Anxious Eyes on the River As Flooding Threat Looms

 

CHARLESTON, Mo. — Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh of the Army Corps of Engineers is likely to make a lot of people angry over the next few days.

But which group of people is not so clear. It will depend on whether he decides to flood farmland in Missouri in order to save a town in Illinois from the ravages of the rising Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

If the general gives the word, his team will blow up a two-mile stretch of levee, sending torrents of water across more than 200 square miles of Missouri farmland to take pressure off the levees that protect Cairo, Ill., to the north.

Missouri officials sued this week to block the corps from moving forward with the plan to swamp the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. Cairo has about 3,000 people; the 130,000 acres of farmland is home to about 200 residents in 90 homes. On Friday morning, Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. of Federal District Court in St. Louis ruled that the corps could go forward, if necessary.

General Walsh said he had sympathy for the farmers. “Many of the people who have lived in the floodway, I’ve known them for two or three years,” he said. “I know what this is going to do, if we open the floodway.”

But, he added, “when it comes down to a discussion of livelihood versus lives, the decision is a little easier to make.”

Col. Vernie Reichling, the corps commander of the Memphis District and General Walsh’s eyes and ears for the northern portion of the Mississippi River and Tributaries project, said, “We’re listening to the river.”

“It’s now an art — based on science, but it’s an art,” Colonel Reichling said.

As the river rises to historic levels, General Walsh, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the corps, is consulting with dozens of engineers, meteorologists and other experts on a decision that is complicated by the way the river is riding perilously close to the informal trigger point of 61 feet.

“If it was 68, that would be an easy decision,” he said. “If it was 58, I wouldn’t have to make the decision.”

If the river recedes rapidly, no action will be necessary. But if it stays near current levels, the risk to Cairo and other communities will remain high, and a decision not to act could leave residents of the economically depressed, largely African-American town feeling that they have been left to the vicissitudes of nature.

Cairo’s defenses can hold up against the pressure for only so long, Colonel Reichling said on a drive through the town to inspect the flood defenses.

“These are temporary restraining structures,” he said. “They’re not meant to permanently contain water.”

On Friday, the river stood at 59 feet, but it is expected to rise to a record 60.5 feet, still below the 61-foot mark, but some of the colonel’s experts are saying it may stay at that level for six or seven days. That creates problems of its own, further weakening the earthen levees and saturating the soil beneath.

“This has been the most amount of pressure that these systems have ever been under,” Colonel Reichling said. “We’re seeing a lot of seepage behind the berms.”

If General Walsh does order the levee breached, two barges loaded with 265 tons of explosives will make a 30-mile journey upriver from their current mooring in Hickman, Ky.

They will arrive at the Birds Point levee, where the explosives will be loaded into three sets of pipe spanning 11,000 feet buried in the soil. After laying a detonating cord, the corps team will prime them with C-4 explosives before installing the blasting cap and pushing the button — electronically, and from a safe distance. The operation will take 24 hours to complete.

The floodway is, in effect, a gigantic relief valve. The gap created by the controlled explosion on the west bank of the Mississippi would send water rushing at more than four million gallons per second into a basin bordered several miles to the west by a setback levee and encompassing some 200 square miles of farmland. The water would re-enter the Mississippi at the southern end of the basin by way of two openings that the corps will also blast. Using the floodway should reduce the height of the river above it by several feet.

General Walsh said this was not the most agonizing situation he had been in in his career in the corps. As the commander for the corps’ Gulf Region Division in Baghdad, he recalled, he managed construction of buildings in the villages where “we were always taking incoming fire” and a children’s hospital in Basra when “thugs and criminals were in control of the city.”

“We lost a number of folks while we were building that facility,” he said. Often, engineering decisions implicitly involve life-or-death decisions, based on safety tolerances and risk factors. “Almost every decision has that kind of connotation to it,” General Walsh said, but the Mississippi choice “is certainly a little bit more immediate.”

Russ Davis, chief of the Operations Division, said of the floodway: “Soldiers train to go to war, but hope they never have to. No one wants to do this.”

If General Walsh does order breaching of the levee, the result is likely to seem undramatic to those raised on action movies, said Paul N. Worsey, the director of explosives engineering education at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla.

? “It’s not like a nuclear weapon going off,” Mr. Worsey said. “It’s going to look like a big a big burp, then there’s going to be a big lake. It may end up, when it goes, being a very big anticlimax — apart from all of the water rushing in.”

Even if the General Walsh does not act at Birds Point, the crisis will not be over: the massive bulge of water will move inexorably downstream, threatening points south.

“We won’t be out of the woods,” Colonel Reichling said. “That water is going to move down to Louisiana, and we’re going to have to fight it again.”

 

Indonesia's Christian Worshippers Pack Easter Services Despite Bomb Threat

 Sara Schonhardt | Jakarta ?April 24, 2011

Christian worshippers fill St. Theresia Church for Easter Sunday services, Central Jakarta, Indonesia, April 24, 2011

Christian worshipers packed Easter services in Jakarta on Sunday, despite a bomb scare at a church days earlier that put police on the highest alert and added to concerns that minority religions are being targeted by increasingly active Islamic hardliners.

Hundreds of people stand together singing at Gereja St. Theresia, while children play with colorful plastic eggs and mothers cradle infants. The celebration here was one of many across Jakarta, where churches overflowed with worshipers undeterred by security threats after police defused several massive bombs on Thursday at a church on the outskirts of the capital.

To safeguard Easter celebrations, police deployed around 20,000 officers to Christian worship sites, and many churches set up security checks at their entrances.

Michael Kawulusan, who attends services at St. Theresia every Sunday, says the increased police presence was reassuring.

"We come to the church for praying so we’re hoping nothing will happen," said Kawulusan. "Of course we are worried, but with these policemen over here guarding the church, I think it should be fine."

Anti-terror police foiled a plot to bomb the church on Good Friday thanks to information obtained after the arrest of 20 people suspected of sending parcel bombs to several prominent figures in Jakarta last month.

The discovery of those devices followed a suicide bombing at a mosque inside a police compound on April 15 that injured around 30 people.

Indonesia is a politically secular country with the world’s largest Muslim population. But increasing attacks against Christians and minority Islamic sects considered deviant have raised concerns of rising intolerance.

Security officials say the string of recent incidents also illustrates the changing face of extremism in Indonesia.? Islamic terrorist groups have previously focused attacks on Westerners in large hotels and embassies.

An International Crisis Group report published last week noted that recent events highlight a shifting trend toward small groups of militants acting independently of large jihadi organizations to attack Indonesians rather than foreigners.

The potential threat has not deterred Anastasia Veronica, who says she has been worshipping at St. Theresia since she was a child, and plans to continue attending with her husband and six-month-old daughter.

"If there was a bomb that exploded here," she said. "We’ve already received guidance by coming to celebrate this day, so I’m not scared."

Across town at the historic Cathedral Church, sounds of hallelujah mix with the Islamic call to prayer. A spokesman for the church estimates the crowd at more than 2,500, still far less than the 4,000 people who took part in Good Friday’s services.

Lucia Darpeni says she is not letting the pre-Easter bomb stop her from worshiping as usual.

"We come here to clean our hearts," she said. "So there is nothing to fear. Even a little fear cannot prevent us from our activities."

Other worshipers agree, saying their faith will be enough to protect them.

[All VOA blogs...]

Going Green
Watch Rebecca Ward's report on the BP?Gulf oil spill - one year later.

 

Inflation in China Poses Big Threat to Global Trade

The latest sign that things were moving too fast came on Sunday, when China’s central bank ordered the biggest banks to set aside more cash reserves.

The move essentially reduces the amount of money available for loans, and is an attempt to cool down the economy. It follows the government announcement on Friday that China’s economy was growing at an annual rate of 9.7 percent, by far the strongest performance by any of the world’s biggest economies.

Because China is now the world’s second largest economy, after the United States, and because the country has been a leading source of global growth during the last two years, money problems here can reverberate from Wal-Mart to Wall Street and the world beyond.

High inflation endangers China’s status as the low-cost workshop for the world. And if the government’s efforts to fight inflation cause the economy to stumble, that will cloud the outlook for international businesses — whether multinationals like General Electric or copper miners in Chile — that have been counting on China for growth.

Inside China, inflation also poses a threat to social stability, a particular worry for Beijing, especially since authoritarian governments in North Africa and the Middle East have become the focus of popular uprisings.

“China’s inflation is a big concern, and actual numbers are worse than officially reported,” said Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

She says Beijing is engaged in an economic tug of war, trying to encourage sustainable growth while struggling to control inflation.

Food prices are soaring, and the government said on Friday that the consumer price index in March had risen 5.4 percent, its sharpest increase in nearly three years. Hoping to tame inflation, in the last six months Beijing has tightened restrictions on bank lending and raised interest rates on loans (to discourage borrowing) and deposits (to encourage savings).

The decision on Sunday to raise the capital reserve ratio for banks, to 20.5 percent of their cash, was the fourth such increase this year.

The government has also increased agricultural subsidies to curb food prices, and tried to forbid some Chinese companies from raising consumer prices. These efforts stand in contrast to those in the United States, where inflation is low (the underlying annual inflation rate was 1.2 percent last month) and where the debate centers on how much to stimulate the economy given the size of the deficit. Inflation is also running low in Europe, where some countries are imposing harsh austerity measures to pare their budget gaps.

But analysts say the results of this economic management have been mixed. Growth has begun to moderate from its torrid pace of about 10 percent annual growth but inflation has become worse.

For example, housing prices continue to climb even though Beijing has long promised to curb the property market and to spend billions of dollars over the next few years on affordable housing.

The average apartment in central Shanghai now costs more than $500,000. Even in second-tier cities like Chengdu, in central China, the price of a typical home costs about 25 times the average annual income of residents.

Analysts say too much of the country’s growth continues to be tied to inflationary spending on real estate development and government investment in roads, railways and other multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.

In the first quarter of 2011, fixed asset investment — a broad measure of building activity — jumped 25 percent from the period a year earlier, and real estate investment soared 37 percent, the government said on Friday.

Some of the inflationary factors, like global commodity and food prices, may be beyond Beijing’s ability to influence. Gasoline prices have also jumped sharply, in line with global oil prices. As the world’s largest car market, China’s demand for fuel is soaring, and gasoline prices are close to $4.50 a gallon, up from $3.82 a gallon in late 2009.

Rising food prices, meanwhile, are showing up in various ways — including higher prices at fast-food chains, like Master Kong, which in January raised the price of its popular instant noodles by about 10 percent.

China’s current supercharged boom began in early 2009, during the global financial crisis, when Beijing moved aggressively to increase growth with a $586 billion stimulus package and record lending by state-run banks.

The loose monetary policy, and big investments in local government projects, did revive economic growth. But even at the time there were already concerns about soaring property prices, undisciplined bank lending and the huge debts being amassed by local governments.

Xu Yan contributed research from Shanghai.

 

Front-line NHS jobs 'face threat'

 10 April 2011 Last updated at 21:30 ET By Nick Triggle Health reporter, BBC News The RCN believes 40,000 posts could close in the next three years Front-line clinical jobs in the NHS are under threat in England, a union says.

A Royal College of Nursing analysis of 21 NHS trusts where cuts were taking place found more than half of posts under threat were in areas such as nursing and midwifery.

RCN leader Peter Carter said it could spell "the biggest disaster in the history of our public services".

But deputy prime minister Nick Clegg maintained radical reorganisation of the NHS is needed.

Overhaul

While the health budget has been protected, savings still have to be made because of the rising demands linked to the ageing population, new drugs and lifestyle factors like obesity.

A target of ￡20bn has been set by 2014-15 - a saving of about 4% a year - which ministers have insisted can be achieved through cutting management costs and by front-line services becoming more efficient.

But the union, which released the findings at the start of its four-day annual conference in Liverpool, said its research showed this was not happening.

Continue reading the main story

Clinical staff are the lifeblood of the NHS and it is haemorrhaging at an alarming rate”

End Quote Peter Carter RCN general secretary Some of the proposed changes that mark the biggest shake up of the NHS to date have been opposed by one of Mr Clegg's closest advisers.

Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb has said the plans pose a major "financial risk" to the NHS, and has threatened to quit unless ministers rethink some aspects, such as "the rush" to give GPs control of budgets.

Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, Mr Clegg insisted the changes, including some cuts, were necessary, but said the finer details of the plan were up for debate over the next couple of months.

Services closed

The RCN has been gathering evidence about the number of posts under threat in the NHS for nearly a year.

It believes there are now 40,000 posts which could close in the next three years, a rise from 27,000 at the end of last year. Most of these will not be redundancies as the NHS tends to rely on natural turnover from people retiring or changing jobs.

As part of its latest research, the RCN took an in-depth look at 21 trusts to see what sort of posts were being targeted.

Continue reading the main story Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust is proposing to cut its nurse, midwife and health visitor workforce by 264 by 2015 - a 15% reduction. The trust says the changes are at the planning stage and are "open to change"At London's Kingston Hospital 214 out of 486 job cuts are in nursing, midwifery and health visiting. The trust said it was part of a five-year plan and services should not sufferCounty Durham and Darlington NHS Trust has a ￡60m savings plan which it wants implemented by 2014. It involves losing 300 nurse posts, but the trust said the figure was just estimated at the moment and was based on falling income and workloadIt showed that 54% of about 10,000 job cuts were clinical and, in total, more than a tenth of the nursing workforce could be lost in these areas.

The union also said it had found examples of services being closed, including rehab centres, detox units and talking therapies.

RCN general secretary Peter Carter said: "Clinical staff are the lifeblood of the NHS and it is haemorrhaging at an alarming rate. Many trusts are not being transparent by admitting the proportion of clinical jobs being list.

"From our research we now know the truth - the majority of job losses are front-line clinical jobs, the jobs that matter to patients.

Health Minister, Simon Burns, tells BBC Breakfast that there will be no huge cuts among front line health staff

"Cutting thousands of doctors and nurses could have a catastrophic impact on patient safety and care. Our figures expose the myth that front-line services are protected."

But NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson questioned the findings, pointing out that latest workforce figures up to December 2010 suggested that nurse posts were continuing to rise.

He added: "There is no excuse to cut back on services that patients need when the NHS will receive an extra ￡11.5bn of funding.

"The NHS does need to become more efficient, but savings must not impact adversely on patient care. We are clear that every penny saved from efficiencies will be reinvested in patient services."