Transcription
196 [music] yesterday afternoon. They said D was about 5 to 6. How [music] the [ __ ] [music] fires, tornadoes, volcanoes, tidal waves, meteorites.
When these kinds of natural phenomena occur, they can be cataclysmic major events, bringing with them staggering loss of human life, tragic environmental devastation, destruction, and hardship. In this sobering yet thrilling installment of desperate hours, our special focus is on geological disasters.
Now, most natural disasters, including volcanoes [music] and earthquakes, are of course geological disasters. But avalanches, landslides, blizzards, and heat waves, they don't usually cause fatalities in the tens of thousands, do they? Don't be lulled into a false sense of security. While casualty counts might be lower, geological disturbances like landslides and heat waves can cause their fair share of misery.
Let's begin with avalanches. The rapid flow of snow down a mountain or hillside. Afghanistan. In some parts of the country, temperatures can soar to 49° C during the summertime. But in the mountains, the snow falls thick and fast. There were three chains of avalanches that could be quickly categorized as geological disasters in the first half of this decade. in 2010, 2012, [music] and 2015.
The most recent avalanches in 2015 in [music] Afghanistan's Panchier Valley were virtually in a category of their own. Avalanches some 40 meters high, totally submerged homes and entire villages. The Hardy Mountain people that live in this region had not seen anything as bad in 30 years.
>> Over 280 people were killed with many more injured and traumatized. As always with avalanches, but particularly in the Panchier Valley, rescue and aid teams had to reach places not easily accessed at the best of times.
>> It had been [music] the same, if not worse, a few years before when an avalanche in the northeastern [music] Afghan highlands demolished a village home to some 200 people. Most of the village was simply caked in snow. The nearest hospital was across a national border in neighboring Tajikhstan. This is a place where most travel is either on foot or horseback, though of course there are some four-w wheeled vehicles. But nowhere [music] was safe when snow fell in a massive dump from just 40 m above. Nearby villagers offered what help they could, but outside help only came days after the avalanche when people from Darwaz district and 25 aid workers from Tajikhstan arrived on the scene.
In Pakistan on the 7th of April 2012 an avalanche struck at a military base in the territory around the Siaen glacia. 140 soldiers and civilian contractors ers were trapped under deep snow. Hopes were high they'd eventually be saved. Swiss and large by and large it is correct. Only on May 29th did authorities officially declare the 129 soldiers and 11 civilian personnel were dead.
>> Nepal is renowned for its mountains, especially Mount Everest, the largest mountain in the world. On Saturday the 25th of April 2015, an earthquake in Nepal set off an avalanche on Everest, killing dozens. It was all too soon after the tragic events of April 2014 [music] when an avalanche on Everest killed 16 Nepalese guides.
our three members uh did not come back to that uh village. Next day we were said that uh some of our uh people are missing and uh the search was on. As a mark of respect for the victims, the Sherper guides announced later that April they would not work on Everest for the remainder of 2014 and they stayed true to their word.
Where were you in ' 62? With any luck, nowhere near Mount Hascaram in northern Peru. Because that's when a tidal wave of snow, ice, and boulders swept down from Peru's highest mountain onto the village below, killing around 3,000 people and displacing thousands more in the region. A few years later, in one of the worst years on record for avalanches, the French ski resort town of Valdesair was pounded by a huge wave of snow that killed 42 people in its wake. Unfortunately, avalanches have little respect for human life.
Neither does the landslide. Another geological phenomenon, one that includes quite a broad spectrum of underground movements such as rockfalls, the collapse of hillsides and slopes, and shallow debris flows. These can all be considered landslides. They can happen offshore in coastal and onshore environments. While the scale of destruction from a landslide [music] may sound less dramatic than an avalanche, landslides can also [music] be devastating, not just to the environment, but also to the human spirit, leaving a trail of heartbreak and horror.
almost ancho [laughter] guys. Who needs an avalanche? [music] It's staggering when you consider the damage caused by landslides alone. Laty Island in the central Philippines was devastated by a landslide that destroyed an entire village of 2,000 people. The people living around the island's tropical mountain terrain had suspected [music] a landslide or avalanche was imminent. For weeks, they had evacuated their village. But when the heavy rain from a typhoon finally subsided, they returned [music] to their homes. Only days later, tragedy struck. Hundreds buried alive by the slide. The impact was devastating. Huge difficulties were encountered by rescue [music] teams trying to identify where people were buried and in keeping themselves safe, [music] let alone finding survivors.
On July 30th, 2014, in an Indian village called Marlin in the Maharashtra province, around 100 people were killed by a landslide. But was Marlin another tragedy that could have been avoided with a little more preparation? Could it have been caused as a result of human action like farming or road construction? And more than one reporter noted that the village of Marlin is only a kilometer or two away from the backwaters of Dimby Dam, an irrigation project finished in the year 2000. Measured a few days earlier, it had held 250 plus million cub m of water. That's a big enough volume of water to make anyone in the neighborhood very uneasy.
A year later in northwest Colombia, it wasn't the folly of man responsible [music] for landslides, but the sheer volume of rain. It was that which was responsible for landslides that killed more than 80 people with mud rushing into houses and smashing bridges. [music] The random cruelty and want destructiveness found in [music] nature is truly overwhelming.
>> [snorts] >> But geological conditions don't even have to be as obviously destructive as avalanches and landslides to create havoc and heartache. A heatwave can be one of nature's silent killers. India is justifiably renowned for its hot climate. But the heat wave that scorched India in the middle of the decade was something else. The May 2015 heatwave was said to be responsible [music] for 2,500 deaths, making it the second deadliest heatwave [music] in India on record.
For two miserable weeks, temperatures soared to nearly 45°. In New Delhi, the 45° heat actually started melting roads. Day upon day, night after night, of searing temperatures hit the homeless, [music] the elderly, and those who work outside the hardest temperature reaching to 47 48° too in some areas. Now the people have been advised through various mediums of communication to take adequate precautions in this regard. Uh mainly you know not to venture out into the open uh during the hot sun. But even at nighttime the heat was stifling. When the monsoon season finally began a little later than usual it brought cool and refreshing rains and a welcome drop in temperature.
These climatic effects are being [music] felt in the United States as well. From North Dakota to Massachusetts, Washington DC to Chicago, America had [music] a scorcher of a summer in 2013. Temperatures in most US states [music] rose above 32° C, and the humidity certainly didn't help matters. Some people, [music] especially those on vacation, managed to find ways to make the most of the sizzling hot temperatures. But it was no day in the park [music] for practically anyone who had to work outside all day.
>> 105° stifling heat, sun barreling down on you. Just got to make your money. the emergency department, we've had, you know, definitely an increase in the number of patients presenting with, you know, heat exhaustion type symptoms, heat cramps, um, you know, just dehydration, being outside for a little too long, being a little too too active outside. But we've also had a few patients who've come in with heat stroke, so the most severe form of heat illness.
Of course, there are times when a heatwave is not quite so severe. People in Britain can look back with nostalgia to the lazy, hazy summer days of 1957 when [music] the whole country experienced unusually high temperatures up to 36° C throughout the entire month of June. Ah, the good old days in the UK when a swimming costume just meant rolling your trousers up and sunblock meant tying a handkerchief around your head. Even heat waves had better manners in those days, it seems.
But geological disasters and disruptions come in all shapes and sizes. Sinkholes must be one of the most curious geological phenomena mankind has ever encountered. A few years ago, in a remote village in Bosnia, the inhabitants were astounded when their local pond disappeared. These mainly occur in what's called cast terrain, soluble bedrock like limestone or gypsum, which can be dissolved by water. Any hole in the ground, which is created by erosion from a few feet across to the size of a football field, can be considered a sinkhole. Most of them form slowly over time. Others, like the one in Bosnia, can appear suddenly. Some of the villagers, however, insisted on more colorful explanations. In human cost, sink holes aren't as bad as [music] they look. Responsible for just a few isolated fatalities.
Blizzards, however, a different animal altogether. A blizzard is a severe snowstorm with winds in excess of 56 kmh and almost no visibility for more than 3 hours. Blizzards can also occur after snowfall when high winds cause white outs, fallen snow blowing around and snow drifts, huge mountains of snow which decrease visibility. In the US, they've started calling these winter storms snowageddon, but winter white outs like the January 2015 northeast American blizzard are no laughing matter. Juno, the unofficially named winter storm, was one almighty nor easter that affected Canada and the central and eastern United States and eventually parts of Greenland and Western Europe.
On January 26th, millions of people along the east coast [music] began preparing for heavy snow, powerful winds, and coastal flooding. With a blizzard warning [music] issued for a 400 km stretch of the Northeast, including New York City and Boston, people [music] were expecting the worst, and in many cases, they got it. There were, however, notable [music] exceptions. When Juno finally hit, it wasn't quite with the ferocity expected.
Now, that said, 83 [music] cm of snow fell in parts of northeastern Connecticut. Providence, Rhode Island got 43 cm of snow, and Portland, Maine was covered in over a meter of the white stuff. Power is over. Let's go. >> The Boston area [music] was buried in more than 60 cm of snow. Um, I'm guessing there's probably 10 to 12 inches right now on the ground and it's still coming down about 2 in an hour, I'd say. >> Yeah, we thought we were getting off easy this winter cuz we haven't had much snow and all of a sudden we got the big blizzard and then this and it sounds like there's some more to come.
>> And yet New York, which had been bracing itself for the worse, was somehow spared. American meteorologists apologized for their big miss after the Big Apple was largely spared by Juno with a not unusual January overnight snowfall of around 15 cm. With cars banned from the roads and public transport shut down, the city that never sleeps looked like a ghost town. But it's surely better to be safe than sorry.
That same year, the holy city of Jerusalem was covered by a respplendant white blanket after the worst snowstorm there in decades. With up to 8 in of snow piling up in the city and temperatures below freezing, [music] schools and highways were closed. a storm like that I don't remember for a long time and I'm living in Jerusalem for 38 years about for 38 years and didn't see such a snow. >> It was actually the most snow the city had seen since 1879. Jerusalem was brought to a standstill and at the height of the storm, power cuts left 60,000 homes without electric heating. For the old people, it's worse. Like for us, it's really fun because we don't get snow, but for old people, it's I think it's really hard, especially with all the um electricity network collapsing and a lot of people got jammed in cars. So, luckily, no one died.
Perhaps few people would choose [music] to rapsidize about the British climate, but actually most of the time it's quite mild and [music] temperate. But in 1978, the southern and western parts of the United Kingdom [music] were battered by blizzards and congested by snow drifts. Many people were trapped in their homes for days. In Yoilton in the West Country, the military were called upon to fight with [music] General Winter. Rescue operations were mounted by all three branches of the armed services, mainly consisting of dropping off food and supplies [music] and airlifting the seriously injured to hospitals.
So there you have it. Our dangerous world where [music] geological mishaps, avalanches, landslides, heat waves, sinkholes, and blizzards can spell disaster almost as much as the big cataclysms such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and tidal waves. It's enough to make you want to purchase [music] that one-way ticket to Mars. Yeah. [music] [music] [music] Heat. >> [music]