Monday, 1 October 2012

Typhoon Jelawat


Typhoon Jelawat hits Japanese mainland, moves toward Tokyo

RT,
30 September

Powerful typhoon Jelawat has made landfall on Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, one day after hitting Okinawa. The typhoon packed winds of up to 126 kilometers per hour as it hit the country’s main island of Honshu.

The typhoon is currently heading toward Tokyo at a speed of 55 kilometers per hour. The city and its surrounding areas have closed shopping areas and canceled dozens of train services.

Officials have instructed tens of thousands of households to evacuate under fears that rivers in the area will overflow, Japanese news agency NHK reported.

The government has warned of potential landslides, and canceled nearly 600 domestic flights.

Hundreds of thousands of residents throughout the country have been left without electricity.

Japan’s Meteorological Agency says that the atmospheric pressure at the center of the storm is currently at 975 hectopascals.

Heavy rainfall is expected along Japan’s Pacific coast, as well as in Tokyo’s Honshu Kanto-Koshinetsu region.

On Saturday, the typhoon wreaked havoc in the southern Okinawa and Kagoshima prefectures off Japan’s southern coast. The storm led to electricity blackouts and caused vehicles to overturn.

The typhoon has left one person dead, one missing, and 145 people injured across Okinawa and 12 other prefectures. Many of those injured were blown over by strong wind gusts or hit with flying objects.

Jelawat is the seventeenth typhoon to hit Japan this season.



Thanks to the Extinction Protocol for the following stories -

Extreme weather wreaks havoc from Spain to Morocco



Residents walk on a muddy street after heavy rain caused flash floods in the town of Villanueva del Rosario, Malaga, southern Spain, Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. Homes were destroyed and at least one woman was killed. Rescue workers are searching to determine if there are more victims.


30 September, 2012
September 29, 2012 – Villanueva Del Trabuco, Spain –  
 
Six people, including a young girl and an elderly woman, died Friday in floods that overturned cars and forced hundreds from their homes in southern Spain, officials said. 
 
At least 600 people had to be evacuated from their homes in the Andalusia province, regional officials said.
 
Early Friday, an octogenarian woman died when a river broke its banks and floodwater swept past her home in Alora, north of Malaga, a regional government spokesman told AFP. 
 
According to provincial officials, two others died later in the same Andalusia region, while another three perished in the neighboring region of Murcia, including a 10-year-old girl. In the village of Villanueva del Trabuco, roads were covered in brown floodwater and teams were working to unearth cars while locals swept the muddy pavements. 
 
“In Malaga province, there are 800 staff working to return things to normal as quickly as possible. The rains are decreasing and seem to be shifting towards Granada and Almeria” further east, Limon said. 
 
The state weather agency AEMET said up to 245 liters (65 gallons) of water per square meter (11 square feet) had fallen in the area in the morning alone. Airports authority AENA said a flight was diverted to Seville as it headed to Malaga, which lies east of the resort city of Marbella on the Costa del Sol, a popular tourist haven. 
 
At least two major highways were closed, authorities said. In the neighboring southeastern region of Murcia, a highway bridge collapsed in the heavy rains, national television TVE reported. 
TD
 
Flooding kills 3 in Morocco
 
Two women and a teenage boy have died in flooding that has plagued Morocco over the past two days, authorities said on Saturday.
 
 A 50-year-old woman, her daughter-in-law and the 14-year-old boy were swept away by flash flooding on Friday in the western region of Safi. 
 
The younger woman was rescued, but later died in hospital in the Atlantic coastal city of Safi, southwest of Rabat. The North African kingdom has been inundated by unseasonal rains and hit by heavy winds since Thursday. 
 
In Agadir, south of Safi, authorities said more than 50 millimeters (about two inches) of rain have fallen since then, a fifth of normal annual precipitation. And the highway linking Safi with Essaouira, further south, was closed to traffic because of the storms.
 -TD


Epic Pakistani floods kill 422 and affects more than 4.7 million



September 29, 2012 – PAKISTAN  
 
Floods resulting from monsoon rains have killed 422 people and left nearly 3,000 injured across Pakistan, a disaster agency spokesman said Saturday. 
 
Some 350,000 people have been forced from their homes and another 4.7 million people affected by the flooding since August 22, Ahmed Kamal of the National Disaster Management Authority said. 
 
More than 15,000 villages have been affected and many houses destroyed or damaged in the past five weeks, he said. Pakistan has suffered a series of devastating inundations, affecting millions of people, in recent years. 
 
Flooding last year killed 470 people and impacted 9.1 million others, Kamal said. In the worst-affected area of Sindh province, in southeastern Pakistan, the waters submerged more than 4.5 million acres of farming land, damaging an estimated 80% of cash crops. Many in the country were at that point barely recovering from massive and deadly flooding in August 2010, which left a fifth of the country submerged by water, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. 
 
Those floods lasted for weeks, affecting more than 20 million people and leaving 1,985 people dead, Kamal said. Much of the land inundated in 2010 was in Punjab province, Pakistan’s breadbasket, where many people live off the soil and their livestock. Great hardship followed for millions in the wake of the flooding.  
-CNN

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