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Tag Archives: rubble
Ghanaian footballer Atsu’s body found under rubble in Turkey quake, agent says – Reuters.com
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Indonesia quake kills scores, reduces homes to rubble, injuring hundreds
CIANJUR, Indonesia, Nov 21 (Reuters) – A 5.6-magnitude earthquake killed more than 60 people and injured hundreds in Indonesia’s West Java province on Monday, with rescuers trying to reach survivors trapped under the rubble amid a series of aftershocks.
The epicentre was near the town of Cianjur in West Java, about 75 km (45 miles) southeast of the capital, Jakarta, where some buildings shook and some offices were evacuated.
Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency (BNPB) said 62 people had been killed. At least 25 people were trapped under collapsed buildings, it said.
BNPB spokesperson Abdul Muhari said the search would continue through the night.
“So many buildings crumbled and shattered,” West Java governor Ridwan Kamil told reporters.
“There are residents trapped in isolated places … so we are under the assumption that the number of injured and deaths will rise with time.”
Indonesia straddles the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a highly seismically active zone, where different plates on the Earth’s crust meet and create a large number of earthquakes and volcanoes.
The BNPB said more than 2,200 houses had been damaged and more than 5,300 people had been displaced.
[1/5] Medical workers treat the victims outside the district hospital after earthquake hit in Cianjur, West Java province, Indonesia, November 21, 2022, in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Antara Foto/Raisan Al Farisi via REUTERS
Electricity was down and disrupting communications efforts, Herman Suherman, head of Cianjur’s government, said, adding that a landslide was blocking evacuations in one area.
Hundreds of victims were being treated in a hospital parking lot, some under an emergency tent. Elsewhere in Cianjur, residents huddled together on mats in open fields or in tents while buildings around them had been reduced almost entirely to rubble.
Officials were still working to determine the full extent of the damage caused by the quake, which struck at a relatively shallow depth of 10 km, according to the weather and geophysics agency (BMKG).
Vani, who was being treated at Cianjur main hospital, told MetroTV that the walls of her house collapsed during an aftershock.
“The walls and wardrobe just fell… Everything was flattened, I don’t even know the whereabouts of my mother and father,” she said.
Within two hours, 25 aftershocks had been recorded, BMKG said, adding there were concerns about more landslides in the event of heavy rain.
In Jakarta, some people evacuated offices in the central business district, while others reported buildings shaking and furniture moving, Reuters witnesses said.
In 2004, a 9.1 magnitude quake off Sumatra island in northern Indonesia triggered a tsunami that struck 14 countries, killing 226,000 people along the Indian Ocean coastline, more than half of them in Indonesia.
Reporting by Tommy Ardiansyah, Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana and Johan Purnomo in Cianjur, Ananda Teresia, Gayatri Suroyo, Fransiska Nangoy in Jakarta
Writing by Ed Davies and Kate Lamb; Editing by Kanupriya Kapoor, Kim Coghill, Toby Chopra and Nick Macfie
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Afghanistan earthquake kills at least 1,000, more trapped in rubble
KABUL, June 22 (Reuters) – The death toll from an earthquake in Afghanistan on Wednesday hit 1,000, disaster management officials said, with more than 600 injured and the toll expected to grow as information trickles in from remote mountain villages.
Houses were reduced to rubble and bodies swathed in blankets lay on the ground after the magnitude 6.1 earthquake, photographs on Afghan media showed.
An unknown number of people remained stuck under rubble and in outlying areas, photos showed. Health and aid workers said rescue operations were complicated by difficult conditions including rains, landslides and many villages being nestled in inaccessible hillside areas.
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“Many people are still buried under the soil. The rescue teams of the Islamic Emirate have arrived and with the help of local people are trying to take out the dead and injured,” a health worker at one of Paktika’s main hospitals said, asking for anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to media.
Mounting a rescue operation will prove a major test for the hard-line Islamist Taliban authorities, who took over the country last August after two decades of war and have been cut off from much international assistance because of sanctions.
A spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) said it was sending teams in addition to ambulances and helicopters sent by the Taliban-led ministry of defence, which was leading rescue efforts.
“Although search and rescue efforts are ongoing, heavy rain and wind is hampering efforts with helicopters reportedly unable to land this afternoon,” he said via email.
“The death toll is likely to rise as some of the villages are in remote areas in the mountains and it will take some time to collect details,” interior ministry official Salahuddin Ayubi said.
DEADLIEST QUAKE IN 20 YEARS
Wednesday’s quake was the deadliest in Afghanistan since 2002. It struck about 44 km (27 miles) from the southeastern city of Khost, near the border with Pakistan, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.
Shaking was felt by about 119 million people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) said on Twitter, but there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties in Pakistan.
People carry injured to a helicopter following a massive earthquake, in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, June 22, 2022, in this screen grab taken from a video. BAKHTAR NEWS AGENCY/Handout via REUTERS
The EMSC put the earthquake’s magnitude at 6.1, though the USGC said it was 5.9.
Most of the confirmed deaths were in the eastern province of Paktika, where 255 people were killed and more than 200 injured, Ayubi added. In the province of Khost, 25 were dead and 90 had been taken to hospital.
Haibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the ruling Taliban, offered his condolences in a statement.
Adding to the challenge for Afghan authorities is recent flooding in many regions, which the disaster agency said had killed 11, injured 50 and blocked stretches of highway.
The disaster comes as Afghanistan grapples with a severe economic crisis since the Taliban took over as U.S.-led international forces withdrew from the country.
In response to the Taliban takeover, many nations imposed sanctions on Afghanistan’s banking sector and cut billions of dollars in development aid.
Humanitarian aid has continued, however, from international agencies such as the United Nations.
A foreign ministry spokesman said the Taliban would welcome international help. Several countries, including neighbouring Pakistan and Iran said they were sending humanitarian aid including food and medicine.
Large parts of South Asia are seismically active because a tectonic plate known as the Indian plate is pushing north into the Eurasian plate. read more
In 2015, an earthquake struck the remote Afghan northeast, killing several hundred people in Afghanistan and nearby northern Pakistan.
In January, an earthquake struck western Afghanistan, killing more than 20 people.
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Reporting by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru and Mohammad Yunus Yawar in Kabul and Jibran Ahmad in Peshawar; Additional reporting by Kabul newsroom, Alasdair Pal in Delhi; Writing by Charlotte Greenfield and Gibran Peshimam; Editing by Robert Birsel, Clarence Fernandez, Angus MacSwan and Lisa Shumaker
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Theresa Velasquez identified as the voice in Surfside condo collapse rubble
The question of her identity remained a sobering loose end for the fire department for months after the disaster. Officials now say the woman was Theresa Velasquez, a 36-year-old music executive from Los Angeles who was visiting her parents. Julio Cesar Velasquez, 67, and his wife, Angela Maria, 60 — who lived in unit 304 — also died in the collapse.
Velasquez spent much of her career in the music industry, the Miami Herald reported. After going to NYU to earn her master’s in music business, she went on to work for a few record labels. She eventually landed at Live Nation, where she worked for six years and was the senior vice president of strategic partnerships. Throughout her career, Velasquez worked to create more visibility and inclusivity for the LGBTQ community in the music industry, according to the Herald. In 2020, Billboard included her on its top executives list for Pride Month.
Following her death, colleagues in the music industry praised Velasquez for her work. Tracy Young, a producer, DJ and composer, said Velasquez was integral to the music communities in Miami, New York and Los Angeles.
“I feel I lost a sister and don’t understand why you were taken so young, with your whole life ahead of you,” she wrote in a Facebook tribute to Velasquez. “I enjoyed watching another female DJ take over the DJ and music community. … Your talent and spirit has touched many and we will never forget!”
The fire department’s findings, first reported by WFOR, refute a USA Today network reporter’s account of the rescue attempt, which identified the victim as Valeria Barth — a 14-year-old who was in the unit directly below the Velasquez family. The new report from Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, dated April 25, is based on “testimonial and physical evidence,” Deputy Fire Chief Raied S. Jadallah wrote.
A spokeswoman for Gannett, which owns USA Today, said the company is “reviewing the new report from MDFR.”
“The facts and the sourcing in our story are clear. We have no additional comment at this time,” she added in a statement to The Washington Post.
Responders on the scene gave differing accounts about the voice they heard coming from under the rubble. Some reported hearing the person say she was from unit 204, while others recalled hearing 304. Barth and her family had been visiting from Colombia and were staying in unit 204.
“[It] was challenging to hear the woman because of the distance,” the report from Miami-Dade Fire Rescue states, adding that rescue crews said they could communicate with her only “when all operations ceased, and everyone was silenced.”
“Even the faintest whisper from the rescue crews or sloshing in the standing water negated any ability to hear the woman,” the report adds.
In describing the voice, rescuers also noted that the woman spoke English with no accent. Video footage of Velasquez reviewed by officials matched her speaking style, the report says.
Barth’s native language is Spanish, the report notes.
The voice also sounded as if it belonged to an adult, rescuers said. Additionally, the person said she was visiting her parents and “remained calm when communicating with the rescuers,” according to the report.
Emergency responders finally found and extricated Velasquez’s body on July 8, two weeks after the collapse.
Velasquez’s brother, David, told WFOR that he accepts the findings from the report.
“There is no way to know 100 percent,” he said, “but it seems like the logical conclusion.”
Bodies, rubble line the streets of Bucha outside Kyiv following Russian retreat
As the driver weaves between bodies, burned out cars and fallen trees, a narrator says: “If you say that Russian soldiers are people …” and then adds, “simply for general understanding of what happened here.”
Additional video posted to social media Saturday shows two men driving through the city. They pass abandoned cars, some of which appear to have been stripped for parts. Debris, tires and old antitank blockades crowd the roads. At one point, as they round a corner, two severely damaged black cars are visible. The word “STOP” is painted on both in English in big, bold white lettering.
Russian forces withdrew from Bucha, a town of 37,000 northwest of Kyiv, and other suburbs of the capital in recent days, leaving a trail of destruction. Russian troops fought for control of Bucha starting on Feb. 27 — three days after the invasion began — and “relentless shelling” trapped residents in homes and shelters without electricity or gas, according to Human Rights Watch. The fighting took out the city’s water tower a week later.
Human Rights Watch interviewed residents who described Russian soldiers looting houses and recounted hearing reports of civilians being shot while attempting to get water. One woman said Russian soldiers had threatened to shoot her if she tried to retrieve her husband’s body.
Journalists on the ground in Bucha on Saturday recounted seeing bodies strewn across streets. The bodies of at least 20 men in civilian clothes were lying on a single street, and one had his hands tied, Agence France-Presse journalists reported. The cause of death was not immediately apparent, AFP said, though one body appeared to have a large head wound.
Reporters from the Associated Press counted six bodies of civilians along a street and in the front yard of a house.
AFP described the bodies as displaying indications, including waxy skin and dark nails, that the people had been dead for several days at least.
Bucha’s mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, told The Post by phone that around 270 local residents had been buried in two mass graves. He also said that about 40 people were lying in the streets but that it was difficult to get a count. Some of the bodies had their hands bound or were shot in the back of the head, he said.
Fedoruk said the bodies would not be touched until security services determine that they are not rigged with explosive devices.
“Until the special services give us an answer to the question of whether we can safely bury them according to Christian custom, we can’t handle the bodies,” he said.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of mining bodies and civilian buildings as they retreated from Bucha and other suburbs of Kyiv. In a video address to Ukrainians early Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia was “mining the whole territory.”
“They are mining homes, mining equipment, even the bodies of people who were killed,” he said.
The Post could not verify those claims.
Asked whether the bodies found around Bucha included Russian soldiers, Fedoruk said that “hundreds of Russian soldiers” were “sleeping eternally” in the region and that Ukrainian authorities would contact the soldiers’ families and close contacts to inform them of their deaths.
AP PHOTOS on Day 35: Scouring rubble of destroyed homes
By The Associated Press
In a village on the outskirts of Kyiv, residents sift through the rubble of their destroyed homes, searching for buried personal items. Serhiy Malyshenko, a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, holds his military medals, charred black from the shelling by Russian forces.
Soldiers and other personnel comfort distraught Ukrainian seniors evacuated from Irpin, a key suburb northwest of the capital that has seen heavy fighting, as they arrive at an assistance center in the village of Yasnohorodka.
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At a private zoo in the village, workers and soldiers attempt to evacuate the surviving animals, wrangling ostriches and carrying a stressed pony to a truck. They were forced to halt when shelling resumed between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the area.
On Wednesday, Russian forces bombarded areas around Kyiv just hours after pledging to scale back operations to promote trust between the two sides, Ukrainian authorities said.
130 people have been rescued from bombed Mariupol theater, but hundreds still under the rubble
United States Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield slammed Russia’s attempts to lie about allegations of biological weapons in Ukraine once again Friday morning.
“As I said one week ago, Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program. There are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories – not near Russia’s border, not anywhere. There are only public health facilities, proudly, and I say proudly, supported and recognized by the US government, the World Health Organization, and other governments and international institutions,” Thomas-Greenfield said in prepared remarks to the UN Security Council.
Ukrainian and US officials have repeatedly debunked claims of US-supported biological programs in Ukraine.
Friday’s emergency session was called by Russia after they announced Thursday that they would not call for a vote on their humanitarian draft resolution on Ukraine.
Thomas-Greenfield instead said “it is Russia that has a well-documented history of using chemical weapons” and that Friday’s meeting is ‘the result of their isolation on this Council and on the world stage.”
“We aren’t going to dignify Russia’s disinformation or conspiracy theories,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “I will not repeat the slurs and false accusations that Russia has hurled against the Ukrainian people and the United States repeatedly at this table. But we know that Russia’s disinformation is a sign of its desperation. That’s the truth, and we will continue to ensure the world sees it and hears it.”
Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia claimed Friday that new details show evidence of US-supported biological weapons in Ukraine.
“Over the last week, new details have come to light which allows to state that the components for biological weapons were being created on the territory of Ukraine,” Nebenzia said in translated remarks to the council. “We can see that the American colleagues were not helping, as they claim, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, but rather the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.”
Nebenzia claimed that a new document distributed to the council Friday morning “confirms direct funding and supervision of the Pentagon and its defense threat reduction agency of military and biological projects in Ukraine.”
“The representative of the US State Department continue to muddle the information and ascertain that US allegedly does not operate in any biological laboratories in the territory of Ukraine, but the facts show otherwise,” the Russian ambassador claimed.
More context: There are US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, but they are not building bioweapons. Actually, it’s the opposite: Part of the reason for their creation was to secure old Soviet weapons left behind in the former Soviet republics. The State Department has described the claims as nonsense — and the US and Ukrainian governments have repeatedly, and for years now, tried to bat down conspiracy theories about the labs and spoken about the work that is actually being done in them.
Russia’s falsehoods about labs like this have not been limited to Ukraine, and the country has been pushing various bits of disinformation about the US and biological weapons since the Cold War.
CNN’s Kiely Westhoff and Donie O’Sullivan contributed reporting to this post.
Survivors emerge from rubble of Mariupol theater bombed by Russia
Hundreds of people were thought to have taken shelter in the theater amid the ongoing Russian siege of Mariupol. Hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in the coastal city and as many as 2,500 civilians have died in Mariupol, Ukrainian officials estimate.
“After an awful night of not knowing, we finally have good news from Mariupol on the morning of the 22nd day of the war. The bomb shelter [of the theatre] was able to hold. The rubble is beginning to be cleared. People are coming out alive,” the former Donetsk region head Sergei Taruta wrote in a Facebook post Thursday.
It was not yet clear whether all those who sheltered in the theater had survived.
After the bombing on Wednesday, Mariupol City Council shared an image of the building and said Russian forces had “purposefully and cynically destroyed the Drama Theater in the heart of Mariupol.”
CNN has geolocated the image and confirmed it is of the theater in the southeastern port city. The word “children” was spelled out on two sides of the theater before it was bombed, according to satellite images.
Ukraine’s Minister of Defense Oleskii Reznikov said on Thursday that the Russian who carried out the bombing was a “monster,” and stressed the presence of children in the building.
“You’ve probably already heard that this theater which was struck by missiles, a theater where 1,200 women and children were hiding,” Reznikov told the European Parliament via video link.
“And you can see from the maps, from the drones that around this theater, big letters of ‘children’ were written so that the pilot of the plane which was throwing the bombs could see ‘children’, and still, in spite of that, this monster has bombed the theater.”
Maxim Kach, a Mariupol city government official, said the building was for civilians, with only women and young children hiding within it and not military personnel, while an adviser to the government said it was the largest shelter in Mariupol.
Residents who escaped the city told CNN conditions were “unbearable” and “hell,” with constant shelling, reports of people being held captive in a hospital and residents left without water, electricity or heat.
Victoria Butenko reported from Lviv. James Frater reported from Brussels. Jeevan Ravindran wrote from London.
Surfside building collapse latest: 4 more bodies recovered from rubble, bringing death toll to 32
“We’re not seeing anything positive,” the fire chief told reporters.
At least 32 people, including three children, have been confirmed dead and 113 others remain unaccounted for since a 12-story residential building partially collapsed in South Florida’s Miami-Dade County last month.
The disaster occurred on June 24 around 1:15 a.m. local time at the Champlain Towers South condominium in the small, beachside town of Surfside, about 6 miles north of Miami Beach. Approximately 55 of the oceanfront complex’s 136 units were destroyed, according to officials. Since then, hundreds of first responders have been carefully combing through the pancaked piles of debris in hopes of finding survivors.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced Tuesday morning that four more bodies were recovered from the rubble, bringing the official death toll to 32. Twenty-six of the victims have been identified so far.
Meanwhile, investigators have confirmed that 70 of the 113 people who are still missing were in fact inside of the condominium at the time of the partial collapse. Another 191 people who were living or staying in the building at that time have been accounted for and are safe, according to Levine Cava, who has stressed that the figures are “very fluid” and “will continue to change” as detectives continuously audit the list.
Although officials wouldn’t say when the search and rescue operation will formally transition into a recovery mission, Levine Cava told reporters that the crews will “continue as now to thoroughly, carefully sift through these piles,” looking for “bodies and belongings.” The process is a “very thorough and exhaustive” one, she said.
Crews have hauled away nearly 5 million pounds of concrete from the vast scene of wreckage, but large piles of rubble still remain. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Alan Cominsky said the rescue workers have been “aggressively” searching for any voids or “liveable spaces” within the debris where there could be trapped survivors but that they are “not coming across that.” No survivors have been discovered in the wreckage of the building since the morning it partially collapsed.
“We’re not seeing anything positive,” Cominsky told reporters on Tuesday morning.
The massive search and rescue mission is now in its 13th day, as teams are able to operate at full capacity and search in areas that were previously inaccessible.
The part of the building that remained standing was cleared of any people or pets before it was demolished on Sunday night, due to concerns about its structural integrity. However, it was too dangerous for surviving residents to enter the building to retrieve their belongings, officials said.
Video released by the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue on Monday night showed crews working atop the piles, braving the elements as Tropical Storm Elsa approached the Sunshine State.
The incoming storm, which has weakened from a hurricane, initiated the discussion about demolishing the rest of the building and fast-tracked the process, according to Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett. Elsa made landfall in Cuba on Monday and by Tuesday morning the storm’s center was moving through Key West with maximum sustained winds of 60 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service.
Prior to the demolition, the search and rescue operation was halted for almost an entire day last week due to safety concerns for the crews regarding the remaining structure. Poor weather conditions have also forced them to temporarily pause working.
The cause of the partial collapse to a building that has withstood decades of hurricanes remains unknown and is under investigation. Built in the 1980s, the Champlain Towers South was up for its 40-year recertification and had been undergoing roof work — with more renovations planned — when it partially collapsed, according to officials.
“The whole world wants to know what happened here,” Levine Cava told reporters on Tuesday morning. “I look forward to learning the truth, as do we all, but I think it’ll be a while before it is understood.”