Tag: Fire

Categories
Politics

Courtroom Paperwork Establish Sailor Charged With Arson in Fireplace That Destroyed Ship

Court Documents Identify Sailor Charged With Arson in Fire That Destroyed Ship

WASHINGTON — Investigators have identified the Navy sailor accused of starting a fire that engulfed the warship Bonhomme Richard and burned for days at a Navy base in San Diego last year.

The sailor, Ryan Sawyer Mays, 20, joined the service in May 2019 and holds the rank of seaman apprentice, according to Navy records. The Navy formally charged Seaman Mays with aggravated arson and hazarding a vessel last month but declined to provide additional details until federal search warrants were unsealed by a federal court in San Diego on Tuesday.

Documents filed by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service describe a sailor who “hated” the Navy after being sent to a warship following a brief stint as a SEAL trainee in late 2019.

Seaman Mays quit the difficult six-month initial SEAL training course in Coronado, Calif., after just five days, according to the filing.

The fire, one of the worst to engulf an American warship outside combat, rendered the ship inoperative while it was pierside at the base. More than 400 sailors from 16 nearby ships fought the blaze, which reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees and took four days to extinguish.

A lawyer representing Seaman Mays said his client had “maintained his innocence throughout this entire ordeal.”

“He’s presumed innocent, and we look forward for the opportunity to review the evidence and presenting a case on his behalf,” the lawyer, Gary S. Barthel, said in an interview on Wednesday.

Seaman Mays, whose identity was reported earlier by The Daily Beast, was confined in a Navy brig from late August to approximately mid-October 2020 and then released, according to Mr. Barthel. It is unclear why the Navy freed Seaman Mays months before he was formally charged.

After his release from the brig, Seaman Mays reported to the staff of Amphibious Squadron 5 in San Diego, where he is currently assigned.

“He’s expected to perform his duties as he would any other day of the week as any other sailor would,” Mr. Barthel said of his client. “There are no restrictions on his movement.”

Mr. Barthel said his client voluntarily quit the SEAL program, and hopes to re-enter training in the future.

“I think he’d like to go back if given the opportunity, if he meets all the other qualifications,” Mr. Barthel said.

A spokesman for the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, which oversees SEAL training, could not immediately confirm the details described by N.C.I.S.

Navy records show that Seaman Mays left the Naval Special Warfare training center on March 6, 2020, and reported to the Bonhomme Richard on March 23.

The N.C.I.S. report said that the Bonhomme Richard’s command master chief — the ship’s senior-most enlisted sailor and a top adviser to the commanding officer — described Seaman Mays as “a person who showed disdain towards authority and the U.S. Navy.” The report further noted that “the morale and behavior of sailors who had aspired to become a SEAL, and then find themselves serving in a more traditional role on a Navy ship, are frequently very challenging.”

Seaman Mays was assigned to the Bonhomme Richard’s Deck Division, which is responsible for maintaining the physical condition of the ship — a job often involving manual labor such as removing rust and painting.

The warship was undergoing an extended maintenance period and was moored when the blaze broke out on a Sunday morning, when fewer than 200 sailors were aboard. The unsealed documents said that Seaman Mays was on duty aboard the ship that day.

Navy officials deemed the 800-foot-long amphibious warship a total loss after repair estimates rose to more than $3 billion. The ship was decommissioned on April 14, and towed through the Panama Canal. It will be cut into scrap metal in Texas.

According to the N.C.I.S., a witness identified Seaman Mays as the only person who entered a vehicle storage area deep within the ship the morning of the fire, shortly before smoke was seen rising from that compartment. The report said that he may have left the storage area through an escape trunk and returned to his berthing area. A second sailor recalled Seaman Mays coming into the berthing area to “tell everyone to get off the ship because the ship was on fire.”

Seaman Mays filled out a questionnaire for investigators eight days after the fire broke out, and was the only member of the crew aboard the ship on July 12, 2020, who reported smelling a “burning fuel/rubbery smell” from the fire, the documents said. Investigators said the terminology Seaman Mays used to describe the smell of the fire was “consistent with items and materials” that special agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found in the vehicle storage compartment after the fire was extinguished.

Seaman Mays faces a preliminary hearing known as an Article 32 investigation, the results of which will either recommend he be sent to a court-martial or have the charges dismissed. The final decision on whether Seaman Mays will face trial will be made by the commander of the Navy’s Third Fleet, Vice Adm. Steve Koehler.

Cmdr. Sean Robertson, a spokesman for Third Fleet, confirmed that “Seaman Apprentice Ryan Sawyer Mays is the sailor who was charged July 29,” and said, “I have nothing further to add.”

Seamus Hughes contributed research.

Categories
World News

Warmth Wave Unfold Fireplace That Erased Lytton, British Columbia

Heat Wave Spread Fire That Erased Lytton, British Columbia

TORONTO — Something strange was happening to the acacia trees in Lytton, British Columbia.

The small town in Western Canada had seen three days of extreme heat that each broke national temperature records by June 30, rising to 121 degrees. That morning at the Lytton Chinese History Museum, Lorna Fandrich noticed the green leaves dropping off the trees surrounding the building, she said, apparently unable to tolerate the heat.

Hours later, Lytton was on fire. A village of fewer than 300 people, nestled among mountain ranges, and prone to hot summers, the town was consumed by flames that destroyed 90 percent of it, killed two and injured several others, the authorities said.

Investigators are probing whether local rail traffic is responsible for starting the fire, which was exacerbated by the heat, amid temperatures that climate researchers say would virtually not be possible without human-caused global warming.

On Friday, when a path was finally cleared of downed power lines, bricks and other debris to make way for five buses taking residents to tour the town, the village was almost unrecognizable, the residents said.

Mounds of warped metal and disfigured wood poked out of gutted buildings. Whatever brick walls remained were often scarred by black scorch marks.

Matilda and Peter Brown saw that their house has been destroyed, leaving just the skeleton of a traditional Indigenous hut used to air dry salmon.

“That was our home,” Ms. Brown said through tears. “That was our sanctuary. Right now we have no place.”

The extreme heat wave that blasted through much of the Pacific Northwest at the end of June spurred widespread wildfires, a drastic spike in heat-related deaths and environmental devastation that wiped out millions of coastal wildlife.

Lytton was hit particularly hard, with temperatures ranging between 116 and 121 degrees. The fire left displaced residents and neighboring Indigenous communities wondering what could be salvaged among the ashes.

“Where many buildings stood is now simply charred earth,” the village of Lytton said in a July 6 statement.

Mr. Brown, who is from the Lytton First Nation, lost one of the family’s heirloom cedar baskets and some personal documents, stowed away in a gun safe.

Ms. Brown is a member of the Ts’kw’aylaxw First Nation, near the neighboring town of Lillooet, where she was leading an addiction counseling group at the time of the fire. She said she is taking time away from work to tend to this “nightmare.”

“I don’t want to be a wounded healer,” she added.

A dramatic scene unfolded June 30 when “someone banged on the office windows after hours” to alert town staff members of the fire, the village statement said. The mayor ordered a complete evacuation, while volunteer firefighters attempted to tame the roaring blaze in dry conditions that allowed it to tear through the town.

At the height of the heat wave, more than 90 crew members flew to British Columbia to help the wildfire service, battling flames over thousands of acres in challenging conditions for overheating equipment. Sudden deaths also rose sharply due to the heat. Emergency responders attended 777 that were reported to the provincial coroner’s office between June 25 and July 1, more than three times the number in the same period last year.

The heat wave in Canada presented an additional public health concern, as authorities were still grappling with the challenge of the coronavirus and Canadians just beginning to enjoy some of the pleasures of summer as restrictions ease.

Gordon Murray, president of the Two Rivers Farmers Market in Lytton, said feelings of grief, sorrow, anger and frustration aboard his bus on Friday were “overwhelming.”

More disconcerting still was just how localized the fire was, he said. He and his partner have been living in Lytton for about a decade, and could see their chimney and white fireplace from their vantage point on the bus. They also lost a cat to the fire.

“That was one of the strange things about it, is that the town is erased,” Mr. Murray said. “Literally, there’s an occasional chimney stack as a kind of exclamation point to the fact that the town is completely gone.”

Ten animal welfare workers were allowed behind the evacuation perimeter on July 8 to carry out a pet and livestock rescue. Forty-one animals were saved and were being assessed before they could be reunited with their owners, said Lorie Chortyk, a spokeswoman at the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Ms. Fandrich, the museum owner, opted not to join the tour, “because it’ll be very emotional, and I think we’ll just wait until they let us go down on an individual basis,” she said.

Though she is not of Chinese heritage herself, she opened the museum in 2017, modeled after a traditional temple that once existed on that land to recognize the contributions and history of Chinese workers in British Columbia. It housed more than 1,600 artifacts, books and archives — all lost in the fire. The town’s history museum also burned down.

“We’ve lost two of the core parts of our history,” Ms. Fandrich said. “So that’s all gone.”

The nearby homes of her two sons were razed. Her daughter’s coffee shop was also destroyed.

The severity of the fires that scorched close to 1.7 million acres in Canada reported by its natural resources agency, occurred with temperatures that surpassed what researchers had ever seen in previous heat waves, according to a recent analysis by a team of international climate researchers.

On the province’s Salish Sea coast, Christopher Harley, a marine biologist and professor at the University of British Columbia, has been surveying the heat wave’s toll on the shoreline, estimating it to be in the billions. On a beach site visit Friday, he said the crunch of dead mussels beneath his feet was a bleak reminder of the devastation to wildlife.

“You start adding in the clams and the barnacles and the sea stars and the snails,” he said. “The true number, whatever it is, is going to be almost incomprehensible.”

Categories
Business

Sri Lanka, Going through ‘Worst’ Marine Catastrophe, Investigates Cargo Ship Fireplace

Sri Lanka, Facing ‘Worst’ Marine Disaster, Investigates Cargo Ship Fire

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The authorities in Sri Lanka have opened a criminal investigation into the crew of a cargo ship laden with toxic chemicals that has been burning off the island nation’s coast for 12 days, spilling debris into the ocean and polluting the country’s beaches.

Several tons of plastic pellets that were being transported on the ship have washed ashore, and Sri Lanka’s Marine Protection Authority described the spill as “probably the worst beach pollution in our history.” Workers have been employed to scour the country’s white-sand beaches for the pellets used in the production of plastic bags and fishing has been discouraged for miles along the coast.

A spokesman for Sri Lanka’s Navy said the fire, which broke out aboard the ship, MV X-Press Pearl, on May 20, had been contained, but on Tuesday thick, black smoke was still seen rising from the burned containers on the ship’s deck.

The spokesman, Captain Indika de Silva, said the ship was carrying 1,486 containers, many of which contained so-called dangerous goods, including nitric acid, caustic soda, sodium methoxide and methane.

The ship was loaded with 350 tons of oil, and a combination of heavy fuel and marine fuel. Captain de Silva said it was “too early to say about an oil spill,” but warned that there was “still a possibility.”

“This is one of the worst marine disasters that has happened in Sri Lanka,” said Dr. Asha de Vos, a marine biologist. “Our only saving grace is that there was no oil spill. If that happens, that will be incredibly tragic.”

X-Press Feeders, the company that operated the vessel, said that a container onboard had been leaking nitric acid well before the ship entered the waters off Sri Lanka, a teardrop-shaped island near India.

The ship’s crew requested it be permitted to offload the leaking container at two previous stops, in India and Qatar, but were denied because the ports lacked the “specialist facilities or expertise” needed to “deal with the leaking acid,” according to X-Press Feeders.

The police have questioned the ship’s crew and sent contaminated water samples to labs for testing. Of the 25 crew members who were rescued and taken to quarantine facilities, two required treatment for injuries sustained during the evacuation and one tested positive for Covid-19, the ship’s operator said.

As the authorities seek to determine the cause of the fire, locals living along the coast near Colombo, the capital, have began a major cleanup.

“I have never seen anything like this before,” said Dinesh Wijayasinghe, 47, an employee at a hotel in the coastal town of Negombo. “When I first saw this, about three to four days ago, the beach was covered with these pellets. They looked like fish eyes.”

Mr. Wijayasinghe said Sri Lankan security personnel have collected as many as 200 bags worth of plastic pellets every day since the fire began.

“Still, more keeps washing ashore,” he said. “We are told not to go to this area. So we are keeping away.”

Dr. De Vos, the marine biologist, said the amount of plastic found on the island’s western and southern coasts was troubling

Plastic pollution, he said, can be a danger to humans and animals, including endangered species like turtles, which hatch their eggs on the beach.

“The pellets can soak and absorb the chemicals from the environment,” he said. “This is an issue because when we eat whole fish, we will also be eating these chemicals.”

Categories
World News

Hearth Strikes Covid Hospital Ward in India.

Fire Strikes Covid Hospital Ward in India.

At least 12 people were killed in a fire early Saturday in a hospital treating coronavirus patients in the western Indian state of Gujarat. A spate of infections and deaths overwhelmed the country and its healthcare system.

The flame broke through the Covid-19 station at Welfare Hospital in the city of Bharuch, about 180 miles north of Mumbai, police said to the Press Trust of India. Around 50 other people were rescued and transferred to other hospitals.

The fire was under control, reported the ANI news agency, and was triggered by a short circuit.

Videos posted on social media showed part of the hospital on fire and patient evacuation.

Several hospital incidents recently claimed the lives of dozens of coronavirus patients in India. Four people were killed in a fire in a hospital in Surat, another city in Gujarat. At least 22 coronavirus patients died in a hospital in the neighboring state of Maharashtra when a leak cut their oxygen supply. Two days later, at least 13 Covid-19 patients died in a fire in another hospital in the state.

The second wave in India has pushed hospitals to unbearable capacity, depleted oxygen supplies and left desperate people to die in line waiting to see doctors. Mass cremations were held across the country.

Health officials are currently reporting more than 300,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths per day.

A growing number of countries have restricted travel to and from India. As of Tuesday, the American government will prevent most non-US citizens from entering the US from India, the Biden government announced on Friday.

India’s vaunted vaccine industry – a global leader – has been overwhelmed by the demand for Covid-19 vaccines and has restricted exports to meet domestic needs.

Other fires in hospitals treating Covid-19 patients around the world have added to the devastation as they are already struggling to meet the demands of staggering cases and deaths.

Last week, a fire started by an exploding oxygen cylinder killed at least 82 people, most of them Covid-19 patients and their relatives, in a Baghdad hospital. The Home Office said 110 more people were injured, many with severe burns who died from their injuries.

Categories
Business

Kia Remembers 380,000 Autos Over Fireplace Danger

Kia Recalls 380,000 Vehicles Over Fire Risk

In the area of ​​consumer alerts, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration advisory service responded to a blinking dashboard light through a recall of nearly 380,000 Kia vehicles.

“Until these recalled vehicles are repaired,” said the consultant, “the safest place to park them is outside and outside of homes and other structures.”

Korean automaker Kia issued a recall on Tuesday for Sportage compact sport utility vehicles from 2017-2021 and Cadenza sedans from the same period, amid concerns that electronic components could short out and cause fires in the engine compartment of certain models.

The affected vehicles are models that are not equipped with an “intelligent cruise control”, said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a unit of the US Department of Transportation, in its consumer report on Tuesday.

“The circuit in the hydraulic electronic control unit can short out,” said the agency. This short circuit “could cause a fire in the engine compartment.”

On its website, Kia describes the Sportage with a starting price of around US $ 24,000 as a “coupe-like profile and sporty stance”. The Cadenza, a full-size sedan, is “a step toward luxury,” says Kia on its website, with startup costs of around $ 38,000.

Affected car owners can take their vehicles to a Kia dealer to fix the problem. In affected Sportage vehicles, dealers can replace certain fuses in the electrical junction box and update the hydraulic electronic control unit software, the agency said. A new fuse set with a 25 A fuse can be installed in affected Cadenza vehicles, which can replace a set with a 40 A fuse.

In addition to the warning lights, drivers of affected vehicles can see a “burning / melting smell” or “smoke from the engine compartment”, the authorities said in a safety recall report.

The recall comes after the Road Safety Agency opened an investigation into engine fires involving certain vehicles owned by Kia and another automaker, Hyundai, The Associated Press reported. A message left with a Kia representative asking for comment was not immediately returned Tuesday evening.

Categories
Business

Tony Hsieh’s Final Evening: An Argument, Medication, a Locked Door and Sudden Hearth

Tony Hsieh’s Last Night: An Argument, Drugs, a Locked Door and Sudden Fire

Tony Hsieh, who developed Zappos into a billion dollar internet shoe store and formulated an influential theory about corporate happiness, purposely locked himself in a shed before it was consumed by the fire that would kill him.

Last November, Mr. Hsieh visited his girlfriend, Rachael Brown, at their new riverside home in New London, Connecticut. After the couple argued over the clutter of the house, Mr. Hsieh set up camp in the attached pool on storage shed, which was full of foam noodles and lounge chairs.

These details were made public in reports released Tuesday by New London Fire Department and police investigators, the first law enforcement reports on the incident. They said Mr. Hsieh was seen on a security video from November 18 that was peeping out the shed door at around 3 a.m. when no one was around. Light smoke rose behind him.

When Mr. Hsieh closed the door, the door lock could be heard and a bolt was pulled.

The 46-year-old entrepreneur was traveling with a nurse. According to police reports, he was planning to go to Hawaii with Ms. Brown, his brother Andrew, and several friends and employees before dawn. While in the shed, he asked to be checked every 10 minutes. His hotel nurse said this was standard practice with Mr. Hsieh.

Investigators said they were unsure of exactly what started the fire, partly because there were too many options. Mr. Hsieh had partially disassembled a portable propane heater. Discarded cigarettes were found. Or maybe the fire broke out from candles. Investigators said his friends told them that Mr. Hsieh liked candles because they reminded him of “an easier time” in his life.

A fourth possibility is that Mr. Hsieh did it on purpose.

“It is possible that negligence or even deliberate act on the part of Hsieh could have started this fire,” the fire report said. The report added that Mr Hsieh may also have been drunk and noted the presence of several Whip-It brand nitrous oxide chargers, a marijuana pipe, and Fernet Branca liquor bottles.

The exact role of drugs or alcohol that night is likely to remain unclear. Dr. Connecticut chief medical officer James Gill said in an email that “autopsy toxicology tests don’t make sense” if the victim survives for an extended period of time. A final report is still pending.

Firefighters who broke open the door found Mr. Hsieh lying on a blanket. He was taken to a nearby hospital and then flown to the Connecticut Burn Center, where he died on November 27 of complications from smoke inhalation.

Mr. Hsieh’s death shocked the tech and entrepreneurial worlds due to his relative youth and his writing about corporate happiness. Zappos was a star of the early consumer Internet, caution persuading that there are few dangers to buying online. Mr. Hsieh became CEO in 2001 and made everyone aware that companies should try to make their customers and employees happy. He moved Zappos from the Bay Area to Las Vegas.

Business & Economy

Updated

Jan. 26, 2021, 2:54 p.m. ET

Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $ 1.2 billion. The next year, Mr. Hsieh published the bestseller “Delivering Happiness”. “Our goal at Zappos is that our employees see their work not as a job or a career, but as a calling,” he wrote.

Mr. Hsieh stayed in Zappos but turned to a citizen project to revitalize downtown Las Vegas. Lots of investments and many years later, the project was an incomplete success at best. For the past year, Mr. Hsieh has focused on Park City, Utah, where he spent tens of millions of dollars buying real estate and got so manic that friends said they talked about an intervention. Few outsiders knew that he had quietly left Zappos.

On the night of the fire, Mr. Hsieh was desperate about his dog’s death during a trip to Puerto Rico last week, according to police interviews. He and Mrs. Brown had a difference of opinion that escalated. At this point, Mr. Hsieh retired to the shed. An assistant spoke to him frequently and recorded the visits with sticky notes on the door. Mr. Hsieh would generally signal that he is fine.

As the group was preparing to leave for the airport in the middle of the night, Ms. Hsieh asked for a check-in every five minutes. But it was only four minutes before the fire became fatal. Attempts by the residents to break open the locked door were unsuccessful. At about the same time as firefighters arrived, three Mercedes-Benz passenger cars arrived to take the group to the airport.

Ms. Brown, an early employee of Zappos, did not return any comments. A family spokesman also did not respond to a message for comment.

Firefighters regularly visited the house in mid-November. At 1am on November 16, they were called by a smoke alarm connected to a security company. A man who opened the door said the alarm was triggered by cooking, according to department records.

The firefighters left, but returned minutes later, prompted by another smoke alarm. “On arrival found nothing to be seen and a man said again that there was no problem,” wrote Lt. Timothy O’Reilly in a summary of the call. Firefighters said they came in to look around.

Lieutenant O’Reilly and his colleagues found smoke in the finished basement, along with “melted plastic items on the stove along with cardboard that felt hot,” which appeared to be plastic utensils and plates. They also found a burning candle in an “unsafe place” and extinguished it. While the smoke in the basement was dissipating, the firefighters gave fire protection tips.

The investigators’ report also covered an episode in the early evening of November 18. Mr. Hsieh’s assistant checked him out in the shed and saw that a candle had fallen over and burned a ceiling. The assistant asked Mr. Hsieh to put out the flame, and the entrepreneur did.

Categories
World News

Rohingya Camp in Bangladesh Struck by Hearth

Rohingya Camp in Bangladesh Struck by Fire

Ms. Khatoon, 34, fled Rakhine state in 2017 and gave birth to her second child in the camp. She said she made a home for her family out of her little hut. Now, she said, she and her family had nothing to eat and nowhere to go.

More than 730,000 Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh since a campaign against killing, rape and arson began against them in 2017. The town of Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh has become a makeshift home for hundreds of people. Thousands of Rohingya refugees are fleeing the violence campaign carried out by Myanmar’s army. The Rohingya have been relentlessly persecuted by the government and mobs of Buddhists who form the majority in Myanmar.

The settlements there turned into mega-camps as the huge influx of desperate people fleeing war or persecution broke in further. Onno van Manen, a country director for Save the Children in Bangladesh, said the fire was another devastating blow to the displaced Rohingya Muslims.

Mr Manen said that since 2017, more than a million refugees, half of whom are children, have lived in cramped camps with limited mobility, inadequate access to education, and abuse, including child marriage.

“Simply put, despite the relentless efforts of the humanitarian communities, a refugee camp is not a place for a child to grow up,” he said.

In May last year, a similar fire was burned to over 400 shelters in the nearby Kutupalang refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. In view of the increasing population and the construction of new shelters over time, it has become increasingly difficult for firefighters to navigate in slum areas.

Authorities in Bangladesh say they are trying to reduce the population in some camps with a plan to move 100,000 people to an island in the Bay of Bengal. Rights groups have criticized the plan, stating that the Rohingya would again be forcibly evicted.

Categories
World News

White Home threatens to fireplace FDA chief until Covid vaccine OKed Friday: experiences

White House threatens to fire FDA chief unless Covid vaccine OKed Friday: reports

US President Donald Trump and Stephen Hahn, Director of the Food and Drug Administration, attend the daily meeting of the coronavirus task force at the White House in Washington, DC on April 24, 2020.

Drew Angerer | Getty Images

White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has urged the head of the Food and Drug Administration to resign if the agency does not clear Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use by the end of the day, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The warning prompted FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and the agency to accelerate their schedule for the release of America’s first Covid-19 vaccine from Saturday morning to late Friday, according to the Post, citing anonymous sources.

The New York Times, Axios, and Reuters also reported that Meadows urged Hahn to resign if he wasn’t quick enough to remove the vaccine.

In a statement, Hahn called the Post’s report “an untrue account”.

“This is an untrue representation of the telephone conversation with the chief of staff,” Hahn told CNBC on Friday afternoon. “The FDA has been encouraged to continue working swiftly on Pfizer-BioNTech’s EEA request. The FDA is committed to swiftly granting this approval, as we noted in our statement this morning.”

The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The reports come a day after a key FDA advisory body voted 17-4, with one abstention, to recommend the vaccine, which Pfizer partnered with BioNTech, for emergency approval. The FDA typically follows the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biological Products. After the overwhelming vote, the FDA should release the vaccine on Friday.

Hahn said earlier that day the agency was “working fast” to clear Pfizer’s emergency vaccine. “The agency has also notified the US Centers for Disease Control, Prevention and Operation Warp Speed ​​so they can implement their plans for timely vaccine distribution,” Hahn said in a joint statement with Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Shortly after Hahn ’s remarks, President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly urged the FDA to speed up the vaccine development process, tweeted the agency,” Get the dam vaccines out NOW. “

“Stop playing and save lives !!!”

FDA approval would mark a record-breaking timeframe for a process that typically takes about a decade. The fastest vaccine development to date against mumps took more than four years and was licensed in 1967. Pfizer and BioNTech announced plans to develop a coronavirus vaccine in March and filed an emergency clearance application with the FDA in November.

An emergency permit, or EEA, is not the same as a full permit, which can typically take months. Pfizer has only submitted safety data for two months, but it typically takes the agency six months for full approval.

– CNBC’s Amanda Macias contributed to this report.

Categories
World News

It’s Australia’s First Huge Blaze of the Fireplace Season. How Unhealthy Will the Summer time Get?

It’s Australia’s First Big Blaze of the Fire Season. How Bad Will the Summer Get?

SYDNEY, Australia – The first big fire of the Australian forest fire season has now blackened roughly half of Fraser Island, an idyllic haven north of Brisbane known for its golden beaches and abundant biodiversity.

With evacuation orders reaching residents on Monday, Australians who had hoped there wasn’t much to burn after last year’s colossal fires are now fighting with a brutal reminder: In a vast country that is at risk of fire and particularly vulnerable to The risk of record-breaking infernos never goes away.

In fact, it continues to increase.

“I’m sure it’s a hit for us and everyone watching,” said Jack Worcester, 34, whose family owns Cathedrals on Fraser, a campground that was recently evacuated. “There is currently no normal for a fire season – any fire season can be pretty serious.”

At this point last year, desiccated forests outside Sydney had been burning for weeks, covering the city’s sky with an orange-gray haze. But while this year (so far) feels less overwhelming, one question hangs on the mind of many Australians, and it’s the same question the Californians asked a few months ago and will be asking again next year: How bad is it going? to get?

Fires are usually measured and recorded using hard statistics – acres burned, homes and lives lost – but before counting there is an impressionistic mapping of the risk, shaped by terrain, climate, human activity and chance.

This year’s Australian seasonal prospect maps show a broad red amoeba for areas of above-average danger that run through the grassy plains of central New South Wales, the southeastern state of which Sydney is the capital. But you have to dig deeper to see that many other areas are also at risk.

For example, Fraser Island is marked as “Normal Fire Potential”. The fire that is now burning, pulling firefighters ashore and on planes to put out the flames and close the island to visitors, is believed to have been caused by an illegal bonfire lit by tourists on October 14th has been.

“By and large, fire is a natural part of the Australian landscape. Even if we say the year has normal or below average risk, it doesn’t mean there is no risk, ”said Naomi Benger, climatologist with the government’s Bureau of Meteorology. “It means the risk is as high as in an average year.”

Due to climate change, she added, the average risk of fire is increasing.

“It only takes a day or two to be disastrous,” she said. “People shouldn’t be complacent.”

La Niña, a large change in tropical Pacific temperatures that affects global weather patterns, is the dominant factor in the 2020-21 Australian fire season. La Niña brings cooler water closer to the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, and this year has provided above-average rainfall for most of the country.

Thunderstorms and long spring weeks have filled the reservoirs, relieving farmers in New South Wales and Queensland after many years of drought. But the soaked rains have also created fields of grass in the plains west of the Great Dividing Range, the mountain range that runs up and down the east coast of Australia.

With just a few hot, dry days, these grasses turn green to brown, making them as easy to light as a dry piece of paper, maybe even easier. This creates a particularly unpredictable and deadly danger.

“The main difference is the intensity; Grass fires are less intense than forest fires in general, but they spread very, very quickly, ”said Richard Thornton, who heads the Cooperative Research Council on Bushfires and Natural Hazards and makes the maps that most countries use to assess each fire base season. “They are certainly moving faster than you can run or walk in front of them, and they are very much dominated by the wind.”

In 1969, a dozen grass fires near the town of Lara killed 23 people, including 17 trapped in their cars on the highway. Some of them tried to escape the fire and failed.

Grass fires also generate enormous amounts of radiant heat. When willow trees caught fire along the surrounding woods in Batlow town in January, the heat from the flames in the grass melted some of the fire trucks and firefighter helmets.

“Because they can move quickly and change direction quickly, people can easily be caught and overrun by a grass fire,” Thornton said. “We’ve seen it before.”

La Niña is just one factor among many. Other weather forces have created drier than normal conditions in places like tropical Queensland.

Fraser Island saw fewer thunderstorms than usual in November, and these dry conditions were exacerbated by the heat. Last month was Australia’s hottest November ever. Projections also suggest that December through February maximum temperatures in parts of southeast and western Australia and along the Queensland coast will likely be above the long-term mean.

That means a higher risk. The onset of a heat wave or two or three this summer could dry out many areas and make fires even more difficult to fight.

Scientists argue that this is climate change in action. As global average temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius since the pre-industrial era, variability in weather patterns is increasing, particularly in Australia, the world’s driest inhabited continent.

What once looked like an anomaly can quickly become the new normal.

“With the Australian fire season last year combined with that in California last year, it can be said that this is what the future will be because of climate change,” said Thornton. “Last year’s fires were unprecedented, but they are no longer like that. Now that we’ve had these fires, they have to be part of the planning. “

A recent report by an independent Royal Commission on fires last year recognized that climate change had already significantly increased the risk of natural disasters in Australia. Numerous changes to fire fighting in the country have been recommended, calling for more aircraft and better coordination of data and communications equipment.

Very little of what the Commission requested has been put into practice or even approved. Prime Minister Scott Morrison goes on to claim that his administration’s efforts to combat climate change – widely viewed as overwhelming and weak by climate researchers in the country – are sufficient.

Emergency managers say the bigger challenge, whether in the US or Australia, is getting the general population in fire-prone areas to understand the changing environment and the risks.

“It’s hard,” said Mr. Thornton. “You don’t want to face the fact that your place of residence is risky.”

Until they can see the fire and the smoke.

Mr. Worcester, the campsite owner on Fraser Island, said that at one point he was exposed to flames close enough for a rock to reach.

“I stood on our property during the ceasefire and watched it be less than 100 meters north of us,” he said. “It was 15 meters tall.”

He said he now intends to buy his own personal fire fighting equipment “just to calm down”. And yet, he already knows that the relief will be short-lived.

The campsite, which was 40 percent full when it had to be evacuated and is now being asked to cancel reservations left and right, is surrounded on three sides by bushland, with the sea in front.

“The vegetation will have grown beyond what it was this year,” Worcester said. “We’ll have two or three years less risk, then another eight years of high risk.”

“At the end of the day,” he added, “when it’s really serious, there is only so much you can do.”