A British Airways jet has caught fire at Las Vegas airport, sending smoke billowing into the air, after suffering what the pilot described as a “catastrophic failure” of the left engine.
The plane – a Boeing 777 heading from the US city’s McCarran airport to London Gatwick – could be seen with flames around its fuselage.
Fire officials said 14 people were taken to Sunrise hospital to be treated for minor injuries, including cuts and bruises, most a result of sliding down the inflatable chutes to escape.
All 159 passengers and 13 crew on board were evacuated, and the fire was swiftly put out by around 50 firefighters. An airport spokeswoman told reporters: “All passengers were evacuated quickly and safely and taken by bus to the terminal.
“We cannot express enough gratitude to the emergency response crews, as well as the British Airways crew.”
The National Transportation Safety Board was investigating the incident, she added.
The plane’s take-off had been aborted shortly before the fire broke out. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the Boeing’s 777 left engine burst into flames.
Dramatic images of flight BA2276 were shared on social media by members of the public at the airport, which is five miles south of downtown Las Vegas.
An investigation has been launched into a fire that broke out at an abandoned building in the Johannesburg CBD on Tuesday night.
Three floors were destroyed by the blaze that started just after 4pm. The cause of the blaze is not yet known and no casualties have been reported.
Johannesburg Emergency Services spokesperson Nana Radebe says there are making sure the fire does not reignite.
“The fire has been contained successfully, at the moment we are just finishing dumping down just to ensure the fire does not reignite.
We also had firefighters making rounds to make sure no one was laying there unnoticed,” says Radebe.
It took three hours for firefighterts to put out the blaze.
Scores of homeless blacks occupy the building.
Despite fire officials declaring the building a danger zone, homeless blacks insist they will continue to stay and sleep in the building. They say they will go back because they do not have another home and have lived there for the past decade.
A massive fire has broken out at the Radio France headquarters building in Paris, causing the evacuation of personnel, according to reports.
The fire engulfed the seventh and eight floors of Maison de la radio (Radio House) in the 16 arrondissement of Paris. Several windows exploded due to the extreme heat. Firefighters were called to the scene.
Radio programmes of France Inter and France Info, the two most important news stations, were suspended as a necessary safety measure. The fire reportedly hit the area of a ventilation system under works.
No injuries were immediately reported.
“I hope we can resume our radio programmes as soon as possible,” Laurent Guimier, director of France Info, told AFP.
Amazon announced its first smartphone today, a bold move into a segment currently dominated by Apple and Samsung. At an event in Seattle, CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the Fire Phone, a smartphone with a 4.7-in. 3-D display, a 2.2-GHz quadcore processor, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and 2 GB of RAM.
The device, which has a heavy focus on multimedia, will offer unlimited photo storage and a dedicated button to launch the camera app. It will be sold exclusively on AT&T’s network at a price of $199 for a 32-GB version with a two-year contract or $299 for a 64-GB version. Amazon is also throwing in a free year of Amazon Prime, its customer-loyalty program (existing Prime members will get a bonus year tacked onto their current subscription).
The device is currently available for preorder on Amazon’s website and will begin shipping on July 25.
The new phone is designed to be tightly integrated with Amazon’s myriad services. The company’s Instant Video service will be preinstalled on the device, as will Amazon’s newly launched music-streaming service. The phone will also come with a new program called Firefly, which allows people to scan objects, songs and TV shows (sort of like an all-purpose Shazam app) so that Amazon can identify them and offer a way to purchase them from its store. In total Firefly can recognize 100 million items, Bezos said. “Fire Phone puts everything you love about Amazon in the palm of your hand,” he said in a press release.
The phone’s 3-D capabilities are its most unique feature. Through a technology dubbed Dynamic Perspective, the Fire Phone uses four cameras placed on its front face to track a person’s head movements at all times. This allows the phone to offer a real-time 3-D-like display that presents more depth to images than a typical smartphone screen. During the event, Bezos demonstrated the phone’s map app, which showed looming skyscrapers leaping off the screen, as well as an app that allowed the user to sort through dresses as if they were in an actual 3-D space. The phone’s motion sensors allow users to scroll within certain apps by tilting the device rather than touching the screen.
Like the Kindle, the Fire Phone will run on a modified version of Android and support some apps native to Google’s operating system. Popular apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, ESPN and HBO Go should be available for the device when it launches. Amazon has also released development tools to allow companies to make apps that make use of Dynamic Perspective and Firefly.
The device demonstrates Amazon’s growing interest in creating hardware. In addition to its popular line of Kindle e-readers and tablets, the company released its first set-top box, the Amazon Fire TV, earlier this year. The company has always been reticent to disclose just how successful its hardware ventures are — Bezos said today that there are “tens of millions” of Kindle owners, and there’s no real data on Fire TV sales — but smartphone sales dwarf those other segments. More than a billion smartphones were shipped globally in 2013, with Samsung and Apple controlling nearly half the market between them.
Amazon will face an uphill battle taking on those two giants, but the company has a history of eschewing profits to smother competitors in other markets. They may be embarking on a similar strategy today — the 32-GB version of the Fire Phone, for instance, will sell for $100 less than a similar model of the iPhone 5S. – Time.com
Amazingly, no one was injured when Europe’s largest oil refinery burned with the force of a thousand suns yesterday. And obviously it’s in Russia.
The refinery is OJSC TANECO, formerly known as the Nizhnekamsk refinery, in Tartarstan. If you get into your Lada and drive due East from Moscow, you’ll get there in about 14 hours.
Reuters reports that the fire was put out the same evening it started and there were no injuries. It will take a few months to get production back up.
It churns out 140,000 barrels of gas and diesel a day, and that production all goes to Russia.
This picture is on English Russia and gives you a sense of scale of the blaze.
Firemen inspect the damages inside the Nairobi airport building
by Peter Martell
A devastating fire shut down Nairobi’s international airport for much of Wednesday in a “major crisis” that forced the cancellation or diversion of scores of flights at east Africa’s biggest transport hub.
The first flights from abroad operated by Kenya’s national carrier will land early Thursday, officials said, with customs and baggage processed through what is normally the domestic terminal because international arrivals were gutted in the four-hour blaze.
Cargo and domestic flights out of the Kenyan capital resumed early Wednesday evening.
It was not clear whether other airlines would also land as early as Thursday.
The inferno, which started before dawn, sent plumes of black smoke billowing out of the main arrivals terminal.
But by 9:00am (0600 GMT), firefighters had succeeded in stemming the raging flames, despite a lack of both water and equipment.
“Everything is being done to resume normal operations,” presidential spokesman Manoah Esipisu told reporters outside the charred arrivals hall of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), where hours earlier flames had lit up the pre-dawn sky.
International passengers were given priority to fly to Kenya’s second city Mombasa to connect to onward flights while Nairobi’s domestic terminal was being prepared to handle flights from abroad.
Some 16,000 passengers usually transit through JKIA every day, Esipisu said.
The airport is a regional hub for east Africa, with many long-distance international flights landing there to connect to countries across the region.
Kenyan business operators were eager for a swift return to normal operations following the disaster.
“This is the busiest time of year for international flights,” said Duncan Muriuki, head of Destination Africa, a tour operator.
“We have people stuck in Mombasa, so it will definitely impact us negatively,” he said, adding that clients stuck at the coast would face journeys of several hours to travel by road to the capital.
The flower sector, which provides a livelihood for some half a million Kenyans, could be hard hit by the fire, as any delay in shipping out fragile lilies and roses would result in big losses.
Jane Ngige, who heads the Kenya Flower Council, said harvesting at flower farms had been halted Wednesday while the trade association waited for more information.
Tens of thousands of passengers could be affected by the JKIA’s closure, while regional airports have limited capacity and will likely struggle to handle all the travellers unable to land in Nairobi.
Around 250 flights take off and land there every day, regional aviation sources said, adding that some six million passengers used the airport last year.
The fire was reported to have begun at the immigration section at arrivals, but the cause is not yet known, with police chief David Kimaiyo saying that investigations had begun.
No casualties have been reported, but two people — an airport worker and a passenger — were taken to hospital due to smoke inhalation, Kenya Airways chief Titus Naikuni said.
The interior ministry was forced to issue public appeals for Nairobi’s notoriously congested traffic to give way to trucks ferrying water to the airport after firefighters tackling the blaze ran “dangerously low on water”.
Soldiers and police even came with buckets to help put out the fire, said Sylvia Amondi, who was at the airport to pick up a relative who had been due to arrive there.
“The international arrivals station has been completely destroyed, the roof has caved in and the floor is covered in debris and water,” she said.
Behind the scenes portly civil servants braved massive puddles to sift through soggy papers and files in what was left of their offices.
In the baggage claim area, only a giant advert for multi-choice TV remained untouched.
President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose father Jomo Kenyatta — Kenya’s first president — the airport is named after, visited the devastated terminal along with his top security chiefs to assess the damage caused by the “huge inferno”, the interior ministry added.
Kenyatta later called the fire a “tragic event”, and promised everything would be done to resume normal operations “as soon as possible”.
In Washington, the White House said President Barack Obama had called Kenyatta to offer US support.
August is one of Kenya’s busiest months for tourism, a key industry for the country, as foreign travellers fly in to see its wildlife and enjoy the white sand beaches on its Indian Ocean coast.
The airport offers direct connections to Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and other African cities. -AFP
A massive fire engulfed the arrivals hall at Kenya’s main international airport early Wednesday, forcing East Africa’s largest airport to close and the rerouting of all inbound flights.
Dark black smoke that billowed skyward was visible across much of Nairobi as emergency teams battled the blaze. Stranded passengers stood on sidewalks outside the airport with their luggage in hand.
The Kenya Airports Authority said the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport has been closed until further notice so that emergency teams can battle the fire.
Associated Press reporters at the scene said the fire had gutted the international arrivals hall, where passengers pass through immigration and retrieve their luggage.
As in many countries in East Africa, public sector services like police and fire units are hobbled by small budgets and outdated or no equipment. A British passenger, Martyn Collbeck, said he was surprised that the airport wasn’t shut down sooner so that emergency vehicles could respond.
“When I arrived there were one or two fire engines parked outside the international arrivals. It spread very fast,” said Collbeck, who had been scheduled to fly back to London on an early morning KLM flight. “There were a couple of explosions which I think were a couple of gas canisters.”
But, he added: “I would have expected more fire engines to respond faster.”
The Nairobi airport is the busiest airport in East Africa, and its closure is likely to affect flights throughout the region. – AP
Twelve people died Tuesday when a night time fire tore through a two-story Moscow market warehouse that was being used by migrant workers from a former Soviet republic as a temporary residence.
“Twelve people died. They were migrant workers. We are trying to confirm which (ex-Soviet) republic they came from,” a Moscow emergencies ministry spokesman told AFP.
Unconfirmed news reports said the migrants came from the impoverished Central Asian nation of Tajikistan. Numerous Moscow markets employ cheap labourers from the region without giving them proper housing conditions or pay.
The blaze erupted early Tuesday at a market on the southern outskirts of the city called Kachalovsky. Officials said it took two hours to put out.
Emergency workers described squalid living conditions in which the workers slept on hard cots that were stacked on top of each other in rows of four without any direct access to the outside.
The workers “lived in a metal annex that was equipped with a space heater”, an unnamed law enforcement official told the Interfax news agency.
“They slept in frighteningly tight conditions, on hard bunk cots that were then stacked on top of each other,” he said.
Another official said the workers probably left the space heater on all night to stay warm during the frigid Moscow spring. Overnight temperatures plunged below freezing and much of central Russia has been hit by snow.
“The fire could have started from the electric space heater. It was probable left on all night because the structure was turned into living quarters,” an unnamed investigator told ITAR-TASS.
Police said they have opened a criminal investigation but have not yet pressed any charges against the market owners.
Russia’s migration service estimates that there are 700,000 Tajiks living officially in the country — a tenth of their home country’s population of just under seven million.
Tajikistan was wrecked by a brutal civil war in the early 1990s and then experienced nearly two decades of ethnic tensions and endemic drugs trafficking that hampered sustainable growth.
Its economy remains in tatters and some analysts estimate that up to half of Tajikistan’s young male population is currently trying to make a living in Moscow and other major Russian cities.
The predominant majority of the migrants who arrive in Moscow do so without acquiring the official city worker permits that the Russian capital has required since Soviet times.
Their employment is therefore never officially reported to the authorities and many end up living in Moscow apartment block basements or makeshift residences.
Seven migrants were killed in January 2009 when a fire swept through an underground Moscow garage they were building and had also used as a temporary living shelter.
Another seven died in May 2011 when a fire engulfed an old abandoned building in central Moscow.
The presence of Central Asian nationals and workers from the predominantly Muslim Caucasus region has also stirred racial tensions in the Russian capital and resulted in repeated deadly attacks.
President-elect Vladimir Putin had vowed to reinforce migration controls while serving as prime minister for the past four years and won a strong following from Russian nationalists while heading the Kremlin in 2000-2008.
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