This story kinda got pushed aside last night with the hurricane approaching. What a tragedy.

A freight train collided with a rush-hour commuter train in Los Angeles on Friday evening, killing at least 17 people and injuring scores of others, many of them critically. The crash was potentially the deadliest accident in the history of the Southern California commuter trains.

The commuter train originated in downtown Los Angeles.
The accident happened in the Chatsworth area of the San Fernando Valley, north of downtown Los Angeles, just before 4:30 p.m. Pacific time.

More at the New York Times

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Sundance Grand Jury Prize Winner for Best Documentary, Trouble the Water, is currently in limited release. Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott, residents of New Orleans’ lower 9th Ward, were there when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Kimberly got a video camera shortly before, and she documented what happened to them. I just saw the film, and it’s powerful stuff. Here’s the trailer:
Read more »

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The floods in the Midwest are BAD. Iowa is hurtin for certain, and now they’re worried about the Mississippi flooding. I haven’t heard anything negative about FEMA’s response……. actually I haven’t heard anything AT ALL about their response. I guess we’ll see how it goes from here. Hopefully no one in this country will ever have to endure the tragic incompetence of federal response like the victims of Hurricane Katrina did.

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They said this city would never flood. They talked about 1993, and 1966 and 1851, years when the Cedar River swelled and hissed but mostly stayed within its banks. They thought they were safe. They were wrong.
Downtown Cedar Rapids was inundated by the raging Cedar River on Thursday. Heavy rain continued to pound parts of Iowa.
Cedar Rapids is experiencing the worst flooding in the city’s history. And the water is still rising. By Thursday afternoon, the Cedar River was about 29 feet deep, or 17 feet above flood stage, according to the National Weather Service. The water was expected to rise another three feet by Friday morning, and reach a record crest, 12 feet higher than the previous record, set in 1851.

More at the New York Times

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Scientists urged residents of northern Nevada’s largest city to prepare for a bigger event as the area continued rumbling Saturday after the largest earthquake in a two-month-long series of temblors.

More than 100 aftershocks were recorded on the western edge of the city after a magnitude 4.7 quake hit Friday night, the strongest quake around Reno since one measuring 5.2 in 1953, said researchers at the seismological laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The latest quake swept store shelves clean, cracked walls in homes and dislodged rocks on hillsides, but there were no reports of injuries or widespread major damage.

More at Yahoo News

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Not that we need a reminder of how wrong they were or how much they lied or how fucked we are 5 years later because of their lies……

From Editor & Publisher:

Today marked the fifth anniversary of the day deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz assured Congress that the U.S. would need no more than 100,000 troops to secure postwar Iraq and get the hell out. Here’s how The New York Times reported it at the time: “In a contentious exchange over the costs of war with Iraq, the Pentagon’s second-ranking official today disparaged a top Army general’s assessment of the number of troops needed to secure postwar Iraq. House Democrats then accused the Pentagon official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, of concealing internal administration estimates on the cost of fighting and rebuilding the country.

“Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, ‘wildly off the mark.’ Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war’s duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward….

“‘I think you’re deliberately keeping us in the dark,’ said Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia. ‘We’re not so naïve as to think that you don’t know more than you’re revealing.’…

“At a Pentagon news conference with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld echoed his deputy’s comments.

A further excerpt from the Eric Schmitt article follows.
*

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq.

He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that ‘’stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it.

”I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help….

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Blogger Monkeyfister lives in the area hit, is trying to get the word out and the donations flowing (thanks to Cernig of The Newshoggers for spreading the word).

Monkeyfister recommends:

American Red Cross
Mid-South Chapter
1400 Central Avenue
Memphis, TN 38104
901-726-1690

And:
United Way of the Mid-South phone in a donation at (901) 433-4300.

They take DIRECT donations, so you can skip all the National-level waste and delay, AND they serve nearly every community in the affected radius.

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Then…	Now…
“Our citizens must understand this storm has disrupted the capacity to make gasoline and to distribute gasoline,” the president said.	“All of us across this nation are concerned for the families who have lost their homes and the many families who have been evacuated from their homes,” Bush said. “We send the help of the federal government.”

I wonder if Bush will do a flyover of California.

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But it ain’t done yet. And Chertoff went to Califorinia today. I hate thinking like I do, but I can’t help it. Those bastards wouldn’t have changed the law if they didn’t intend to put it to use. If those fires had been in….. say….ohhhhh…… I don’t know……let’s say New Orleans……martial law would be in place. That’s the first thing I thought of today when I heard Skeletor was on his way, and that people were being housed in the stadium. My heart goes out to the people in the fire ravaged areas.

Bowing to robust lobbying by U.S. governors, members of Congress appear poised to repeal a law enacted just a year ago that expanded the president’s power to invoke martial law.

Both the House and Senate have passed defense authorization bills (HR 1585) that would undo the provision in a law (PL 109-364) that augmented the circumstances in which the president may use the military, even without governors- consent, to enforce the law at home during crises. A House-Senate conference is writing the bill’s final version, and the provision is unlikely to change.

The National Governors Association also is concerned about a proposal in the House-passed version of the bill that would require new procedures for the control of National Guard and active-duty troops during domestic emergencies.

But the more significant issue for governors is restoration of the traditional limits on presidential power in times of crisis.

More at CQ

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By ANTHONY DEUTSCH
The Associated Press

For those of you unfamiliar with the power of earthquakes and the Richter Scale, here’s the difference in strength: Naturally, it depends on the depth of the earthquake, but if you have a 6.7 earthquake followed by a 6.8, the 6.8 earthquake means the earth released ten times more energy than the 6.7. for each one tenth of a point on the Richter Scale, the earthquake is ten times worse. - JS

PADANG, Indonesia - Days of colossal earthquakes and tsunami warnings have forced traumatized Indonesian villagers to seek safety in the last place imaginable: graveyards.

With only plastic sheeting to keep her family dry, Dasima joined hundreds camping in the mud between headstones on the flat, high ground, far from the ocean’s reach.

“I am very afraid of another tsunami,” the 50-year-old said two days after an 8.4-magnitude temblor sent a towering wave into her remote fishing village. “We will stay here until we feel it is safe.”

Seismologists warn, however, the worst may be yet to come.

Kerry Sieh of the California Institute of Technology has spent decades studying the fault line that runs along Indonesia’s western coast. He is among several experts predicting a repeat of the powerful earthquake that triggered the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen Indian Ocean nations.

“No one can say whether it will be in 30 seconds or 30 years,” he said. “But what happened the other day, I think is quite possibly a sequence of smaller earthquakes leading up to the bigger one.”

Wednesday’s quake shook four Southeast Asian countries, damaged hundreds of houses and spawned a 10-foot-high tsunami. At least 13 people were killed. A series of powerful earthquakes and dozens of strong aftershocks followed - including one measuring 7.8 and another 7.1.

read more HERE

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By ANTHONY DEUTSCH
The Associated Press

PADANG, Indonesia - The second powerful earthquake in as many days shook western Indonesia Thursday, collapsing buildings in a coastal city and triggering tsunami alerts around the region.

At least nine people were killed and 49 injured in the twin tremors, which caused tall buildings to sway in at least three countries.

On Wednesday, an 8.4-magnitude earthquake shook Southeast Asia. That tremor triggered a small non-destructive tsunami off the coastal city of Padang on Sumatra, the Indonesian island ravaged by the 2004 tsunami disaster. A tsunami warning was issued for wide areas of the region and nations as far away as Africa.

Thursday’s magnitude-7.8 quake rattled the same area of Sumatra and caused extensive damage in Padang.

“Many buildings collapsed after this morning’s quake,” Fauzi Bahar, the mayor, told El Shinta radio. “We’re still trying to find out about victims.”

Thousands of frightened people piled in trucks or sought shelter on high ground.

Rafael Abreu, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado, said Thursday’s quake did not appear to be an aftershock to the temblor the day before. But the centers of both were close together.

read more HERE

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By MATTHEW LEE
The Associated Press

It looks like Bush’s advisers (read that as “yes men/women”) are keeping the boss happy by telling him what he wants to hear. The delusional emperor with no clothes just keeps in his own little world of pretend, doesn’t he? - JS

WASHINGTON - President Bush’s top two military and political advisers on Iraq will warn Congress on Monday that making any significant changes to the current war strategy will jeopardize the limited security and political progress made so far, The Associated Press has learned.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who has been less forthcoming than Gen. David Petraeus in advance of his testimony, will join Petraeus in pushing for maintaining the U.S. troop surge, seeing it as the only viable option to prevent Iraq and the region from plunging into further chaos, U.S. officials said.

Crocker and Petraeus planned to meet on Sunday to go over their remarks and responses to expected tough questioning from lawmakers - including skeptical Republicans. But they will not consult Bush or their immediate bosses before their appearances Monday and Tuesday, in order to preserve the “independence and the integrity of their testimony,” said one official.

Petraeus and Crocker did have lengthy discussions with the president, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when Bush visited Iraq on Labor Day.

Crocker, a career diplomat with extensive experience in the Middle East who opposed the war when it began in 2003, is pushing for political change where progress has been elusive and the administration’s options are limited under the fragile Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Yet the diplomat will say that as poorly as al-Maliki’s government has performed, it would not be advisable at the moment for the U.S. to support new leadership or lobby for a different coalition of Iraq’s fractious Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the officials said.

read more HERE

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CNN

Rescuers searched Thursday for survivors of powerful Hurricane Felix, which a Nicaraguan official said has claimed 48 lives, a death toll sure to climb.

Casualty reports have yet to come from at least 70 percent of villages and towns along Nicaragua’s swampy jungle coast, where Felix slammed ashore with 160 mph winds on Tuesday, said disaster official Jorge Ramon Arnesto Soza.

Soza, the executive secretary of the National System for the Prevention, Mitigation and Attention of Disasters, said those expected reports will likely raise the current death toll, which he described as “very low.”

Survivors of the storm struggled Thursday. An Associated Press photographer arrived in one isolated village in Nicaragua and saw residents cracking coconuts to drink the milk because they had nothing else, the AP reported.

The U.S. Southern Command has sent the USS Wasp to Nicaragua to help with relief efforts, and Venezuela also sent aid, according to the AP. At least 57 Cuban doctors and nurses already working on the Miskito coast were lending a hand, too.

Authorities rescued 52 Miskito Indians who lived on low-lying reefs and keys off the coast, said Honduran congresswoman Carolina Echeverria. They survived the hurricane’s deluge by grasping floating objects until help arrived, she said.

Bodies that could not be recovered were seen floating in the water, said Echeverria.

read more HERE

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This really hits home to me. Many in my family tree, including my dad, were coal miners. Dad was an underground electrician and mechanic. Had to retire early though. Coal dust can do a number on a man’s lungs.

I can only remember one accident that involved a “fall-in”. A big rock fell from the roof of the mine and crushed a man to death. Very sad.

New bore hole drilled at Utah mine finds no sign of life

(CNN) – A sixth bore hole drilled into a space where six Utah miners were thought to be trapped found that the chamber contained no space where the men could have survived, an attorney representing some of the miners’ families told CNN.

“There was zero void,” he quoted Rob Moore, vice president of Murray Energy, as telling the relatives.
[...]

“They are going through a living hell, and it’s just heartbreaking,” King said of the miners’ families.

Source: CNN.com

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Before moving back home to KY, I owned an end unit condo in Knoxville, TN. The parking was directly in front of the unit and, to the side, was a row of thick, tall firs. Absolutely beautiful, except they also were home to pigeons. I couldn’t tell you the number of evenings, even during winter time, I’d go out and spray water up into the trees to run these birds off. If I didn’t, the next morning, my car would be completely covered up. Seriously!

Before moving, the homeowners association decided the only thing to do was to cut the trees down. Well, they did. And it ruined the look of my home.

I never hated a bird up until then.

Foul Play?

Officials investigating the deadly Minneapolis bridge collapse are looking at an unlikely culprit: pigeons.

Could pigeons have played a role in the Minnesota catastrophe?

Aug. 25, 2007 - Of all the possible causes of the deadly collapse of Minnesota’s Interstate 35W bridge earlier this month-uneven traffic patterns, de-icing salts, faulty construction-the latest is the most surprising: Pigeons. Or more precisely, the waste the birds leave behind. “Pigeon dung can be a serious issue-it’s acidic and will easily eat away almost any metal,” explains engineer William Schutt, president of Matcor, a corrosion-protection firm in Doylestown, Pa. “It can wash into and then rust the bolts and rivets of bridges if they-re not cleaned and checked properly.”

The build-up of pigeon excrement on the I-35W bridge was substantial enough to be noted in several Minnesota Department of Transportation inspections over the years, pointing to the steel box sections of the bridge as a popular nesting spot. Those sections are crucial to supporting the structure, and in 1999 bridge workers placed plastic screens over openings in the beams in an effort to repel the birds. But the dung continued to pile up. A 2006 inspection of the bridge still reported “severe pigeon debris” on its steel deck truss.

Eve Conant, Newsweek

Source: MSNBC.com

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