According to Reuters this morning the death toll in Haiti as a direct consequence of Hurricane Tomas has reached seven. Haitian President René Préval said from the presidential palace that:
Now that, relatively speaking, Haiti has escaped the danger, we have to continue to be vigilant.
According to Imogen Wall, spokeswoman for the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
We have been incredibly lucky on this one. The flooding is still serious, particularly in Leogane, because of the cholera situation …. For once Haiti has been lucky.
Reuters lists the biggest problems caused by Tomas as:
Wind from Tomas blew down some tents at camps for displaced people in the southern coastal city at Jacmel, and a river burst its banks in Leogane, pouring water into the town west of the capital.
Friday morning has arrived, and unfortunately the forecasts weren't too far out. Tomas has strengthened to hurricane force once more, and is travelling only slightly to the west of Tuesday's forecast track. According to Reuters:
A Jan. 12 quake in Haiti killed more than a quarter of a million people in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation. About 1.3 million survivors still live in hundreds of makeshift tent camps crammed into open spaces in the wrecked capital Port-au-Prince.
Strengthening Tropical Storm Tomas drenched Haiti on Thursday, threatening fragile, crowded earthquake survivors' camps in the poor Caribbean country that is also reeling from a deadly cholera epidemic.
Haitian President René Préval went on national radio to urge citizens to take precautions and follow evacuation recommendations. "Protect your lives," he said.
So far Haiti hasn't been troubled by the 2010 hurricane season, but unfortunately it looks as though that is about to change. As you can tell from his name, this year there have already been a lot of tropical storms in the Atlantic before Tomas. Up to now they have all somehow managed to avoid Haiti:
Tracks of 2010 Atlantic Tropical Storms - Courtesy of Wikipedia
If the mainstream news media haven't been wondering about the causes of the devastating January 12th earthquake and more recent and thankfully less violent quakes, a number of scientists certainly have. Several teams of researchers published their findings in a Haiti earthquake special issue of Nature Geoscience yesterday. To read the articles in full you need to pay, but here are some brief extracts:
The devastating Haiti earthquake on 12 January 2010 involved slip on numerous faults. An as yet undescribed fault that runs close to the town of Léogâne was implicated.
The earthquake also caused several submarine landslides, which, together with the ground motion, resulted in the production of local tsunamis.
The fault system may still pose a significant seismic risk to the region around Port-au-Prince. The findings suggest that not all the strain accumulated over the past two-and-a-half centuries or so was released during the event in January.
Returning to the most recent humanitarian disaster to hit Haiti, the BBC reports this morning that the outbreak of cholera has now claimed over 250 lives, with a total of more than 3,000 people infected.
We had a number of conversations yesterday about clean drinking water too. Nobody we spoke to could explain to us why if the world decides it's a high enough priority it's possible to mobilize $700 billion in a week to bail out a few banks, it's somehow not possible to get cholera free water to people who need it.
I awoke this morning and checked the news from Haiti. The mainstream media now confirms that the cholera outbreak has reached the capital Port-au-Prince. According to Reuters a UN humanitarian spokeswoman said that the 5 known cases:
Were very quickly diagnosed and isolated. This is not a new location of infection. Obviously, preventing the disease spreading to the city is an absolutely paramount concern right now.
However as Reuters also points out:
Prevention measures and surveillance were being increased in Port-au-Prince, with its squalid sprawling slums and about 1.3 million survivors of the January 12 earthquake packed into tent and tarpaulin camps. All are highly vulnerable to a virulent diarrheal disease like cholera.
It is the worst medical emergency to strike the poor, disaster-prone Caribbean nation since the earthquake killed up to 300,000 people and is also the first cholera epidemic in Haiti in a century.
They may be being "increased", but Daniel Rouzier of U.S.-based charity Food for the Poor is not impressed with the prevention measures taken so far:
Right now, it's been over 72 hours. There is no safety cordon. If the sick had the proper healthcare where they were, they wouldn't have come to this chaotic city.
The death toll so far is now being reported as a total of 208:
Haitian health officials told a news conference on Saturday that 194 people had died from cholera in the Artibonite region, the main outbreak zone, with 14 other deaths in neighboring Central Plateau, where a prison was among places affected.
There are also reports on Twitter that the inhabitants of Port-au-Prince were shaken in their beds last night by yet another earth tremor. First reports suggest these emanated from a 4.6 magnitude earthquake centred below the ocean North-east of Puerto Rico.
2,634 people have been hospitalised in the central Artibonite and Central Plateau regions by the illness, which causes diarrhoea, acute fever, vomiting and severe dehydration.
There are fears the outbreak could reach camps housing the survivors of January's quake in Port-au-Prince.
I say it's not unexpected, because when people exist in the conditions that many have had to endure since the start of the rainy season in Haiti then it's really only a matter of time.
For the most up date information I suggest you read the Twitter feed of Haitian hotel owner and musician Richard Morse in preference to the mainstream news media.
A U.S.-based think tank is painting a grim picture of the earthquake recovery effort in Haiti, adding its voice to widespread accusations of ineffectual local leadership.
Clearly the scale of the damage was surprising," he said. "We're also somewhat surprised at the Haitian and international response. Not the humanitarian response, which was actually dramatically quick. But the second stage — so little of the rubble has been cleared, and so few of the basic decisions have been made.
We travelled up to Bristol yesterday to hear Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows talk on their one stop in England on the Venus Project World Lecture Tour. Unfortunately we arrived late, after enduring traffic hell on the M5 motorway northbound from Devon. We missed the start of Roxanne's talk, but we did get to hear all of Jacque's talk and the subsequent Q&A session. During his talk Jacque had made it quite clear that he thinks a lot of people talk bullshit, including politicians, psychologists and lovers! He had occasionally used some four lettered vernacular also. We got surprised in the foyer after his lecture by Jacque himself, who unexpectedly emerged to shake our hands and enquire if Kasia had been offended by any of his fruitier language. She assured him she hadn't been! Having been sat near the back during the main presentation it was great to see him up close and chat briefly, even if he did take the opportunity to illustrate one of his points by suggesting that my prior conditioning might lead me to punch the guy opposite me on the nose!
It seems like quite has lot has happened since my first blog post about Jacque's proposals for a resource based economy. The lecture in Bristol was organised by the Zeitgiest Movement, which is now "the activist arm of The Venus Project", for example. There also now seems to be lots of controversy about Jacque's ideas at a variety of locations on the internet! Here's a few of the things Jacque himself had to say yesterday:
There's no such place as "Utopia" – Everything changes
Man cannot think or reason
There's no such thing as "Human Nature"
You and I are merely "Consumers" – Our values are shaped by the existing monetary system.
We don't talk TO each other – We talk AT each other
90% of schools are run by "Horse's Arses"
Children should be taught to be "Problem Solvers"
Don't be "Polite" – The only way to learn is through confrontation
Even the wealthiest people of today will have "a better standard of living" following a change to a resource based economy
If you don't do anything, nothing will change
Plenty more food for thought in amongst all that. His talk did raise at least one question in my own mind, which I never actually got to ask Jacque because he and Roxanne had to rush off to talk to the press. Here it is:
Personally I'm not very keen on elites, but it sounds like experienced engineers like myself, apparently already conditioned to "consume" and to "punch people on the nose", might very well become a new elite following a change to a resource based society. Personally I'm not too keen on committees either. How would the members of Jacque's proposed "survey committees" be selected? At random? By virtue of being part of a new elite? By some other mechanism?
Not that it answers my question, but here's a video showing some of the things that Jacque Fresco had to say during his recent visit to South West England:
Adopt the goal of giving every household and business access to timely, useful and actionable information on their energy use.
Studies and experience show that when people have access to direct feedback on their electricity use, they can achieve significant savings through simple behavioral changes. Investments in home energy efficiency, along with automating appliances and other devices, can lead to even greater savings.
Google have been working along these lines for some time with their PowerMeter project, which aims to provide:
A free energy monitoring tool that allows you to view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online.
Recently Google have added a "social" element to the project, by enabling you to share details of your personal energy consumption logged on Google's servers with "your friends, the Joneses". Google assure their readers that:
All sharing is completely opt-in and your privacy will still be protected.
Whilst I am a firm believer in providing people with feedback on their personal energy consumption, I can't help thinking that many people won't be too wild about the idea of Google, let alone the Government, having access to vast amounts of data about their energy consuming habits.
Following on from their letter to Mr. Obama, Google and The Climate Group held an event on the topic in Washington DC today, which included a presentation by Carol Browner, the White House energy adviser. As well as their own blog, Google are using social media website Twitter to spread the word about the event. According to comments on Twitter I'm not the only one concerned about smart grid privacy and security issues. Apparently Leslie Harris of the Center for Democracy and Technology thinks that:
There will be a consumer backlash to smart meters if consumers aren't in control of their energy data.
I wonder if Google or other members of The Climate Group are working on a means whereby people will be able to keep track of their personal energy consumption and expenditure in a user friendly way, but without Google and/or "the Joneses" being able to access it?
Earlier this week Dutch energy consulting and certification company KEMA announced that the Hoogkerk "PowerMatching City" had been officially opened by the mayor of Groningen. According to KEMA:
Hoogkerk is the first microgrid project in Europe to integrate a full-scale, operational “smart” residential community energy system. The community includes 25 interconnected residential homes equipped with micro-cogeneration units, hybrid heat pumps, PV solar panels, smart appliances and electric vehicles, and additional community-based power produced by a wind farm and a gas turbine.
Whilst 25 homes seems to me to be stretching the definition of "a city" a bit far, it seems that:
The project seeks to develop a market model for a smart grid, creating an industry reference standard to help enable wide-scale smart grid implementation. In the live phase, research into the community members’ energy use behavior will be undertaken to gain insight into the “smart” energy consumer. Data will be collected on how, how much and when electricity is used and analyzed to explore consumer willingness to exchange comfort for flexibility based on financial incentives.
This project is a "high tech" solution to future sustainability, of the sort being promoted by a variety of giant corporations, notably IBM with their "Smarter Planet" initiative. It seems that IBM have identified cities as the biggest hurdle standing in the way of a sustainable future, and they suggest "Smarter Cities" as a solution. As IBM put it: More on Visions of a Smarter Planet
