Continue reading »]]> A 12-year-old girl thought to be the only survivor of the Yemenia air crash has told how she was thrown into the ocean and watched her aircraft sink.

Baya Bakari told her father at a hospital in Yemen that she heard voices around her in the Indian Ocean, but could not see anyone.

She was found clinging to debris some two hours after the crash.

The plane, going to the Comoros Islands from Yemen’s capital Sanaa, came down in bad weather with 153 on board.

Many of the passengers were travelling to the Comoros Islands but had begun their journey in Paris or Marseille on another jet operated by Yemenia, the national airline of Yemen, before boarding flight IY626 in Sanaa.

The EU and France have both said they highlighted safety concerns over Yemenia planes and said the jet that crashed had not flown into EU airspace since 2007.

But no official cause for the crash has yet been found. Earlier on Wednesday a French government minister in the Comoros capital, Moroni, said that a detected signal thought to be from one of the plane’s “black box” flight recorders was in fact a distress beacon.

‘True miracle’

Ms Bakari, who lives in Paris with her family, was treated in hospital in Moroni for injuries, said to include a fractured collarbone and burns.

On Wednesday evening, she was reported to be flying back to Paris in a French government aircraft.

French officials earlier said that she was 12 years old, contradicting earlier reports she was 14.

Speaking from Paris, her father Kassim Bakari said she was thrown from the plane as it hit the water. He said she clearly recalled the chaos of her time in the water.

“She said: ‘Papa, we saw the plane going down in the water. I was in the dark, I couldn’t see a thing.

“‘[And] on top of that daddy, I can’t swim well and I held on to something, but don’t really know what’.

“She’s a very timid girl, I never thought she would escape like that,” he said, adding that she was “fragile” and barely able to swim.

Mr Bakari recalled how he said goodbye to his wife and daughter at the airport as they headed to the Comoros.

“I kissed them both, then my wife turned around, she looked at me and she waved, and my daughter she didn’t do anything, and that was the last time I saw my wife alive, because my daughter… I will see her again I hope, but for my wife it was the last time.”

French officials in Moroni praised the girl’s courage. International Co-operation Minister Alain Joyandet described her rescue as a “true miracle”.

“She is a courageous young girl. She really showed an absolutely incredible physical and moral strength.”

An uncle, Ali Abdou, who visited the girl in hospital in Moroni, told the BBC she did not yet know that her mother had died.

She was scheduled to be transferred back to Paris for treatment later on Wednesday, he added.

“She is conscious, speaking well, [she] is ok. She was joking, she was chatting, we laughed together.

“It’s a miracle. It was God’s will.”

‘No black box’

Earlier, a French government minister reversed earlier claims that one of the plane’s black box recorders had been found.

Mr Joyandet, the French minister in Moroni, said signals picked up by rescuers came from a distress beacon. Most aircraft have a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder.

“The Transall (military plane) that picked up an acoustic signal did not, despite what was said this morning, detect the beacons of the flight recorders, but rather what appear to be its distress beacons,” Mr Joyandet said in Moroni, the Comoros capital, AFP news agency reported.

There were 66 French nationals among the passengers. Most of the rest were Comorans, and most had flown on a different Yemenia aircraft from Paris or Marseille before boarding flight IY626 in Sanaa.

A French vessel has been sent to the site to start recovery operations, she added, and French rescue teams are involved in the search for survivors.

However, no-one from the plane has been confirmed alive apart from Baya Bakari, and rescuers say chances of finding more survivors are slim.

Angry protest

The French transport ministry said on Tuesday that the Airbus 310 plane which crashed had been banned from France because of “irregularities”.

But Yemenia responded by criticising “false information and speculation about technical problems” on the plane.

Several Comoran expatriates angry with what they see as the poor state of the company’s aircraft tried to stop passengers from checking in for another Yemenia flight leaving Paris Charles de Gaulle airport for Sanaa.

About 60 people failed to check in, reports said, but it was not clear how many did so as a result of the protest.

The crash was the second involving an Airbus aircraft in recent weeks. On 1 June an Air France Airbus 330 travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board.

Survivor speaks of Yemenia crash

Continue reading »]]> More than 200 people are believed dead after an Air France passenger jet disappeared over the Atlantic on a flight from Brazil.

Officials said they had “no hope” for Air France Flight 447 which dropped off the radar three hours and less than 200 miles into a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

As the Brazilian air force mounted a search and rescue operation for the Airbus 330-200k in the waters around the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, families of passengers gathered at a crisis centre in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport awaiting news.

The Foreign Office said it was “urgently” seeking news on whether there were any Britons on board.

Air France said that the aircraft had sent a message reporting an electrical “short circuit” after strong turbulence.

The company said the plane had probably been struck by lightning.

An Airbus source described the failure as “catastrophic” suggesting a sudden and unexplained systems failure.

The flight left Rio at 7pm local time (11pm British time) and was due in Paris at 11.15am (10.15am BST).

It was 190 miles north east of the coastal Brazilian city of Natal when it was lost contact three hours and 20 minutes later.

Authorities began the operation around Fernando de Noronha, an idyllic holiday destination but they cautioned that the search area could be three times the size of Europe.

Air France said that it “shares the emotion and worry of the families concerned.”

A source at the airline told Le Monde: “The plane disappeared from the screens several hours ago.

“It could be a transponder problem, but this kind of fault is very rare and the plane did not land when expected.”

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said he had been informed of the crisis and ordered all relevant government agencies to hunt “for any sign of the plane”.

The country’s transport minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said there was “real pessimism at this hour”.

“We can fear the worst,” he said.

Media in Italy reported that five Italian nationals were among the 216 passengers and 12 crew on board.

Brazil’s air traffic control system has been in crisis since 2006, when a Gol passenger jet collided with a private plane above the Amazon killing all 154 people on board.

That disaster was followed just 10 months later by the worst crash in Brazil’s history when a TAM jet slid off the runway at São Paulo’s city airport and crashed into a warehouse. Some 199 people died.

Although the two crashes were not directly related, Brazil’s air traffic control system and oversight of it were implicated in both. The Gol crash caused nationwide turmoil after air traffic controllers launched strikes and go slows at what they said were poor working conditions.

The system is run by the military but questions were raised about the capacity, training and above all, the English language abilities, of the controllers.

The Gol crash reflected “systematic shortcomings in emphasis on positive air traffic control concepts,” the US’s National Transportation Safety Board said in its final report on the disaster.

Air France plane lost: officials say ‘no hope’ of finding airliner

Continue reading »]]> New York, Boston and other cities on North America’s northeast coast could face a rise in sea level this century that would exceed forecasts for the rest of the planet if Greenland’s ice sheet keeps melting as fast as it is now, researchers said on Wednesday.

Sea levels off the northeast coast of North America could rise by 12 to 20 inches more than other coastal areas if the Greenland glacier-melt continues to accelerate at its present pace, the researchers reported.

This is because the current rate of ice-melting in Greenland could send so much fresh water into the salty north Atlantic Ocean that it could change the vast ocean circulation pattern sometimes called the conveyor belt. Scientists call this pattern the meridional overturning circulation.

“If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise,” said Aixie Hu, lead author of an article on the subject in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise,” said Hu, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

This is an even bleaker assessment than an earlier study indicated. A March article in the journal Nature Geoscience said warmer water temperatures could shift ocean currents so as to raise sea levels off the U.S. northeast coast by about 8 inches more than the average global sea level rise.

NOT LIKELY BUT POSSIBLE

However, this earlier research did not include the impact of melting Greenland ice, which would speed changes in ocean circulation and send 4 to 12 more inches of water toward northeastern North America, on top of the average global sea level rise.

That could put residents of New York, Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia, at risk since these cities and others lie close to sea level now, Hu said in answer to e-mailed questions.

Not only would coastal residents be at direct risk from flooding but drainage systems would suffer as salty ocean water would move back into river deltas, changing the biological environment, Hu wrote in an e-mail.

“In a flooding zone, because the higher sea level may impede the function of the drainage system, the future flood may become more severe,” he wrote. If cities are prone to subsidence — where the ground sinks — higher sea levels would also make that problem worse, according to Hu.

The ice that covers much of Greenland is melting faster now due to global climate change, raising world sea levels. But sea level does not rise evenly around the globe. Sea level in the North Atlantic is now 28 inches lower than in the North Pacific, because the Atlantic has a dense, compact layer of deep, cold water that the Pacific lacks.

Greenland’s ice-melt rate has increased by 7 percent a year since 1996 but Hu said it is unlikely to continue. Still, he and his co-authors ran computer simulations that included this fast-paced melting, along with more moderate scenarios with ice-melt increasing by 3 percent or 1 percent annually.

Hu said it was hard to say whether the 7 percent annual increase could go on for the next 50 years but said it was possible since the current rate of increase in climate-warming carbon dioxide is higher than the high end of projections by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Greenland ice could fuel severe U.S. sea level rise

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Continue reading »]]> The search for 16 oil workers missing after their helicopter crashed into the Atlantic off Newfoundland has now been called off.

Officials say it is unlikely the missing workers could have survived.

Rescue officials say the mission is now one of recovery.

A spokesman says the search ended after 34 hours, adding that it has gone beyond the 24-hour life expectancy time for someone in a survival suit.

One body was recovered and one man was rescued. He is listed in critical but stable condition in hospital.

The case now goes to the Transportation Safety Board.

The lead investigator says plans are already underway to lift the helicopter to the surface some time next week.

It is about 120 metres down and a remote submersible equipped with cameras will be sent to the ocean floor, possibly as soon as today, to examine the wreck.

Canadian chopper crash search called off

Continue reading »]]> A Canadian Coast Guard ship rescued all 22 people from a burning Spanish fishing trawler in the North Atlantic on Sunday, just as the fisherman were leaping into the water.

“It was pretty dramatic when you see a ship sinking and people being launched in a life raft, people jumping off the side,” Coast Guard Capt. Derek LeRiche said by telephone.

Some didn’t have life jackets on, and some jumped into the freezing water wearing regular clothes, he said.

The Coast Guard was in the area on a routine fisheries patrol about 250 miles (400 kilometers) southeast of Newfoundland when it received a distress call from the Monte Galineiro trawler.

It was not immediately clear what caused the fire.

LeRiche said they arrived about 10 minutes later, just as the Spanish fishermen were jumping into the water or sliding into life rafts.

“We managed to pick them up quite fast, and most didn’t have ill effects of the water temperature,” he said.

One crewman had hypothermia and was treated on board. Another suffering from smoke inhalation was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

It was lucky that the Coast Guard ship had been nearby, LeRiche said.

“We were thinking of doing a boarding on her anyway” with some fisheries inspectors, he said. “All the cards were in line that we were so close.”

Canadian Coast Guard Rescues 22 From Flaming Ship

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Continue reading »]]> A British couple was rescued from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean by an Italian tanker after spending 40 days lost at sea.

Stuart Armstrong, 51, and his partner Andrea Davison, 48, are heading back to Britain on board the supertanker Indian Point.

Although unhurt, they were tired, exhausted and grateful to be returning home after their six-week ordeal in which they “stared death in the face.”

The drama began on Jan. 9, six days after the couple left the Cape Verde Islands off the West Coast of Africa on board their yacht Sara.

They were headed for Antigua where they intended to anchor until April.

But, midway through the 2,550-mile journey disaster struck and the rudder on the yacht jammed to starboard. Attempts to fix it were useless.

At this stage the couple, who live on the yacht in Majorca, were in the middle of the Atlantic, 1,200 miles from Antigua, five days sailing time away and out of range for any rescue attempt.

“In effect we were sailing round and round in circles as the rudder was stuck all the way over,” Armstrong said, speaking from the Indian Point. “We tried to counteract this by putting droves over the side to try and help point the boat towards land but we didn’t really have any great success.”

“At first we were not too bothered as we had a good supply of dry provisions, the usual things you have on a boat – pasta, kidney beans, biscuits, rice and soya. There was also plenty of water to keep us going, the radio was still working and we had power so there was no need to be too worried.”

He continued, “I have crossed the Atlantic seven times and this was Andrea’s fourth so we are pretty experienced and for the first few days it was a challenge and a bit of an adventure.”

“We alerted the coastguards in Britain and America and we also let our families know. I spent a good few days trying to fix the rudder as well but I just didn’t have any luck.”

Their first problem was around 10 days or so later when the alternator broke which meant they had no power.

“All that we had was a small solar panel which gave us enough to fire up the satellite phone but we had to ration it,” he said. “The loss of the alternator also meant that we could not use the desalination unit which turns sea water into drinking water so we also had to start rationing that as well.”

The American Coast Guard monitored their position but because of their remote location a rescue attempt was impossible and the couple simply carried on drifting with the current pushing them slowly towards the Caribbean.

During their weeks at sea the couple’s yacht was battered by storms but they managed to escape unscathed. However, as they neared the Bermuda triangle after more than a month at sea conditions began to worsen.

The reduced electrical power meant that Armstrong could only talk to his daughter once or twice a week and it was the same for Davison and her two children.

“At first they were OK with our situation because they know Stuart is a good sailor but I think as time moved on they started to get more concerned and so did I,” said Davison. “We kept getting hit by storms but we managed to get out of them with no real problems. But I knew we were riding our luck and we wouldn’t be able to go on for much longer.”

Click here to read more on this story from Sky News.

British Couple Saved After 40 Days Stranded At Sea

Continue reading »]]>

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant are understood to have both been severely damaged in the underwater accident earlier this month.

Both are fitted with state-of-the-art technology aimed at detecting other submarines, but it apparently failed completely.

Although both France and Britain insist that security was not compromised during the collision and there was no danger of a nuclear incident, inquiries are now under way in both countries.

Each boat is a key part of their respective county’s nuclear deterrent, ready to unleash their destructive weapons at a moment’s notice.

French Navy sources confirm that Le Triomphant, one of four strategic nuclear submarines of the so-called “Force de Frappe”, was returning from a 70 day tour of duty when the incident occurred.

It happened in heavy seas, and in the middle of the night between February 3 and 4, and left Le Triomphant’s sonar dome all but destroyed.

The sonar dome should have detected the Vanguard but Le Triomphant’s crew of 101 claimed to have “neither saw nor heard anything”.

The French tried to play down the collision, with a Navy spokesman saying: “The collision did not result in injuries among the crew and did not jeopardise nuclear security at any moment.”

The Ministry of Defence would not even confirm it had taken place. A spokesman said: “It is MoD policy not to comment on submarine operational matters, but we can confirm that the UK’s deterrent capability has remained unaffected at all times and there has been no compromise to nuclear safety.”

Le Triomphant took at least three days to limp back to her home port, while HMS Vanguard returned to her home base in Faslane, in Scotland.

With a complement of 135 crew, she is the lead boat of the Vanguard class of submarines which carry Trident ballistic missiles around the world.

Le Triomphant is also the lead ship in her own class of Triomphant nuclear submarines.

Each carries 16 M45 ballistic missiles, weighs 35 tons each, carries six warheads and has a range of around 5,000 miles.

France’s Atlantic coast is notorious for being a “submarine graveyard” because of the number of underwater craft, mainly German U-boats, sunk in the area during the Second World War.

British and French nuclear submarines collide in Atlantic

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Continue reading »]]> SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico police say they found the mutilated remains of a woman floating in a seaside cave near the site of a small plane crash.

Police spokeswoman Yaira Rivera says investigators believe the woman found Sunday in a cave under a cliff near the northwestern town of Camuy was one of the plane’s passengers.

The Cessna 206 plunged into the Atlantic about a half-mile (kilometer) off shore on Feb. 8 with six people aboard.

Witnesses said they’d heard an engine struggling and saw an explosion.

Authorities recovered the remains of one man last week amid heavy rain and high seas, but could not immediately identify him because he had been mutilated by sharks.

Police said the pilot and five passengers were Puerto Ricans.

Police find remains near Puerto Rico plane crash

Continue reading »]]> MADRID: At least 10 people, including four children, were killed as high winds struck Spain and France on Saturday, tearing roofs from buildings, blowing down trees and power lines and whipping up huge waves.

The Spanish authorities said the four children were killed and several others injured near Barcelona on Saturday when the roof of a sports center collapsed in high winds. A spokeswoman for the Catalan government said the children had been sheltering from the wind in the sports hall in Sant Boi de Llobregat, just south of Barcelona, when the roof and some of the walls collapsed.

Jaume Bosch, mayor of Sant Boi, said the children were 9 to 12 years old, according to the Web site of La Vanguardia, a Barcelona-based newspaper. The spokeswoman, who spoke on condition of anonymity under government rules, said seven other children and two adults were injured, one of them seriously. Emergency services had pulled everyone free of the rubble of the building by midafternoon, she said.

Photographs of the collapsed building on the Web site of La Vanguardia showed a large, corrugated iron roof caved in over a pile of concrete rubble. Witnesses said about 30 children had been preparing to play baseball and decided to take shelter inside the building.

José Antonio Godina, a parent of one of the children in the sports center who was quoted by the Web site of El Mundo newspaper, said the scene was “horrific.”

“We heard a very loud noise and we thought it was a tree falling on a roof,” he said. “But when we got there, the roof of the building had literally flown off and the walls had collapsed on them.”

The newspaper did not say whether Godina’s child was among the injured.

In northern Spain and southern France, the gales, which reached 160 kilometers an hour, or 100 miles an hour, cut power supplies and closed airports and roads.

The authorities on both sides of the border called on people to stay indoors and stay clear of beaches and harbors as eight-meter waves pounded the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts.

The local authorities in the Landes region of France said one person was killed and one seriously injured when a tree fell on a car, according to Reuters. In Spain, the police said three other people had been killed in Catalonia, one by a falling wall and two by falling trees. Two men, including one police officer, were killed in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, the police said.

In France, the national power grid manager, Électricité Réseau Distribution France, said nearly 1.2 million homes were cut off. Fecsa, the electricity grid manager in Catalonia, said tens of thousands of people in the northeastern region of four million inhabitants were without power.

The French agriculture minister, Michel Barnier, said the storm was “the worst since 1999,” when a huge storm killed 88 people in France and left nearly four million people without electricity, according to Reuters. He said France would call on the European Union to help finance reconstruction efforts once the extent of the damage becomes clear.

The French interior minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, said she had ordered that 700 extra security forces be sent to the region to help with rescue efforts and that extra equipment also be sent to help clear roads and electric lines.

High winds kill 10 in Spain and France – International Herald Tribune

Continue reading »]]> Paloma lost its punch as it stalled over Cuba on Sunday and was downgraded to a tropical depression after coming ashore as powerful hurricane that battered the island still recovering from two earlier storms.

Paloma left a trail of destruction through eastern Cuba, but not the widespread devastation of hurricanes Gustav and Ike that caused $8 billion in damage when they struck in August and September.

In it latest advisory, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Paloma’s winds had dropped to 35 miles per hour (55 kph). Its center was located 15 miles (25 km) south-southwest of the eastern central city of Camaguey and moving just 1 mph (2 kph) to the north, the center said.

The storm hit the southern coast on Saturday with 120 mph winds (195 kph) that knocked over power and phone lines, toppled trees, damaged homes and felled a communications tower.

In Santa Cruz del Sur, where Paloma made landfall, a 13-foot (4-metre) storm surge pushed seawater nearly a mile (1.5 km) inland, damaging hundreds of homes. Rainfall of up to 15 inches (40 cm) was reported in some areas, causing local flooding.

Paloma weakened quickly as it crept inland and was downgraded throughout the day on Sunday before its downgrade to tropical depression.

Much earlier in the day, the Cuban weather service said only remnants of Paloma remained and stopped issuing advisories.

NO INJURIES OR DEATHS

Cuban officials declared the recovery phase begun and many of the hundreds of thousands of evacuees started returning home. No storm-related deaths or major injuries were reported.

“I’m happy that it was less that expected,” university student Maritza Bacallao in Camaguey. “The scare was worse than the reality.”

“It was less than Ike and I hope it’s the last one,” said school teacher Iris Mendoza, also in Camaguey. “It’s the second time they made me spend the night without sleeping, watching to see if the roof fell in.”

Gustav slammed the Isle of Youth and westernmost Pinar del Rio province with 150 mph (230 kph) winds, while Ike hit eastern Cuba with 120 mph winds (195 kph) and rampaged through much of the island.

They damaged almost 450,000 homes and destroyed 30 percent of Cuba’s crops, which touched off food shortages in the cash-strapped communist-run island that normally imports 60 percent of its food.

The most recent reports said only 20 percent of the damaged homes had been fully repaired.

Before hitting Cuba, Paloma raked the Cayman Islands, causing wind damage and flooding in the wealthy British territory, but no deaths.

Paloma was the eighth hurricane of a busy Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ends Nov. 30.

It was was the second-most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the month of November and struck 76 years after a Nov. 9, 1932, cyclone that killed 3,000 in the same part of Cuba.

Reuters