DVIDS

ORISKANY, N.Y. — More than 700 National Guard soldiers and airmen from New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands come together next week at the New York State Preparedness Center here to prepare for certification as a regional disaster response force.

Residents may notice increased military traffic in the Oriskany, Rome and Utica areas as the HRF arrives and conducts its final training preparations and validation exercise.

The organization, known as a National Guard Homeland Response Force, will train both at the New York National Guard Armory in Utica and Oriskany at the New York State Preparedness Center to certify their readiness to assist responders following a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high explosive incident.

An aerial view of debris from an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck northern Japan. The debris was inspected by a helicopter-based search and rescue team from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Alexander Tidd

Debris from the March 2011 Japanese tsunami are beginning to arrive on the Pacific Coast. The debris is a collection of items that both float and have a high enough profile off the water to catch the wind. The wind-driven debris, as predicted, is arriving before the current-driven debris.
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NOAA photo of tornado damage to St. John's Mercy Hospital in Joplin

The heart of Joplin Missouri was, in many respects, St. John’s Mercy Hospital. The city’s residents were born there, healed there and often spent their final days there. On May 22, 2011, an F5 tornado tore its way through downtown Joplin and left the hospital in ruins. That ended an era but yesterday a new era was begun with the groundbreaking ceremony for a new Mercy Hospital Joplin.

NOAA photo of damage to St. John's Mercy Hospital in Joplin after the tornado.

The entire St. John’s campus will be leveled as the work begins on a new hospital on donated land at the intersection of I44 and Main Street. A farewell service was held in Joplin on Sunday for the old hospital and a groundbreaking ceremony for the new one.

St. John’s Mercy sits over abandoned lead mines that date to the mid 1800′s. Engineers were uncertain if a controlled demolition would be safe so the site will be cleared using conventional methods. During the six weeks of demolition, as much of the existing structure as possible will be salvaged. The buildings will be stripped of wiring and pipes that will go to the scrap yard. The concrete and asphalt will be ground up and used for fill on the site.

Science will also be served during the demolition. Some parts of the building will be sent to various labs for study of the effects of the tornado on the building and its components.

The hospital has donated about 12 acres of the old site to the Joplin schools. An elementary school will be built there to replace two schools destroyed by the tornado.

At the new site, an innovative project is rescuing about 400 trees from the bulldozers. The site was scoured by certified arborists for the best saplings. They were tagged and have been transplanted to a local nursery where they will be cared for. In 2014, in preparation for the opening of the new Mercy Hospital Joplin, they will be replanted as part of the final landscaping. The trees selected are the ones best suited for Joplin’s climate and soil.

The FEMA blog describes the recovery efforts in Joplin.

• 1.2 million cubic yards of debris removed
• 3,600 building permits issued
• 167 temporary classrooms and 67 temporary safe rooms
• 337 families in temporary housing
• 50 percent of the homes destroyed are being rebuilt
• 90 percent of the businesses damaged have reopened

The National Weather Service has released a report titled Joplin, Missouri, Tornado – May 22, 2011.

The tornado was rated EF-5 on the Enhanced-Fujita Scale, with its maximum winds estimated at more than 200 mph. The path of the entire tornado was 22.1 miles long and was up to 1 mile in width. The EF-4/EF-5 damage path was roughly 6 miles long from near Schifferdecker Avenue along the western portions of Joplin to near Interstate 44 east of Joplin, and generally ½ to ¾ of a mile wide along the path. NOAA map.

An aerial view of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from an MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter assigned to the Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort, shows the devastation of the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti Jan. 12, 2010. Approximately 230,000 Haitians are reported to have died as a result of the earthquake. U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Chelsea Kennedy. Click for a larger image.

January 12, 2010: The United Nations reports

The earthquake that hit Haiti on 12 January 2010 affected almost 3.5 million people, including the entire population of 2.8 million people living in Port-au-Prince. The Government of Haiti estimates that the earthquake killed 222,570 and injured another 300,572 people. Displacement peaked at close to 2.3 million people, including 302,000 children. At least 188,383 houses were badly damaged and 105,000 were destroyed by the earthquake. Sixty per cent of Government and administrative buildings, 80 per cent of schools in Port-au-Prince and 60 per cent of schools in the South and West Departments were destroyed or damaged. Total earthquake-related loss is estimated at $7.8 billion, equivalent to more than 120 per cent of Haiti’s 2009 gross domestic product.

U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Jay Wamsley holds a Haitian toddler during a humanitarian visit to one of many small villages outside Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, Feb. 2, 2010. Wamsley, an environmental health and safety officer, is temporarily assigned to Port Security Unit 307. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Adam Eggers.

In October 2010, cases of cholera began to appear in Haiti. The illness had not been seen for generations and it spread rapidly. As of December 26, 2011, the Haitian Ministry of Health reports 522,946 cases of cholera since then, and a total of at least 7,011 deaths.

The situation two years after the earthquake remains grim. Over 500,000 Haitians remain in nearly 1,000 refugee camps. The deaths and illnesses from cholera continue, though improvements in sanitation and availability of treatment have cut the death rate nearly in half.

The World Food Program states

Haiti is a food deficit country. It relies heavily on imported food – 50 percent of national requirements are imported. Food prices have been rising since the end of 2010. In a country where approximately half of the population lives with less than $1 a day and three quarters have less than $2 per day, this increase has led to an overall loss of purchasing power for the majority of Haitians. WFP is using its three main programmes – school meals, nutrition and cash and food for work- to alleviate the impact of rising food prices on the most vulnerable.

Still, for the first time in 25 years, the Haitian government has all three branches functioning. The Caracol Industrial Park will open in March and its first tenant, Korean textile firm Sae-A, has committed to creating 20,000 new jobs. About half of the rubble created by the earthquake has been removed with 30-40 percent having been recycled into new construction. Much of the remaining “rubble” consists of buildings that have been condemned but the owners believe they can be salvaged.

U.S. Southern Command has conveyed a supply of disaster response equipment to the Haitian government. The United States has donated 12 boats, four sport utility vehicles, and 11,000 hand-crank radios to Haiti’s Direction de la Protection Civile (DPC).

In a study released just before Christmas, researchers estimate that 14,000 Americans died due to the effects of radioactive materials released by the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in March 2011. Joseph J. Mangano and Janette D. Sherman authored the paper which was published in the December 2011 International Journal of Health Services. The paper is titled “An Unexpected Mortality Increase in the United States Follows Arrival of the Radioactive Plume from Fukushima: Is There a Correlation?”. The full paper can be found at this link at radiation.org.

The researchers used data from the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The MMWR includes data from 122 U.S. cities reporting deaths for the week. The numbers of deaths for each city are broken down by age group, and the deaths related to pneumonia and influenza are also broken out. All data is preliminary and it takes nearly two years for the CDC to finalize the numbers. This report does not specify the cause of death.

The authors used the data from the MMWR reports for weeks 12 to 25, March 20 to June 25, 2011. That data was compared to the same period in 2010, as well as the fourteen weeks prior.

We took a look at infant deaths, children under 12 months of age. The study reports that infant deaths in the 122 cities rose by 1.8 percent year over year. Year over year for the prior fourteen week period, they declined 8.37 percent. They calculate that 822 infant deaths during the fourteen week study period were “excess”.

Recall that we used the term “preliminary” to refer to this data. We used the CDC’s database to search for the same data for the entire country for the study period. We found that our fourteen week total for infant deaths for 2011 agrees with the study, 2,743 deaths. However, the total for 2010 differs, and alters their analysis. They report 2,722 infant deaths for the period in 2010, while the current CDC count is 2,754. infant deaths went down year over year, not up by 1.8 percent.

Infant mortality in the United States. CDC data as of January 2, 2012. Click on the image for a larger view. Chart by Charles Simmins

Infant mortality in the United States. CDC data as of January 2, 2012. Click on the image for a larger view. Chart by Charles Simmins

Infant mortality in the United States. CDC data as of January 2, 2012. Click on the image for a larger view. Chart by Charles Simmins

Looking at the prior fourteen weeks’ data, MMWR weeks 50-11, the difference is even more striking. In the 2009-2010 period, infant deaths from our CDC data set equal 2,859. For the fourteen weeks prior to the study period, our 2010-2011 infant death total is 2,608. Infant deaths fell far more than the study states.

Among the weaknesses in this study are the failure to correct for pneumonia and influenza deaths. We included 2009 in our data. Weekly infant mortality totals for 2009 in the study period are much higher than for either 2010 or 2011. The novel H1N1 pandemic was affecting mortality in the United States. The flu is a key factor in mortality during the same time periods that the study examined.

The cities represent about 25 percent of the national population. Other questionable assumptions are that any effects from radioactive fallout would be evening distributed throughout the 122 cities in the data and that the effects in the cities would be equal to those in the rest of the nation.

The population rank tables provided in the study, tables four and five, demonstrate mortality variances that do not correlate with geography. One would expect West Coast cities to have a higher exposure to any Fukushima fallout, and thus demonstrate higher mortality rates. Houston leads with respect to an increase in mortality in both tables, not Los Angeles or San Diego.

We believe that the study’s authors have not proven their thesis. The current data refutes part of their analysis with respect to infant mortality. The authors use of just one prior year fails a commonsense test that you need more than two data points to establish a trend. They authors have not corrected the data with respect to the actual geographic distribution of fallout, nor did they make any attempt to correct for the effects of seasonal influenza or other variables such as violent deaths. Without a cause of death, any “excess deaths” which may be found cannot be related to Fukushima radiation and fallout.

At this point, if excess deaths exist, it is just coincidental that measurable amounts of radioactive byproducts from the Fukushima nuclear accident were found in the U.S. during the same time period.