Floodwaters Threatening the South of

Pakistan

Nadeem Khawer/European Pressphoto Agency

Flood victims fled the areas under water in the Sindh Province in Pakistan on Friday.
By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: August 20, 2010

MULTAN, Pakistan — Surging waters are shifting flood damage southward in Pakistan, as
the water level rises at one of the main flood barriers north of the city of Hyderabad, officials
said Friday.
Multimedia

Map
Extent of the Flooding in Pakistan
Asim Tanveer/Reuters

Pakistanis displaced by flooding fight for relief goods in the Punjab Province in Pakistan.

The next two days will be critical for the city’s 1.5 million people, but embankments
strengthened over the last 10 days offer some protection, said an officer at the flood control
room there, who gave his name as Major Ehsan. “We have done a lot of work, making
sandbags and stone pitches to build up the embankments,” he said.

The Indus River, which has flooded five to seven miles beyond its banks, is flowing at a rate
of more than 700,000 cubic feet per second, he said, which is expected to rise to 800,000
cubic feet per second in the next 24 hours at the flood barrier, called the Kotri barrage, he
said. “If the water coming does not exceed that, we will be able to pass through this,” he said.

Villages upriver are still being inundated, and although most of the population has been
evacuated from low-lying areas, the military was still getting phone calls from people
stranded in their homes and was sending out rescue boats, he said.

The floods, which have stricken about one-fifth of Pakistan’s territory, were set off by
torrential monsoon rains in the northern highlands that began July 28. Water tore through the
upper part of the country with terrifying velocity, and it is now spreading out through the
flood plains of central Punjab and southern Sindh Provinces on its way to the Arabian Sea.

Questions have been raised about the national and local preparedness, whether there were
delays in warning local officials of the pending flooding and whether officials who were
alerted failed to react promptly. On Friday, government officials warned that high tides in the
Arabian Sea expected next week will add to the flooding in the coastal areas south of
Hyderabad.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has accepted an offer of $5 million of aid made by its archrival India,
after several days of hesitation. Receiving assistance from India is politically delicate in
Pakistan, and the government can expect criticism from some of the religious and nationalist
parties that support the fight for an independent Kashmir, the contested region split between
India and Pakistan.

India also donated assistance after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan-administered Kashmir,
and the government also waited then before accepting the offer. As of Friday, the United
Nations had received more than $263 million, plus more than $54 million in additional
pledges. “This is not just Pakistan’s hour of need — Pakistan is facing weeks, months and
years of need,” said Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general.

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Neil MacFarquhar from the
United Nations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/world/asia/21pstan.html?ref=disasters

We’re Not Ready

By BOB HERBERT

Published: July 19, 2010

We were told by oil industry executives and their acolytes and enablers in government that
deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico would not cause the kind of catastrophe that we’ve
been watching with an acute and painful sense of helplessness for the past three months.
Advances in technology, they said, would ward off the worst-case scenarios. Fail-safe
systems like the blowout preventer a mile below the surface at the Deepwater Horizon rig site
would keep wildlife and the environment safe.

Bob Herbert
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Americans are not particularly good at learning even the most painful lessons. Denial is our
default mode. But at the very least this tragedy in the gulf should push us to look much harder
at the systems we need to prevent a catastrophic accident at a nuclear power plant, and for
responding to such an event if it occurred.

Right now, we’re not ready.

Nuclear plants are the new hot energy item. The Obama administration is offering federal
loan guarantees to encourage the construction of a handful of new plants in the U.S., the first
in decades. Not to be outdone, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a certifiable nuke
zealot, would like to see 100 new plants built over the next 20 years.
There is no way to overstate how cautiously we need to proceed along this treacherous road.
Building nuclear power plants is mind-bogglingly expensive, which is why you need
taxpayer money to kick-start the process. But the overriding issues we need to be concerned
about, especially in light of our horrendous experience with the oil gushing in the gulf for so
long, are safety and security.

We have to be concerned about the very real possibility of a worst-case scenario erupting at
one of the many aging nuclear plants already operating (in some cases with safety records
that would make your hair stand on end), and at any of the new ones that so many people are
calling for.

The problem is that while the most terrible accidents are blessedly rare, when they do occur
the consequences are horrific, as we’ve seen in the gulf. With nuclear plants, the worst-case
scenarios are too horrible for most people to want to imagine. Denial takes over with policy
makers and the public alike. Something approaching a worst-case accident at a nuclear plant,
especially one in a highly populated area, would make the Deepwater Horizon disaster look
like a walk in the park.

“We are way, way behind when it comes to the hard work of preventing accidents and
responding to these catastrophes when they happen,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of
the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of
Public Health. “With the deep-water oil drilling, we allowed the technological advances to
drive the process at a rate that was unsafe, and we got really badly burned. The potential of a
nuclear catastrophe is a major disaster in waiting.”

There are already plenty of problems on the nuclear power front, but they don’t get a great
deal of media attention. David Lochbaum, the director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the
Union of Concerned Scientists, told me last week that there have been 47 instances since
1979 in which nuclear reactors in the U.S. have had to be shut down for more than a year for
safety reasons.

“We estimated, in 2005 dollars, that the average price tag for these outages was between $1.5
billion and $2 billion,” said Mr. Lochbaum.

People of a certain age will remember the frightening accident at the Three Mile Island
nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, a partial meltdown that came dangerously close to a
worst-case scenario. As Mr. Lochbaum put it, “In roughly two hours, conditions at the plant
rendered it from a billion-dollar asset to a multibillion-dollar liability. It cost more to clean up
than it cost to build it.”

Another frightening accident occurred in 2002 at the Davis-Besse plant at Oak Harbor, Ohio.
A hidden leak led to corrosion that caused a near-catastrophe. By the time the problem was
discovered, only a thin layer of stainless steel was left to hold back the disaster.

The potential problems with nuclear power abound. No one knows what to do with the
dangerous nuclear waste that is building up at the plants. And no one wants to have an
extended conversation in polite company about the threat of terrorists who could wreak all
manner of mayhem with an attack on a plant.
For many very serious people, our overreliance on foreign oil and the potential dire
consequences of global warming make the case for moving more toward nuclear energy a
compelling one. But if this is done without a whole lot more serious thought given to matters
of safety and rigorous oversight, it’s a step we’ll undoubtedly come to regret.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 20, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/opinion/20herbert.html?ref=disasters

The Sun Also Surprises

By LAWRENCE E. JOSEPH

Published: August 15, 2010

Los Angeles

Ted McGrath

DESPITE warnings that New Orleans was unprepared for a severe hit by a hurricane,
America was blindsided by Hurricane Katrina, a once-in-a-lifetime storm that made landfall
five years ago this month. We are similarly unready for another potential natural disaster:
solar storms, bursts of gas on the sun’s surface that release tremendous energy pulses.

Occasionally, a large solar storm can rain energy down on the earth, overpowering electrical
grids. About once a century, a giant pulse can knock out worldwide power systems for
months or even years. It’s been 90 years since the last super storm, but scientists say we are
on the verge of another period of high solar activity.
This isn’t science fiction. Though less frequent than large hurricanes, significant storms have
hit earth several times over the last 150 years, most notably in 1859 and 1921. Those
occurred before the development of the modern power grid; recovering from a storm that size
today would cost up to $2 trillion a year for several years.

Storms don’t have to be big to do damage. In March 1989 two smaller solar blasts shut down
most of the grid in Quebec, leaving millions of customers without power for nine hours.
Another storm, in 2003, caused a blackout in Sweden and fried 14 high-voltage transformers
in South Africa.

The South African experience was particularly telling — the storm was relatively weak, but
by damaging transformers it put parts of the country off-line for months. That’s because high-
voltage transformers, which handle enormous amounts of electricity, are the most sensitive
part of a grid; a strong electromagnetic pulse can easily fuse their copper wiring, damaging
them beyond repair.

Even worse, transformers are hard to replace. They weigh up to 100 tons, so they can’t be
easily moved from the factories in Europe and Asia where most of them are made; right now,
there’s already a three-year waiting list for new ones.

Without aggressive preparation, we run the risk of a disaster magnitudes greater than
Hurricane Katrina. Little or no electricity means little or no telecommunications,
refrigeration, clean water or fuel. Basic law enforcement and national security could be
compromised.

Fortunately, there are several defenses against solar storms. The most important are grid-level
surge suppressors, which are essentially giant versions of the devices we use at home to
protect computers. There are some 5,000 vulnerable transformers in North America; at
$50,000 for each suppressor, we could protect the grid for about $250 million.

Earlier this year the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow the White House
to require utilities to put grid-protection measures in place, then recoup the costs from
customers. Unfortunately, the companion bill in the Senate contains no such provision.

It’s not a lost cause, though; lawmakers can still insert the grid-protection language during
conference. If they don’t, there could be trouble soon: the next period of heavy solar activity
will be in late 2012. Having gone unprepared for one recent natural disaster, we would make
a grave mistake not to get ready for the next.

Lawrence E. Joseph is the author of “Aftermath: A Guide to Preparing for and Surviving
Apocalypse 2012.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opinion/16joseph.html?ref=disasters