earthquake – praag.org

California overdue for major earthquake

Three fault segments running beneath Northern California and its roughly 15 million people are overdue for a major earthquake, including one section that lies near the dams and canals that supply much of the state’s water, according to a geological study published Monday.

The three fault segments and one other in the region are loaded with enough tension to produce quakes of magnitude 6.8 or greater, according to a geological study published Monday.

They include the little-known Green Valley fault, which lies near key dams and aqueducts northeast of San Francisco. Underestimated by geologists until now, the fault running between the cities of Napa and Fairfield is primed for a magnitude-7.1 quake, according to researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and San Francisco State University.

The water supplies of the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and the farm-rich Central Valley depend on the man-made water system that links to the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, noted James Lienkaemper, the U.S. Geological Survey geologist who was lead author of the study. The Green Valley fault is last believed to have ruptured sometime in the 1600s.

All four vulnerable fault segments belong to the San Andreas fault system, the geological dividing line that marks where the western half of California shifts northwest and away from the rest of North America at about 2 inches a year.

Source: AP

Earthquake strikes Guam

A 7.1-magnitude earthquake was reported off the coast of Guam Wednesday, but no tsunami is expected due to the earthquake’s depth.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, the earthquake was located “too deep inside the earth” to generate tsunami concerns.

The quake struck at more than 160km deep, according to the US Geological Survey. The magnitude was originally put at 6.9.

The earthquake was reported about 40km northwest of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.

The island, a US naval base, is located about 2600km southeast of Japan, with its largest source of income being the United States Armed Forces.

In addition to on-shore military installations, Guam, along with the rest of the Mariana Islands, is being prepared to be the westernmost military training range for America.

It is currently viewed as a key military hub that will further allow US military power to be projected via sea and sky.

California hit by largest quake in 25 years

Over 80 people were treated at hospital and massive power outages were reported in North Bay area of San Francisco and around the city of Napa, after California was shaken by a 6.0 magnitude earthquake.

The 6.0 quake struck at 3:20 am (10:20 GMT), the US Geological Survey said. Its epicenter was 6 kilometers from American Canyon and 9 kilometers from the city of Napa, at a depth of 10.8 kilometers from the surface.

Residents of the cities of San Francisco, some 40 miles away, and Davis, just over 70 miles away, quickly took to Twitter reporting feeling the quake.

Three people – two adults and one child – sustained critical wounds. At least 87 people were treated for minor injuries at Napa hospital after the earthquake, the spokesperson told AP. Most patients have cuts, bumps, bruises, said Vanessa DeGier, spokeswoman for the hospital in Napa.

The quake caused six significant fires including a blaze at the Napa Valley mobile home park, where 4 trailers were completely destroyed, according to local firefighters.

“There’s collapses, fires,” said Napa Fire Capt. Doug Bridewel. “That’s the worst shaking I’ve ever been in.”

The city government said there were 50 gas main breaks and 30 water main leaks. Three historic buildings in Napa were also damaged, including the county courthouse, and at least two downtown commercial buildings were severely damaged.

At least 15,000 customers were left without power across Northern California, the utility provider Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s map showed following the massive quake.

The USGS initially measured the tremor as “moderate,” but then it was upgraded to “violent.” The immediate hours after the event saw at least five aftershocks measuring at 1.6 magnitude. Aftershocks of up to 5.0 magnitude may continue throughout the next week.

Source: RT

US will assume control of Japan’s nuclear cache

According to The New York Times, Japan will announce on Monday that it will turn over to Washington more than 700 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium and a large quantity of highly enriched uranium, a decades-old research stockpile that is large enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons.

The nuclear fuel being turned over to the United States, which is of American and British origin, is a fraction of Japan’s overall stockpile. Japan has more than nine tons of plutonium stored in various locations and it is scheduled to open in the fall a new nuclear fuel plant that could produce many tons more every year.

American officials have been quietly pressing Japan to abandon the program, arguing that the material is insufficiently protected even though much of it is in a form that would be significantly more difficult to use in a weapon than the supplies being sent to the United States.

The explosions at Fukushima were chemical hydrogen explosions and were not nuclear explosions however. The exposed core reacts with the high pressure steam at about 2000°C to form zirconium and hydrogen. What we DO have is effectively three dirty bombs, ejecting radioactive isotopes in the form of dust particles into the atmosphere.

It takes a dosage of 4 Sieverts to kill 50% of the population, one Sievert would kill 5% of the population. Background level is 1-2 mS/y, smokers inhale an additional 5-10mS/y. 30 milliSieverts/year is regarded as the maximum occupational danger level (airline pilots, etc get about 5-9 mS/y). Some areas in Japan may get that level, Europe almost certainly will not.

Using Bequerels instead of Sieverts: Background level here for foodstuffs is about 40 Bequerels/kilogramm, warning levels for foods after Chernobyl were set at 800 B/Kg. Cancer patients sometimes have a scintigramm at 4 MEGA-Bequerels = 47 THOUSAND Bequerels/kilogramm without any negative effects.

Most of the fallout cloud should go out over the Pacific where it will be washed out of the sky by rain. Each component of the fallout has a different duration depending on which isotope it is. Each isotope has a so-called half-life. This means that half its radiation is gone after this half-life. Since 210 =1,000 and 220 = 1,000,000 it takes 10 respectively 20 half-lives for that isotope’s radiation to fall to 1 thousandth resp. one millionth of its initial value.

The dangerous elements which accumulate in the body are iodine, cesium and plutonium. The reactor Fukushima #3 is a MOX reactor.

Iodine 131 has a half-life of 8 days. It is a β and γ emitter. Iodine congregates in the thyroid gland. You can take non-radioactive I127 pills to saturate your thyroid preemptively, so that it doesn’t take up any I131.

Cesium137 has a half-life of about 33 years, β and γ emitter. The body treats cesium like potassium, so it is eventually excreted. but can cause many different types of cancer, particularly in the excretion filters, liver and kidneys.

Plutonium239 has a half-life of about 24,000 years, so it doesn’t go away. It is an α and γ emitter which congregates in the bone marrow where the α particles can do serious damage quickly.

Don’t eat any Kobe beef, imported Sushi or Pacific fish unless it has been officially checked for radiation first.

Source: VoR

Earthquake shakes central New Zealand, damaging homes

Scene from New Zealand after its previous earthquake in 2011

Strong earthquakes shook central New Zealand on Friday, damaging homes, destroying a bridge and sending office workers scrambling for cover in the capital. No serious injuries have been reported.

A magnitude-6.5 temblor struck just after 2:30 p.m. near the small South Island town of Seddon, and at least six aftershocks were 5.0 magnitude or stronger.

Several homes near the epicenter were severely damaged, with chimneys collapsing and roofs caving in, said police spokeswoman Barbara Dunn. She said a bridge was severely damaged on the main highway near Seddon, and that rocks and debris had fallen onto the road. Police closed a section of the highway.

Some buildings in Wellington, the capital, were evacuated, and items were knocked off shelves in places.

Police said a number of people were freed from Wellington elevators that stopped working. The initial temblor also forced the nation’s stock exchange to close for more than an hour.

Wellington Mayor Celia Wade-Brown said there was no major damage to the city’s infrastructure or office buildings. She said highways had become clogged as people left the city.

“We think this is business as usual,” she said, “but it is going to take a little while for people to get home tonight.”

The U.S. Geological Survey said the epicenter of the initial temblor was 94 kilometers (58 miles) west of Wellington at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles).

A quake of similar strength in the same area three weeks ago broke water mains, smashed windows and downed power lines.

Caroline Little, a seismologist with New Zealand quake monitoring agency GeoNet, said the series of quakes since July had followed an unusual pattern.

“Normally you get a big quake and then the aftershocks get smaller in magnitude,” she said.

Little said the July quake was on a fault line near Seddon that had not previously been mapped. She said it was too early to determine if Friday’s quakes were on that same fault.

A different fault line runs through Wellington, and many in the city fear a major disaster if it were to become active.

New Zealand is part of the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire” that has regular seismic activity. A severe earthquake in the city of Christchurch in 2011 killed 185 people and destroyed much of the city’s downtown.

Local authorities issued no tsunami warnings after Friday’s quakes. – AP

A rapper’s charity

Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-born hip-hop celebrity, complained when he faced questions about his charity’s financial record and ability to handle what eventually amounted to $16 million in donations.

Portraying himself as persecuted like Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Jean, 40, writes with indignation about insinuations that he had used his charity, Yéle, for personal gain. He says he did not need to — “I have a watch collection worth $500,000”— and that doubters will someday understand “Yéle is Haiti’s greatest asset and ally.”

But on his book tour for “Purpose: An Immigrant’s Story,” Jean neglects to mention two key facts: a continuing New York attorney general’s investigation has already found financial improprieties at Yéle, and the charity effectively went out of business last month, leaving a trail of debts, unfinished projects and broken promises.

“If I had depended on Yéle,” said Diaoly Estimé, whose orphanage features a wall painting of Mr. Jean and his wife, “these kids would all be dead by now.”

Even as Yéle is besieged by angry creditors, an examination of the charity indicates that millions in donations for earthquake victims went to its own offices, salaries, consultants’ fees and travel, to Mr. Jean’s brother-in-law for projects never realized, to materials for temporary houses never built and to accountants dealing with its legal troubles.

On the ground in Haiti, little lasting trace of Yéle’s presence can be discerned. The walled country estate leased for its headquarters, on which the charity lavished $600,000, is deserted. Yéle’s street cleaning crews have been disbanded. The Yéle-branded tents and tarps have mostly disintegrated; one camp leader said they had not seen Yéle, which is based in New York, since Jean was disqualified as a presidential candidate because he lives in Saddle River, N.J., not Haiti.

This summer, the charity foundered.

At the end of August, Derek Q. Johnson, Yéle’s chief executive, announced his resignation to supporters.

His resignation came after Jean declined to accept a settlement proposed by the attorney general covering the charity’s pre-earthquake activities, and he hired Avi Schick, a lawyer who had been a member of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s transition team.

The settlement would have required Jean and the two other Yéle founders to pay $600,000 in restitution “to remedy the waste of the foundation’s assets.” It also would have required Yéle to pay for a forensic audit of its post-disaster expenses, as it had done for its pre-earthquake finances, and to start “winding down its affairs.”

In 2010, Yéle spent $9 million and half went to travel, to salaries and consultants’ fees and to expenses related to their offices and warehouse. In contrast, another celebrity charity, Sean Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization, spent $13 million with only 10 percent going to those costs.

Though Mr. Penn’s group spent $43,000 on office-related expenses, Yéle spent $1.4 million, including $375,000 for “landscaping” and $37,000 for rent to Mr. Jean’s Manhattan recording studio. Yéle spent $470,440 on its own food and beverages.

Some of Yéle’s programming money went to projects that never came to fruition: temporary homes for which it prepaid $93,000; a medical center to have been housed in geodesic domes for which it paid $146,000; the revitalization of a plaza in the Cité Soleil slum, where supposed improvements that cost $230,000 are nowhere to be seen.

In its relief operation, Yéle operated outside the coordination system set up by other nongovernment groups; it did not want to be burdened by rules and meetings, Mr. Locke said in a 2010 interview.

Other organizations focused on providing concrete services like sanitation or health care.

Yéle chose to work more broadly than deeply. It supplied food, water and supplies to what it said were dozens of tent camps. Julie Schindall, then spokeswoman for Oxfam America, called it a “dump and run strategy.” Mr. Penn told The New York Times in 2010, “My impression is that Yéle is at the service of Wyclef Jean and his reputation.”