Cameras and meteorites

Extraordinary moving pictures of a meteorite racing across the Russian sky, shaking buildings and shattering glass, clearly demonstrate the communications revolution brought about by small portable cameras, especially mobile phones.

A decade or so ago, there would have been little chance of a camera being on hand to capture the event as it happened in a remote region nearly 1,000 miles from Moscow.  The meteorite, which burned up in the earth’s atmosphere, weighed about 10 tonnes.

More than 950 people were injured, mainly by flying glass, two of them seriously.  A much bigger heavenly body, about half the size of a football pitch, passed within 17,000 miles of earth the same day.  In astronomical terms, this qualifies as a fairly near miss.

In 1908, Russia got in the way of another asteroid or comet.  It came down in a sparsely populated region of Siberia, flattening trees over an area of 800 square miles.    And many believe that the dinosaurs were exterminated by an asteroid that hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico 65 million years ago.

* A cabbie writes, and recommends my book!   Thank you.   see p10  http://www.dac-callsign.com/13/Jan13/CallSignJan2013.pdf

Disasters and disorder

Haiti could be a pretty lawless place at the best of times. The aftermath of the earthquake is not the best of times. At first it seemed survivors were helping themselves to food and water wherever they could find them, and you couldn’t blame them.

Now, though, looting has become much more widespread with organised criminal gangs beginning to take charge. Following the quake, an estimated 4,500 prisoners escaped from the country’s main gaol – among them drug barons and gang bosses.

Disorder, of course, is not unusual after a major disaster. During the Sicily earthquake of 1908 (see my blog of January 16), the walls of Messina prison collapsed and those inmates who were not killed or injured just walked out. Normally law-abiding folk grabbed what they needed to survive wherever they could, but others pillaged shops and warehouses or rifled corpses, while two men were shot dead trying to rob a bank.

After the Lisbon quake of 1755, the authorities hanged thirty looters in prominent places around the city. And following America’s Johnstown flood of 1885, a number of “marauders” were summarily executed, because “the people in the solemn earnestness of their work of succour and rescue [had] not the patience to wait the tedious process of law.”

Survivors and great escapes

There has not been much good news from Haiti, but yesterday we got a small ration. Fifty hours after the earthquake struck, a two year old boy was found alive by a Spanish rescue team in the ruins of his home in Port-au-Prince. Redjeson Hausteen Claude’s face broke into a smile when he was handed to his weeping mother.

On July 4 last year, I wrote in this blog about what appeared to be the unusual ability of children to survive air crashes. And after the great Sicily earthquake of 1908, which killed perhaps 150,000 people, a group of Russian sailors, who played a much-admired role in the rescue effort, found two babies safe and well under a heap of rubble. They were said to have been laughing and playing with the buttons on their clothes.

There have also been astonishing escapes involving adults, of course. Twenty days after the Courrieres mining disaster in France in 1906, 13 survivors emerged from the pit, long after the rescue effort had been abandoned, and following the Chinese Tangshan earthquake of 1976, there were miners who kept going for 15 days underground without food or clean water.

Italian earthquakes

At least 27 people have been killed by an earthquake that struck the Italian Mediaeval city of L'Aquila about 70 miles from Rome in the early hours of this morning. A hundred thousand people have fled their homes.

Italy is often prey to earthquakes because of two fault lines – one that runs the length of the country from north to south, and another that crosses the centre from west to east. In 2002, 25 people were killed in the southern town of San Giuliano di Puglia, while five years earlier, a quake demolished part of the famous church of St Francis at Assisi, with its frescos by Giotto. The death toll was ten.

Italy’s deadliest earthquake in recent years came in 1980, when 2,700 people were killed at Eboli about 50 miles south of Naples, while the deadliest the country has ever seen had its epicentre under the Straits of Messina that divide Sicily from the Italian mainland.

It struck on the morning of December 28, 1908, and flattened much of Messina on Sicily and Reggio di Calabria on the mainland. Some estimates put the number of people killed at more than 150,000, and martial law had to be imposed when gangs of looters descended on the stricken areas. Ships in the harbour at Messina were turned into floating hospitals for the injured, and Russian sailors in particular won praise for their courage in helping to free people trapped under the rubble.