George: Witfontein 'a disaster waiting to happen'

GEORGE NEWS - "The Witfontein Forest, in its current degraded state, is posing a fire hazard and is a disaster waiting to happen."

So said Patch Bonkemeyer, CEO of Cape Pine, on Friday during an interview with the George Herald. He added, "The Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) was quite right in warning the Department of Agriculture, Fo-restry and Fisheries (DAFF) to get their house in order, and to immediately start maintaining fire breaks and prune their pine plantations."

Runaway fires
Industry players and the Eden Disaster Management recently issued similar warnings about the fire hazard situation. What makes the situation so precarious is that this state owned forest is situated right on the borders of George, and the annual warm August 'berg winds' can fuel runaway fires.

In 2005 Eden Disaster Management's fire crew had to fight a desperate battle to keep the flames from engulfing the northern and eastern suburbs of George.

Bonkemeyer was reacting to a report in last week's issue of the George Herald in which the repercussions of ignoring the degraded state of Witfontein was printed. The report highlighted a directive issued to the DAFF by Ishaam Abader, the environmental management inspector of the DEA, on 26 June stating that the failure to halt alien infestation at Witfontein has further aggravated the fuel loading.

"It would appear that the DAFF is in non-compliance with the provision of the National Environmental Management Act (Nema) in that there is a failure to prune or thin the plantation thus presenting a significant fire risk, especially considering the amount of dead undergrowth." Abader warned that the necessary 'enforcement actions' would be taken if the directive is not adhered to.

Mismanagement
But the state of dereliction at Witfontein, as spelt out by Abader, (the fuel loading and inaccessibility 'presents a clear hazard to the safety of the inhabitants of George and surroundings') is not the only crisis. Bonkemeyer sketched a grave situation about the economic effect of the absence of managing the local state forest. "The 360ha Witfontein Forest is on the brink of becoming totally unviable as a commercial forest."

When the Western Cape Regional Manager Susan Steyn and her head, Cyril Ndou, the DAFF director of forest management in Pretoria, were contacted by the George Herald for a response they stated that the directive had not reached them. The deputy director, Dr Nthabiseng Motete, was not available for a comment a week ago. Bonkemeyer said he wants to emphasise that Steyn and Ndou are both of good will, but they just don't have the resources to properly manage the forests.

Sound
In closing, Bonkemeyer said, "Make no mistake. I came here to put Cape Pine on a sound financial footing and it certainly is. We have contracts with Tsitsikamma to keep the sawmill going and have tendered for more contracts upcountry." Bonkemeyer and his wife are returning to Washington to be with their children. A successor has not been named yet.

22 000 ha lie fallow
In a George Herald report last April the DAFF announced it was determining a strategy to re-commission forestry in a competitive and sustainable manner in the Boland and George areas. It would now seem that the 22 000ha in those two areas have continued to lie fallow.

Cape Pine, which is majority owned by a US based investment firm Global Environment Fund (GEF) (formerly Safcol and MTO), has been managing the Southern and Eastern Cape plantations (excluding the Witfontein areas, in accordance) with a lease agreement with the DAFF. The Outeniqua plantation stretches from Garcia plantation near Riversdale to Kruisfontein in Knysna where Pinus radiata and Pinus elliotti pine trees species are grown on rotation. The George Sawmill is the primary mill serving this area where wood destined for the building trade and furniture industry is processed.

ARTICLE: PAULINE LOURENS, GEORGE HERALD JOURNALIST

Global disasters cause losses of $140bn

Zurich - Natural and man-made disasters caused $140bn of damage worldwide last year, according to a study released on Wednesday by reinsurance group Swiss Re.

In its annual survey of disaster damage, Swiss Re noted that the loss total was down from the $196bn recorded in 2012, the year that Hurricane Sandy battered the United States.

Of the $140bn recorded in 2013, insured losses accounted for $45bn.

The most expensive disaster for insurers was the massive flooding in central and eastern Europe in May and June last year, with Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland hardest hit.

Total economic losses in the floods hit $16.5bn, of which $4.1bn was covered by insurers.

In July, parts of France and Germany were struck by severe hailstorms, causing economic losses of $4.8bn.
The damage in Germany alone generated most of the entire insured loss of $3.8bn - the largest ever figure for a hailstorm worldwide, Swiss Re said.

Floods in Canada in June caused losses of $4.7bn, of which $1.9bn was insured.

The next costliest disaster for the insurance sector was the wave of thunderstorms and tornadoes in the United States - including a freak twister in Oklahoma - which left insured losses of $1.8bn and inflicted $3.0bn in overall economic damage.

Poor nations bear the brunt

While rich countries saw the most expensive single disasters in terms of insurance claims - the norm, given their wealthier economies and extensive insurance penetration - it was the developing world that continued to bear the brunt of lives lost and overall economic damage.

The vast majority of the 26 000 disaster deaths last year - up from 14 000 in 2012 - were in developing nations.

Asia, where like other poor regions only a small percentage of the population has insurance, was hardest hit.
Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in November brought some of the strongest winds ever recorded, coupled with heavy rains and strom surges.

Some 7 500 died or went missing, and over 4 million were left homeless.

Haiyan inflicted $12.5bn in economic damage, of which insured losses represented just $1.5bn, Swiss Re said.

The second biggest humanitarian disaster was the June flooding in India, which claimed 6 000 lives. It did not make it into Swiss Re's top ten table of economic losses and insured damage.

Thousands of lives were saved when Cyclone Phailin made landfall in India in October, Swiss Re underlined, hailing the country's effective risk reduction programme which included a pre-planned evacuation drive.
But with Phailin destroying some 100 000 homes and more than 1.3 million hectares of farmland, total economic losses were $4.5bn, of which just a tiny proportion was insured.

Swiss Re said the insurance industry needed to rethink how it could help the wider world deal with the fallout of disasters.

"The protection gap, the difference between total losses and insured losses, has progressively widened over the last 40 years," it said.

"Disaster events continue to generate increasingly total losses alongside ongoing economic development, population growth and urbanization," it added.

It also echoed concerns that climate change driven by emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases was expected to lead to more frequent and severe extreme weather.

- AFP

Making Sense of Nepal’s Seti River Disaster

The first sign of trouble for residents along the upper Seti River in Nepal was the water. In late April and early May 2012, what was usually a roaring river had slowed to a trickle. And the milky-white water—colored by rock flour from glaciers upstream in the Sabche Cirque—had turned blue and clear.

Residents regarded the river changes as bizarre, but nobody connected the slowdown to anything dangerous upstream. So it came as a surprise when a slurry of sediment, rock, and water suddenly surged through the valley on May 5, 2012, obliterating dozens of homes and sweeping 72 people to their deaths. In the chaotic aftermath of the flood, questions swirled about where the water had come from and how it had arrived with so little warning.

Had a natural dam formed and then abruptly burst? Had debris from a rockslide dammed the Seti into a glacial lake and then failed? Had water long trapped in subterranean caves found its way out? Did an avalanche high on Annapurna triggered the deluge? “There were all sorts of theories in the beginning, but they were mostly speculation,” said Jeffrey Kargel, a University of Arizona hydrologist who has been studying the disaster. “We didn’t have hard data from the field that could prove or disprove most of them.”

Now they have that data. Twenty months after the disaster, experts like Kargel have made enough observations in the field, conducted enough tests in the lab, and analyzed enough satellite data to say quite definitely what happened. He has concluded that it was not just one event but a series of them that combined to produce the devastation.

It began weeks before the flood with a series of rockfalls that sent debris tumbling into the Seti River, backing water up in the extremely deep and narrow gorge. The last of these landslides occurred just a week or so before the flood. The situation grew dire on May 5, 2012, when an unusually powerful ice avalanche and rockfall tumbled down a vertical cliff on a ridge just south of Annapurna IV. The total drop from the Annapurna IV ridgeline to the bed of the Seti is about 6,100 meters (20,000 feet) spread over a distance of only 40 kilometers (25 miles)—more relief than anywhere in the continental United States.

“You can imagine what an enormous amount of force accompanied the avalanche,” said Kargel. “It was so powerful that huge amounts of snow melted due to the friction, and it produced a blast of hurricane-force winds that flattened old-growth forests near the Seti River Gorge.” As the force of the avalanche and winds poured into the gorge, it overwhelmed the natural dam created by the earlier rockslides. The dam burst and sent a surge of pent up water and avalanche debris rushing downstream.

Evidence of the massive rockfall and avalanche was still visible on December 22, 2013, when an astronaut on the International Space Station snapped a photograph (top) showing debris still coating the slopes below Annapurna IV. Next to the snow-covered slopes of the cirque, the debris-covered surfaces appear tan. The second image, a photograph by Kargel, shows the vertical cliff where the avalanche began.

Kargel’s research group has taken four separate trips to the area since 2012. In the process of piecing together how the disaster occurred, the team also analyzed whether a similar event could occur in the future. “There are good reasons to be concerned,” he said. “Something like this will happen again. It’s inevitable.”

His rationale? The Seti River Gorge is unusually prone to dangerous blockages because of how narrow and deep it is. And the same processes that triggered the spring 2012 rockfalls and avalanche are still at work. “The only question is whether future events will be as destructive or whether people in the Seti River Valley will have absorbed the lessons of 2012 and found ways to move their homes out of the flood plain.”

Read Kargel’s behind-the-scenes account of his efforts to understand the causes of the disaster in our Notes from the Field section.

1. References

2. Bhandry, N.P. et al (2012, August) Preliminary Understanding of the Seti River Debris-Flood in Pokhara, Nepal, on May 5th, 2012. ISSMGE Bulletin, 6 (4), 83-93.
3. International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (2012, May 5) Quest to unravel the cause of the Seti flash flood, 5 May 2012. Accessed January 22, 2014.
4. Kargel, J. et al. (2013, July 11) Causes and Human Impacts of the Seti River (Nepal) Disaster of 2012. Accessed January 22, 2014.
5. Kargel, J. et al. (2014) The 2012 Seti River flood disaster and alpine cryospheric hazards facing Pokhara, Nepal. Geophysical Research Abstracts. Accessed January 22, 2014.
6. Kharel, K. (2013, July 8) A scar on Annapurna that had caused the Seti Flood of 2012. Accessed January 23, 2014.
7. NASA Earth Observatory (2012, May 20) Aftermath of the Seti River Landslide.
8. Petley, D. (2012, May 23) Understanding the Seti River Landslide in Nepal. Accessed January 24, 2014.

Astronaut photograph ISS038-E-20918 was acquired on November 16, 2013, with a Nikon D3X digital camera using a 1000 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 38 crew. It has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by Adam Voiland.

Instrument: 

ISS - Digital Camera - NASA

Proposed step to help society prepare for a solar storm disaster

The orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured this image of a powerful coronal mass ejection, or CME, on July 23, 2012. The sun is blotted out in this image by an occulting disk. Look at the right side of the sun. You can see a cloud of solar material ejected from the sun in one of the fastest coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever measured. Most CMEs reach Earth in two to three days. This one would have reached us in only 18 hours. Image via ESA&NASA/SOHO.

Solar scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder are pointing to a 2012 solar storm and its CME as an example, they say, of why society needs to prepare. Daniel Baker, director of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, gave a presentation on this subject to other scientists this week the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Dr. Baker told EarthSky:

We would like space weather users, operators of systems, and policy makers adopt this event immediately and do war game scenarios with it.

The event took place on July 23, 2012. It started with a giant storm that erupted on the sun, blasting material into space. Researchers clocked this coronal mass ejection, or CME – a giant bubble of gas and magnetic fields, containing some billion tons of charged solar particles – as traveling between 1,800 and 2,200 miles per second (about 3,000 km per second). It was one of the fastest CMEs on record, and the traveling cloud of solar particles narrowly missed Earth.

CMEs are common on the sun, especially when, as now, the sun is in an active phase of its 11-year cycle. When they occur, CMEs get blown off the sun in all directions. Most don’t come in Earth’s direction. But every so often, an eruption is aimed right at us. When that happens, a geomagnetic storm occurs. That’s when observers on Earth are likely see the beautiful aurora or northern lights. No matter how powerful the solar storm may have been, the event isn’t harmful to our human bodies on Earth, because our atmosphere protects us. But very powerful events have the potential to create a technological disaster by short-circuiting satellites, power grids, ground communication equipment and by threatening the health of astronauts and aircraft crews.

The most talked-about historical CME is probably the famous Carrington event of 1859. It was strong enough to have wreaked havoc on earthly technologies, if today’s technologies had existed at that time. During that event, the sun blasted Earth’s atmosphere hard enough that New Englanders could read their newspapers at night by aurora light.

The July 23, 2012 event on the sun was likely more powerful than the Carrington event of 1859, Baker said. It just wasn’t aimed our way.

But it might have been.

Baker said in a press release issued December 9:

My space weather colleagues believe that until we have an event that slams Earth and causes complete mayhem, policymakers are not going to pay attention. The message we are trying to convey is that we made direct measurements of the 2012 event and saw the full consequences without going through a direct hit on our planet.

We have proposed that the 2012 event be adopted as the best estimate of the worst case space weather scenario. We argue that this extreme event should be immediately employed by the space weather community to model severe space weather effects on technological systems such as the electrical power grid.

I liken it to war games – since we have the information about the event, let’s play it through our various models and see what happens. If we do this, we would be a significant step closer to providing policymakers with real-world, concrete kinds of information that can be used to explore what would happen to various technologies on Earth and in orbit rather than waiting to be clobbered by a direct hit.

Bottom line: Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder would like policy makers to use the July 23, 2012 solar storm and its CME – which was measured by our spacecraft – in modeling responses to a similar CME that might be aimed our way.

Read more about C-U scientists’ thoughts on the need to prepare for powerful solar storms

- Earthsky

Mosselbaai: Vreemde voorwerp spoel op strand uit

 

GROOT-BRAKRIVIER NUUS - 'n Vreemde staal voorwerp het by die mond van Groot-Brakrivier uitgespoel.

Dit is die eerste keer op Dinsdag, 19 November in die see opgemerk.

Die struktuur is ongeveer 19 meter lank. Die onderste 12 meter was, te oordeel aan die skulpdiere en mossels daaraan, vir 'n geruime tyd onder water en waarskynlik geanker.

As enigiemand weet wat die oorsprong van die voorwerp is of aan wie dit behoort, kontak gerus die kantore van die Mossel Bay Advertiser by 044 690 7156 of los 'n boodskap op ons Facebook-blad.

- Mosselbaai Advertiser