SEOUL, South Korea – The captain of a South Korean ferry that capsized in April killing about 300 people apologized in court on Wednesday for his failure to rescue passengers in the country’s worst maritime disaster for decades. “I have committed a grave crime. I am sorry,” Lee Joon-seok, the 68-year-old captain, was quoted as saying…
South Korea’s Prime Minister Chung Hong-Won resigned on Sunday amid public anger over the sinking of a Sewol passenger ferry, admitting that he had not been up to the task of overseeing rescue operations for the 476 people on board. More than 300 people, many of them high-school students, have been confirmed dead or are…
ANSAN, South Korea – Teenagers who survived the South Korea ferry disaster told on Monday how classmates helped them float free as water flooded their cabins despite crew instructions to stay put even as the vessel sank. Six teens, whose names were withheld to protect their privacy, were giving testimony at the trial of…
A Japanese parliamentary panel has delivered a damning verdict after investigating the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant which followed an earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011. Although such an event should have been predicted and planned for, the panel said, it found gaping holes in safety standards and emergency procedures. Here is an…
TOKYO — A year has now passed since the complete core meltdown of three boiling water reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima No.1 plant. Because of the limited information issued by the Japanese government – and its insistence that the disaster was only a result of the unanticipated magnitude of the earthquake and tsunami – the world…
New research confirms that extreme weather and deforestation can cause earthquakes. Photo: Marco Dormino/Wiki Commons If you ever doubted that human action was capable of profoundly effecting the Earth’s ecology, consider this: Scientists now believe that our mismanagement of the environment is quite literally causing the Earth to shake. New research has confirmed…
Six months after the 7.0 Haiti earthquake caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters in modern times, the worse-case scenarios have been avoided. Yet tens of thousands still live in camps. PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI; AND MEXICO CITY — At 4:53 p.m., exactly six months ago today, Haiti was ravaged by a 7.0 earthquake that killed more than 230,000 people,…
The green line south of Port-au-Prince shows the fault line where the 7.0-magnitude quake was centred. The epicentre was 10 kilometres beneath the surface. (U.S. Geological Survey) Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti was especially destructive because its epicentre was close to a major city and its hypocentre, or focal point, was close to the Earth’s surface, says a Canadian…