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland.

Any victims found now are likely to be dead, she said.

One woman in Insul, in the rural Eifel region, said people had emerged from their houses like ghosts last week to see whether their neighbors were alive. In the Ahrweiler district, of which Insul is part, 123 people died.

For immediate relief, the federal government will initially provide up to 200 million euros ($235.5 million) in emergency aid, and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said more funds can be made available if needed.

That will come on top of at least 250 million euros provided by the affected states to repair buildings and damaged local infrastructure and to help people in crisis situations.

Scholz said the government would contribute to the cost of rebuilding infrastructure such as roads and bridges. The full extent of the damage is not clear, but Scholz said that rebuilding after previous floods cost about 6 billion euros.

PUBLIC CRITICISM

The floods have dominated the political agenda before a national election in September and raised uncomfortable questions about why Europe’s richest economy was caught flat-footed.

Two-thirds of Germans believe that federal and regional policymakers should have done more to protect communities from flooding, a survey by the INSA institute for German mass-circulation paper Bild showed on Wednesday.

Interior minister Horst Seehofer, who faced calls from opposition politicians to resign over the high death toll, said there would be no shortage of money for reconstruction.

“That is why people pay taxes, so that they can receive help in situations like this. Not everything can be insured,” he told a news conference.

Insured losses from the floods may total 4 billion to 5 billion euros ($4.7-5.9 billion), said the GDV insurance industry association. Damage in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate is likely to exceed the 4.65 billion euros recorded after a deluge in August 2002, it said.

The estimate does not include losses from the southern German state of Bavaria and in Saxony in the east last weekend.

Only around 45% of homeowners in Germany have insurance that covers flood damage, according to the GDV, triggering a discussion about the need for compulsory insurance.

“As the time interval between heavy natural disasters gets shorter and shorter, one needs a debate about a protection scheme and how it could be designed,” Seehofer said.

Economy Minister Peter Altmaier told Deutschlandfunk radio aid would include funds to help businesses such as restaurants or hair salons make up for lost revenue.

($1 = 0.8490 euros)

(Writing by Maria Sheahan, Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Death toll in Miami condo collapse rises to 46

By Brad Brooks

SURFSIDE, Fla. (Reuters) -Search and rescue workers on Wednesday recovered 10 more bodies from the rubble of an apartment block outside Miami that collapsed last month, bringing the death toll to 46, as hopes faded that any of the 94 people still unaccounted for would be found alive.

The effort to locate survivors of the Champlain Towers South building continued in warm, dry conditions with the threat from Tropical Storm Elsa, battering the opposite side of Florida, having receded.

Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told a briefing that in addition to the 46 confirmed dead, 94 others who may have been inside the building in Surfside when it partially collapsed on June 24 were still unaccounted for.

Levine Cava, who shed tears as she repeated her remarks in Spanish, said the rescue effort had been made easier by the planned demolition on Sunday night of the half of building that had remained standing.

“The team continues to make progress in the areas of the pile that was inaccessible prior to the demolition,” Levine Cava said.

As she spoke, a new shift of workers walked by in small groups, wearing clean uniforms and not sharing a word with each other, while a group leaving the rubble pile looked exhausted and were drenched in sweat.

Though local officials say they have not given up hope of finding survivors, no one has been discovered alive in the rubble since the first few hours after the building came down.

Asked about whether continuing the search was giving families false hope, Levine Cava said: “They are being supported to come to closure as soon as possible.”

(reporting by Brad Brooks and Franciso Alvarado; additional reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; editing by Jonathan Oatis and John Stonestreet)

Rescuers still hope for survivors as death toll in Florida collapse hits 10

By Gabriella Borter

SURFSIDE, Fla. (Reuters) -Rescue workers pulled a 10th body from the rubble of a collapsed Florida condominium on Monday, as officials vowed to keep searching for any possible survivors five days after the 12-story building fell without warning as residents slept.

Crews were using cranes, dogs and infrared scans as they looked for signs of life amid the ruins, hoping air pockets may have formed underneath the concrete that could be keeping some people alive.

“We’re going to continue and work ceaselessly to exhaust every possible options in our search,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told a news briefing.

The death toll appears certain to rise, and Levine Cava acknowledged the number of casualties is “fluid.” There are 151 people still unaccounted for.

The cause of the collapse at the Champlain Towers South in Surfside, near Miami, remains under investigation.

A 2018 engineer’s report found serious concrete deterioration in the underground parking garage as well as major damage in the concrete slab beneath the pool deck. The author, Frank Morabito, wrote the deterioration would “expand exponentially” if it was not repaired in the near future.

But Ross Prieto, then Surfside’s top building official, met residents the following month after reviewing the report and assured them the building was “in very good shape,” according to minutes of the meeting released by the town on Monday.

Reuters was unable to reach Prieto, who is no longer employed by Surfside. He told the Miami Herald newspaper he did not remember getting the report.

The engineer’s report was commissioned in advance of the condo seeking recertification, a required process for buildings that reach 40 years of age. The tower was constructed in 1981. An estimate prepared by Morabito Consultants in 2018 put the cost of repairs at $9.1 million, including electrical, plumbing and work on the façade.

After the meeting, Prieto emailed the town’s manager to say it “went very well. The response was very positive from everyone in the room. All main concerns over their forty year recertification process were addressed.”

Guillermo Olmedillo, Surfside’s town manager in 2018, told Reuters he did not recall hearing about any issues related to the tower based on the engineer’s report.

“The last thing I knew was that everything is OK, reported by the building official,” he said.

Gregg Schlesinger, a lawyer and former general contractor who specializes in construction-failure cases, said it was clear the deficiencies identified in the 2018 report were the main cause of the disaster.

But Donna DiMaggio Berger, a lawyer who works with the condo association, said the issues were typical for older buildings in the area and did not alarm board members, all of whom lived in the tower with their families.

Morabito Consultants was retained by the building in 2020 to prepare a 40-year building repair plan.

The firm said on Saturday that roof repairs were underway at the time of the collapse but concrete restoration had not yet started.

“We are deeply troubled by this building collapse and are working closely with the investigating authorities to understand why the structure failed,” it said.

Levine Cava vowed officials will “get to the bottom” of why the building collapsed but said the priority right now is searching for survivors.

‘TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE’

Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah said workers have found voids large enough to keep victims alive.

“Not to say that we have see anyone down there, but we’ve not gotten to the very bottom,” he said.

He said searchers have heard some sounds, such as tapping of scratching, though he acknowledged it could be metal shifting. But he emphasized that there is no set amount of time after which the rescue effort should cease.

The teams include experts sent by Israel and Mexico to assist in the search.

Some relatives of those missing have provided DNA samples to officials, and family members were permitted to pay a private visit to the site by special arrangement on Sunday, Levine Cava said.

The police have identified eight victims, including a couple married for nearly 60 years and a mother whose teenage son is one of the few known survivors.

At a makeshift memorial a block away, tributes to the victims and “missing” posters hung on a chain-link fence, with flowers and children’s toys strewn about.

Given the scores of those still missing, the disaster may end up one of the deadliest non-deliberate structural failures in U.S. history.

Ninety-eight people perished when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington, D.C., gave way from the weight of snow during a silent movie screening in January 1922. Two interior walkways collapsed into the lobby of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, during a dance party in July 1981, killing 114.

(Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien, Brad Heath, Peter Szekely and Kanishka Singh; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Alistair Bell)

Vaccine protects COVID-19 survivors against variants; virus’ spike protein damages blood vessels

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Vaccine protects COVID-19 survivors against variants

In COVID-19 survivors, the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine protects not only against the original virus strain but also against worrisome variants, two studies show. UK researchers analyzed immune responses after a single dose of the vaccine in 51 people, including 25 people previously infected with an early version of the novel coronavirus. Survivors showed enhanced antibody responses against the newer, more infectious variants first seen in the UK and South Africa, whereas people who had not previously been infected did not produce antibodies that could neutralize the variants, according to a report on Friday in Science. Separately, U.S researchers studied 30 people after two doses of the vaccine. Immune responses were 3.4 times better at neutralizing the coronavirus in the 10 COVID-19 survivors than in the 20 who were not previously infected, they reported on medRxiv on Thursday ahead of peer review. The difference was even greater when looking at neutralization of new variants from the UK, South Africa and Brazil, said coauthor Fikadu Tafesse of Oregon Health & Science University. “For example, the South African variant, which is the best at evading neutralizing antibodies, was 6.5 times better blocked,” or neutralized, in blood samples from people who were vaccinated after infection, he said. “Our findings give people another reason to go out and get vaccinated even if they have already had COVID-19.”

COVID-19 spike protein damages blood vessels

The “spike” proteins that the coronavirus uses to help it break into cells inflicts other damage as well, according to a new study that shines a spotlight on the many ways COVID-19 attacks organs other than the lungs. The spike proteins themselves cause direct damage to the cells that line the blood vessels, scientists found in test tube experiments using an engineered version of the spike and artery-lining cells obtained from mice. After attaching itself to the ACE2 protein on healthy cells, the spike disrupts signaling from ACE2 to the mitochondria – the cell’s energy-generating structures – causing the mitochondria to become damaged, researchers reported on Friday in Circulation Research. COVID-19 is really a disease of the blood vessels, coauthor Uri Manor of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California said in a statement. The new findings could help explain the blood clots associated with COVID-19. They could also explain “why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body,” Manor said. “The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.”

Cancer screenings in U.S. plummeted during pandemic

Nearly 10 million screenings for three common cancers were missed in the U.S. because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study suggests. Researchers who compared monthly spring and summer screening rates in 2020 to rates in 2018 and 2019 found a 90.8% decline in breast cancer screening, a 79.3% decline in colorectal cancer screening and a 63.4% decline in prostate cancer screening just in the month of April 2020, researchers reported on Thursday in JAMA Oncology. “There was a deficit of 9.4 million in screening for the three major cancers across the United States that was most likely related to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said coauthor Dr. Ronald Chen of the University of Kansas Cancer Center in Kansas City. “This is a deficit we have to make up for in 2021.” One bit of good news from the study: telehealth visits seemed to be associated with getting cancer screenings back on track. Healthcare teams that could reach patients through telehealth “were able to come up with a plan for screening,” Chen said. “This emphasizes the importance of telehealth and the importance of continuing it after the pandemic is over.”

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid and Linda Carroll; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Rescuers hunt for survivors after cyclone kills 119 in Indonesia

By Agustinus Beo Da Costa

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Rescuers searched for dozens missing in the remote islands of southeast Indonesia on Tuesday, as reinforcements arrived to help in the aftermath of a tropical cyclone that killed at least 119 people.

Helicopters were deployed to aid the search, and ships carrying food, water, blankets and medicine reached ports previously blocked by high waves whipped up by tropical cyclone Seroja, which brought heavy rain and triggered deadly floods and landslides on Sunday.

Indonesia’s disaster agency BNPB revised upwards the death toll from the cyclone in the East Nusa Tenggara islands, after earlier saying 86 had died. Seventy-six people were still missing.

“The rescue team is moving on the ground. The weather is good,” BNPB spokesman Raditya Jati told a news briefing.

Search and rescue personnel, however, had trouble transporting heavy equipment for use in the search.

“Search for victims is constrained, the existing heavy equipment cannot be sent to their destination, especially in Adonara and Alor,” the head of BNPB, Doni Monardo, said.

The Adonara and Alor islands were among the islands worst hit by the cyclone, with 62 and 21 people dead respectively.

Aerial images from Adonara on Tuesday showed brown mud and flood water covering a vast area, burying houses, roads and trees.

The military and volunteers arrived on the islands on Tuesday and were setting up public kitchens, while medical workers were brought in.

Video taken by a local official in Tanjung Batu village on Lembata, home to the Ile Lewotolok volcano, showed felled trees and large rocks of cold lava that had crushed homes after being dislodged by the cyclone.

Thousands of people have been displaced, nearly 2,000 buildings including a hospital were impacted, and more than 100 homes heavily damaged by the cyclone.

Two people died in nearby West Nusa Tenggara province.

There were also concerns about possible COVID-19 infections in crowded evacuation centers.

In neighboring East Timor, at least 33 were killed in floods and landslides and by falling trees. Civil defense authorities were using heavy equipment to search for survivors.

“The number of victims could still increase because many victims have not been found,” the main director of civil protection, Ismael da Costa Babo, told Reuters.

“They were buried by landslides and carried away by floods.”

Some residents of Lembata island may have also been washed away by mud into the sea.

A volcano that erupted on Lembata last month wiped out vegetation atop the mountain, which allowed hardened lava to slide towards 300 houses when the cyclone struck, a senior district official said, hoping help was on the way.

“We were only able to search on the seashore, not in the deeper area, because of lack of equipment yesterday,” Thomas Ola Langoday told Reuters by phone.

He feared many bodies were still buried under large rocks.

President Joko Widodo urged his cabinet to speed up evacuation and relief efforts and to restore power.

Weather agency head Dwikorita Karnawati said once-rare tropical cyclones were happening more often in Indonesia and climate change could be to blame.

“Seroja is the first time we’re seeing tremendous impact because it hit the land. It’s not common,” she said.

(Reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa, Stanley Widianto and Bernadette Christina Munthe in Jakarta and Nelson Da Cruz in Dili; Writing by Gayatri Suroyo and Fathin Ungku; Editing by Martin Petty, Tom Hogue and Bernadette Baum)