Columbia County officials say that more people reported hearing mysterious booms over several days last week. Some people said the blasts were so loud that they were awakened from sleep. Local experts still don't know what the cause is, but now the reports aren't limited to just Columbia County.
Early this week, reports starting flooding into the Columbia County Emergency Management Agency (EMA) about loud booms in the area. "Appling, Harlem is the typical area we are looking at here. Of loud booms, rumbling. Now we're hearing about pictures being moved on walls." A man said the blast shook his house early Tuesday morning. He says when he walked outside, his driveway had new cracks in it. Since he lives near a rock quarry, he figured that's what it was. "We have already checked and our seismologist says that there is no activity on any of our equipment, as far as earthquakes. We've already called all the rock quarries, there was no blasting during any of those times."
The cause of the booms could be a device called an Earth Shaker. It's full of gun powder and when it explodes, it's apparently powerful enough to shake the ground. But this week there have also been other reports of loud booms in other cities, some in Arizona, Rhode Island, Alabama, and Texas. Could there be another explanation?
"I'm concerned because we do have a lot of credible people who are telling me these things. Law enforcement, fire, county employees, citizens, all of who are credible because they are people I know, people who go through our training. You don't have clusters of people that are all telling you the same thing and it's not happening. Something is making those loud booms, what it is, I don't know."
Several theories are popping up about methane gas pockets exploding underground, military testing, and the fact that we are a few weeks away from the end of the Mayan calendar. There were similar occurrances in central Arizona during the same timeframe as the occurrances in Columbia County. (links to other online stories similar to Columbia County's occurrances)
goes the power to be heard,
to share in the decisions of government
which shape men's lives.
Everything that makes man's life worthwhile
- family, work, education,
a place to rear one's children and
a place to rest one's head -
all this depends on the decisions of government;
all can be swept away by a government which does not heed
the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people.
Therefore, the essential humanity of men
can be protected and preserved
only where government must answer - not just to the wealthy,
not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race,
but to all its people.**
Robert F. Kennedy
LARGEST QUAKES -
Live Seismograms - Worldwide (update every 30 minutes)
This morning -
5.3 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
Yesterday -
12/8/12 -
5.0 HALMAHERA, INDONESIA
5.1 NEAR S COAST OF NEW GUINEA, P
5.7 NEAR S COAST OF NEW GUINEA, PNG.
5.0 NEAR S COAST OF NEW GUINEA, PNG.
5.1 NEAR S COAST OF NEW GUINEA, PNG.
5.1 TAIWAN REGION
12/7/12 -
5.6 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.1 NEAR EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.1 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.1 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.0 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
5.5 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
6.2 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
7.3 OFF EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN - 459 km (285 miles) NE of TOKYO, Japan.
6.3 NORTH ISLAND OF NEW ZEALAND
5.3 SOUTHERN XINJIANG, CHINA
5.6 EASTERN NEW GUINEA REG., P.N.G.
5.0 NEW BRITAIN REGION, P.N.G.
5.1 BOUVET ISLAND REGION
VOLCANOES -
Volcano Webcams
Indonesia - North Sulawesi's Mount Lokon Enters Second Day of Eruption on Friday. So far there have been no report of casualties or damages, and the alert status of the mountain was still at “ready,” or two rungs above normal and one below full eruption.
TROPICAL STORMS -
In the Western Pacific -
Typhoon Bopha was located approximately 665 nm east-southeast of Palau.
In the South Indian Ocean -
Tropical Cyclone Claudia was located approximately 480 nm south-southeast of Diego Garcia. [It was likely that Claudia will weaken and become an extra-tropical storm over the weekend.]
Typhoon Bopha is THE STRONGEST CYCLONE TO EVER HIT THE PHILIPPINES - The death toll from Tropical Cyclone Pablo (Bopha) exceeded 500 early Sunday, even as the damage caused by the cyclone breached the P6-billion mark.
NY mostly ignored reports warning of superstorm - More than three decades before Superstorm Sandy, a state law and a series of legislative reports began warning New York politicians to prepare for a storm of historic proportions, spelling out scenarios eerily similar to what actually happened: a towering storm surge; overwhelming flooding; swamped subway lines; widespread power outages. The Rockaway peninsula was deemed among the "most at risk."
But most of the warnings and a requirement in a 1978 law to create a regularly updated plan for the restoration of "vital services" after a storm went mostly unheeded, either because of tight budgets or the lack of political will to prepare for a hypothetical storm that may never hit. Some of the thorniest problems after Sandy, including a gasoline shortage, the lack of temporary housing and the flooding of commuter tunnels, ended up being dealt with largely on the fly.
"I don't know that anyone believed," acknowledged Gov. Andrew Cuomo this past week. "We had never seen a storm like this. So it is very hard to anticipate something that you have never experienced." Asked how well prepared state officials were for Sandy, Cuomo said, "not well enough." It wasn't as if the legislative actions over the years were subtle. They all had a common, emphatic theme: Act immediately before it's too late.
The 1978 executive law required a standing state Disaster Preparedness Commission to meet at least twice a year to create and update disaster plans. It mandated the state to address temporary housing needs after a disaster, create a detailed plan to restore services, maintain sewage treatment, prevent fires, assure generators "sufficient to supply" nursing homes and other health facilities, and "protect and assure uninterrupted delivery of services, medicines, water, food, energy and fuel."
Reports in 2005, 2006 and 2010 added urgency. "It's not a question of whether a strong hurricane will hit New York City," the 2006 Assembly report warned. "It's just a question of when." A 2010 task force report to the Legislature concluded: "The combination of rising sea level, continuing climate change, and more development in high-risk areas has raised the level of New York's vulnerability to coast storms. ... The challenge is real, and sea level rise will progress regardless of New York's response."
The Disaster Preparedness Commission met biannually some years, but there are gaps in which there is no record of a meeting. However, some administrations, including Cuomo's, convened many of the same agency heads to discuss emergency management. But even under Cuomo, who has taken a much greater interest in emergency management after three violent storms in his first two years in office, there are still three vacancies on the commission.
Some improvements very made to the plan in recent years, such as requiring a specific plan to protect and evacuate the infirmed and to save pets. "But on two issues related to Sandy — prevention and recovery — they did almost nothing. If Goldman Sachs was smart enough to sandbag its building, why wasn't the MTA smart enough to sandbag the Battery Tunnel?" Sandy flooded both tubes of the Tunnel, which was one of the major and longest transportation disruptions of the storm. It also ravaged the Rockaways in Queens, particularly the waterfront community of Breezy Point, where roughly 100 homes burned to the ground in a massive wind-swept fire.
Among the other crises faced on a daily basis during Sandy were the shortage of temporary housing (which continues), the long disruption of electricity and gasoline, generators in health care facilities swamped by floodwaters, restoring power from swamped electrical infrastructure and repairing commuter rail lines. The warnings touched on many of these areas, but mostly in a broad way with few specific directions for action. Some areas, such as a shortage of shelters in New York City and repairing commuter rail lines quickly, have improved in recent years to some degree, but other areas such as making sure health facility generators are on upper floors are newly realized problems forced by Sandy, according to the former legislators.
"What you've got here is a great number of consequences that were foreseeable, but unforeseen. Prevention is politically less sexy than disaster response." There was another obstacle to enacting calls for more preparation: funding. The state and city were each facing $1 billion deficits from a slow economic recovery before Sandy hit. "As your budget shrinks, the first thing that goes out the door is emergency management, the first thing. To take the 1978 law and really enable it, you need to put a ton of money behind it and there was no political will to do it."
Cuomo is now asking the federal government for more than $32 billion to cover the immediate costs triggered by Sandy, and an additional $9 billion for preventive measures to better protect the area for the next big storm. The Cuomo administration insists that it has had robust emergency planning and clearly made important changes after tropical storms Irene and Lee slammed much of upstate and threw a scare into New York City in 2011. The administration created three regional disaster logistics centers and conducted training and exercises and, before Sandy, took extensive preparatory steps learned from Irene to "preposition" equipment and top staff and National Guard troops around the state.
Like the state, the city has talked up storm preparedness in a series of hurricane and climate change plans since 2000. And it has taken some concrete steps, such as requiring some new developments in flood zones to be elevated, eliminating roadblocks to putting boilers and electrical equipment above the ground and restoring wetlands as natural storm-surge barriers.
Still, the city wasn't expecting Sandy. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had figured there was only a 1 percent chance that the Battery in lower Manhattan would see the 14 feet of water Sandy sent in; the previous record, set in 1960, was 11 feet.
Bloomberg said the city would reassess building codes and evacuation zone borders, look at ways to flood-proof power and transportation networks, make sure hospitals are better prepared and do an engineering analysis of whether to build levees, dunes or other structures to protect the coast.
EXTREME HEAT & DROUGHT / CLIMATE CHANGE -
Texas - Is drought coming back in Houston? Much of the area received some much needed rain this week, but even with the rain there are concerns about a returning drought across the state. A record drought in Texas last year contributed to a historic number of wildfires in the state that burned more than four million acres of land, destroyed more than 3,000 homes and devastated massive acreage of farmland and forests. "October and November of this year were among the five driest October and Novembers on record."
U.S. Drought revives old water war among river states - The water wars are raging again in America's heartland, where drought-stricken states are pleading for the increasingly scarce water of the Missouri River – to drink from their faucets, irrigate their crops and float the barges.
The nation's most expensive weather event in 2012 was not Superstorm Sandy, but the continuing drought. More than 62 percent of the United States is still experiencing drought conditions. Less than 18 months after the US Army Corps of Engineers blasted gaps in a levee on the Mississippi River to cope with a record flood, it's getting ready to detonate explosives for the opposite reason – to clear rock outcroppings on the bottom of the river to try to deepen the channel for river traffic. Except for patches of California, Montana and Wyoming, the drought is expected to persist in most of the dry regions west of the Mississippi River over the next three months.
Drought in the Horn of Africa Delays Migrating Birds - The extensive 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa had significant consequences for European songbirds such as thrush nightingale and red-backed shrike. These birds visit northern Europe every spring. Year-round tracking revealed that the cause of the delay was a prolongation of stopover time during spring migration at the Horn of Africa, which was affected by extreme drought.
UN climate talks in Doha have closed with a historic shift in principle but few genuine cuts in greenhouse gases. The summit established for the first time that rich nations should move towards compensating poor nations for losses due to climate change. Developing nations hailed it as a breakthrough, but condemned the gulf between the science of climate change and political attempts to tackle it.
The deal, agreed by nearly 200 nations, extends to 2020 the Kyoto Protocol. It is the only legally-binding plan for combating global warming. The deal covers Europe and Australia, whose share of world greenhouse gas emissions is less than 15%. But the conference also cleared the way for the Kyoto protocol to be replaced by a new treaty binding all rich and poor nations together by 2015 to tackle climate change.
The final text "encourages" rich nations to mobilise at least $10bn (£6bn) a year up to 2020, when the new global climate agreement is due to kick in. There was last-minute drama as the talks were thrown into turmoil by the insistence of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus that they should be allowed extra credit for the emissions cuts they made when their industries collapsed. After a long delay, the chairman lost patience, re-started the meeting and gavelled through the agenda so fast there was no chance for Russia to object. A cheer exploded into prolonged applause. Russia bitterly objected at what it said was a clear breach of procedure, but the chairman said he would do no more than reflect the Russian view in the final report.
The big players, the US, EU and China accepted the agreement with varying degrees of reservation. But the representative for the small island states at severe risk from climate change was vociferous. "We see the package before us as deeply deficient in mitigation (carbon cuts) and finance. It's likely to lock us on the trajectory to a 3,4,5C rise in global temperatures, even though we agreed to keep the global average temperature rise of 1.5C to ensure survival of all islands. There is no new finance (for adapting to climate change and getting clean energy) - only promises that something might materialise in the future. Those who are obstructive need to talk not about how their people will live, but whether our people will live."
The island states accepted the agreement because for them it is better than nothing. Other diplomats will point to the immense complexity of the UN process, which is attempting to move away from the old Kyoto Protocol into a new phase binding rich and poor nations together in the task of tackling climate change. Until now rich nations have agreed finance to help developing countries to get clean energy and adapt to climate change, but they have stopped short of accepting responsibility for damage caused by climate change elsewhere. But in Doha that broad principle was agreed.
"It is a breakthrough," said an association of 52 developing nations. "The term Loss and Damage is in the text - this is a huge step in principle. Next comes the fight for cash. What helped swing it was [US President Barack] Obama asking Congress for $60bn for the damage caused by [Hurricane] Sandy." "This is a watershed in the talks. There is no turning back from this."
The UK think-tank E3G said: "This agreement really opens a can of worms - it might be applied to countries damming transboundary rivers, for instance. It could be very significant in future." The US had been adamant that this measure would be blocked, and the EU nearly vetoed it, too. The US head of delegation was seen for much of the past few days walking in circles The key to US agreement was the positioning of the Loss and Damage mechanism under an existing process promising to mobilise $100bn a year for poor nations to adapt to climate change. Facing tough budget decisions at home over the "fiscal cliff" it was essential for the US to avoid the impression that it was giving away more cash at this time.
The Seychelles representative told rich nationsthat discussion of compensation would not have been needed if they had cut emissions earlier. "We're past the mitigation [emissions cuts] and adaptation eras. We're now right into the era of loss and damage. What's next after that? Destruction?"
The US has been blamed on finance and on failure to cut its emissions more aggressively. The EU has also been under fire for failing to raise its promised cuts from 20%, which it is reaching easily, to 30%. (Scientists say it should be 40%.) The EU has been held back by Poland, which insists on its right to burn its huge reserves of coal.
Russia, Belarus and Ukraine then further delayed the endgame of the conference with an argument over so-called "hot air" - the pollution permits they were given to allow their heavy industries to thrive. Those industries collapsed but Poland and Russia insist that - as they suffered economic pain during the collapse - they should be allowed to use up the pollution permits as their economies grow again. In effect, they want to be able to increase their emissions as other nations are obliged to cut theirs.
The major task of this two-week conference has been untangling of the diplomatic spaghetti from climate agreements that have grown piecemeal over the past 15 years. It is widely agreed that a useful house-keeping job was done to help the UN move towards the next phase, which aims at a globally-encompassing agreement. Preliminary discussions were held on this, and it was quickly evident that making a global agreement fair to all parties will be monumentally difficult.
HEALTH THREATS -
Early-season rise in US flu activity continues - Influenza is widespread in eight US states, and some other indicators of an early flu season continue to rise.
RECALLS & ALERTS
