Websites around the world today are showing images of the most powerful city in the world brought to a halt by natural causes -- as the Superstorm Sandy hit New York and New Jersey.
The President of the United States, Obama has now declared it a “major disaster” with at least 33 deaths reported across eastern US, more than 7.6m people without power and dozens of homes destroyed by fire in New York. Damage estimates this evening talked about a figure of over $20bn.
Maybe now the discussion can start seriously about whether or not these are natural disasters following natural cycles or are they instead as a result of man-made interference?
Many of the media in the US have been labelling the Superstorm Sandy -- a once-in-a-lifetime storm. One wonders what will happen if more of these events occur within the next 5 to 10 years.
There are now at the time of writing, more than 7.6 million people without electricity across the eastern US, sitting in the dark waiting for the storm to pass.
By coincidence just yesterday the author and local historian* Emilio Lammari was demonstrating how in the past people moved around in the dark from house to house using bundles of dried bark from the chestnut trees to light the way.
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As you can see from the video below, the light given off by the burning bark could not exactly be termed bright but it does give a very good idea of what it was like before electricity changed everything and is a very evocative image of the recent past.
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*from the giornaledibarganews archives 2009 -- “I mulini ad acqua nel territorio di Barga” di Emilio e Raffaello Lammari, -- Normally a book presentation in Barga does not exactly bring with it large crowds but this morning at the Palazzo Pancrazi in Barga Vecchia it was standing room only with people spilling out of the building into the piazza all trying to get a glimpse of what was going on. What actually was happening was the culmination of six years work for the father and son team of Emilio and Raffaello Lammari and the presentation of their book -”I mulini ad acqua nel territorio di Barga”. What started out as originally a school project for Raffaello concerning a water mill in Barga blossomed into a research occupying both into all of the water mills in the territory of Barga. The pair then went on to painstakingly document in images and text every known mill in the area and researched all the people who had built and worked in them. Almost all are now disused and many reduced to ruins since they stopped working in the late 50′s and early 60′s but thanks to Emilio and Raffaello, they are no longer lost to the community as this book manages to recreate and show some of the back breaking work and also some of the poetry that went into this now lost profession. -- full article here
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La devastazione provocata dall’uragano Sandy e’ “un inquietante segnale delle cose che potranno succedere, dobbiamo rispondere a questo avvertimento e risolvere in fretta la crisi del clima. L’energia sporca provoca un tempo sporco”.
E’ questo l’allarme lanciato oggi sul suo blog da Al Gore, l’ex vice presidente, e candidato alla Casa Bianca sconfitto da George Bush, uno dei piu’ accesi nemici della teoria del riscaldamento globale, che ora e’ una delle voci piu’ autorevoli nel mondo della causa ambientalista.
I disastri naturali diventano piu’ frequenti e “sono rafforzati dalla crisi climatica – continua Gore – gli scienziati ci dicono che continuando a scaricarte 90 milioni di tonnellate di agenti inquinanti nell’atmosfera ogni giorno, noi alteriamo l’ambiente in cui le tempeste si sviluppano. Mentre gli oceani e l’atmosfera continuano a riscaldarsi, le tempeste diventano piu’ violente e distruttive”.
Durante la campagna elettorale gli ambientalisti hanno criticato non solo Mitt Romney ma anche il presidente Obama per non aver dedicato praticamente alcuna attenzione ai temi dell’ambiente e dei cambiamenti climatici. Ma oggi, di fronte alla distruzione di Sandy, diversi politici hanno fatto collegato la tempesta ai cambiamenti climatici.
“Ormai abbiamo la tempesta del secolo ogni due anni, abbiamo una nuova realta’ in cui dobbiamo fronteggiare questo tipo di clima” ha detto il governatore di New York, Andrew Cuomo. “E’ evidente che le tempeste che abbiamo fronteggiato negli ultimi anni sono molto piu’ violente del passato, che sia il global warming o no, questo non lo so, ma dobbiamo affrontare il problema”, ha detto il sindaco di New York, Michael Bloomberg. – source