Chernobyl (man-made disasters)

Top Ten deadliest natural disasters

Rank	Event	Location	Date	Death Toll (Estimate)
1.	1931 China floods	China	01931-01-011931	2,000,000-4,000,000*
2.	1887 Yellow River flood	China	01887-01-011887, September–October	900,000–2,000,000
3.	1556 Shaanxi earthquake	Shaanxi Province, China	01556-01-011556 January 23	830,000+
4.	1970 Bhola cyclone	Bangladesh	01970-01-011970 November 13	500,000
5.	1839 India Cyclone	India	01839-01-011839 November 25	≥ 300,000
6.	2004 Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami	Indian Ocean	02004-12-262004 December 26	283,100
7.	526's Antioch earthquake	Turkey	00526-05-20526 May 20	250,000
8.	1976 Tangshan earthquake	China	01976-07-281976 July 28	242,000
9.	1975 Banqiao Dam failure	China	01975-08-011975, August	231,000
10.	1138 Aleppo earthquake	Syria	01138-01-011138	230,000

Electricity is all around us – in thunder storms, in our bodies, in all things alive or dead. However, it is not easy to make and control electricity for us to use in our homes and in industry. Nuclear power is a way of making electricity that seems to be cheap and clean.

Chernobyl was a nuclear power station in the Ukraine. The power station in Chernobyl was made in a way that has not been accepted in other parts of the world. British scientists had looked at the design but decided that it was dangerous, because the reactor did not have enough protection in case anything went wrong.

In the middle of a nuclear power station are one or more reactors, which get extremely hot. If they get too hot, the reactors blow up.

Very late at night on Friday 25^th April 1986, some of the scientists at the Chernobyl power station decided to try a dangerous experiment. They changed the pressure in one reactor, which caused the temperature rise. The reactor blew up.

Twenty people were working there at the time. One person was killed immediately, and his body has never been found. Several other people were killed soon after – some of them were firefighters who were helping to put out the fire. Other firefighters succeeded in putting out the fire before it reached the other three reactors at Chernobyl.

At first, the scientists and the government did not want to say that a really serious accident had happened. However, in the next days and weeks after the accident, the government of the Ukraine agreed that the air, food and water around Chernobyl were radioactive, and that it was dangerous for people to stay there. During the next few weeks, people in the city of Kiev, a hundred kilometers south of Chernobyl, wondered why there were no buses in their city! In fact, 1,200 buses from Kiev, and other towns, were being used to take people to a safer place. Later, 135,000 people were moved from around Chernobyl.

The rest of Europe first heard about the Chernobyl accident not from the USSR, but from Sweden, where radioactivity was noticed at the Forsmark nuclear power station. Denmark and Norway also reported an increase in radioactivity, and the scientists of western Europe finally realized that the radioactivity must be coming from near Kiev in the USSR.

The government of the USSR, however, said nothing to the world for two day after the accident. Because there was no hard information from the USSR, many wild stories began to be told, about thousands of deaths and cities living in fear. It was eighteen days before President Mikhail Gorbachev finally told the people of the USSR about the accident.

There is no doubt that the Chernobyl disaster was caused by human mistakes. The power station was not safe, and scientists at the power station were experimenting in dangerous ways. To make matters worse, the workers at the power station had no idea what to do in an emergency, and the government was extremely secretive.

The Chernobyl disaster had many effects on the electricity industry everywhere in the world. There had been nuclear accidents before, and many people had said for years that nuclear power was dangerous. This was the first really big accident that proved their warnings were right. Soon after the accident, many crowds of people met together in European cities. They held up notices with messages such as, ‘Chernobyl is everywhere’.

Nuclear power was suddenly very unpopular, and governments had to look seriously for other ways of making electricity. That is why there is so much interest now in wind power and power from heat of the sun.

P.S. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie discovered radium. In 1934 Marie Curie died of leukemia, which is a sort of cancer. People think that her leukemia was caused by radiation.

Doctors believe that the Chernobyl disaster has caused at least 5,000 cancer deaths in Europe.

Building Collapse ( man-made disasters)

ST. PETERSBURG – A nine-story apartment building collapsed Monday in St. Petersburg, killing at least one person and leaving more than 400 homeless. Clouds of dust hung over the heap of bricks and smoking furniture that once was their home.

According to rescuers’ documents, seven of the 413 people registered to live in the workers’ dormitory remained missing as of midnight. Two were children, and one was a woman who had reportedly called a relative from under the ruins asking for help.

Andrei Bagotsky, head of the rescue effort, said one man was found dead of apparent suffocation in the collapse, which buried cars and sent up giant clouds of dust and black plumes of smoke from a fire that also hit the building.

Anna Markova, vice governor of Russia’s former imperial capital, said she “could not rule out” that people could be trapped inside, but added, “There were at least 20 to 30 minutes for them to leave the building.”

Rescue workers said they were first alerted to a crack that appeared suddenly in an upper apartment in the boxy apartment building, and about 55 people were evacuated. Each eight-room apartment housed several families who shared a kitchen and bath, a common Soviet construction solution to housing shortages.

Within an hour, the top three floors of the building collapsed, and then part of the building burst into flames.

As residents huddled outside under rainy skies, the entire building buckled and crumbled to the ground.

“I was taking a shower in the bathroom, when I heard something like an explosion. The bath shook under me, and the ceiling cracked,” said Yuri Pchelintsev, 18, who lived on the seventh floor.

“I rushed to open the bathroom door but it was stuck. So I broke the little window in the bathroom and climbed out through the hole,” he said.

Nadezhda Tolmacheva said she was at home with her 8-year-old daughter when she noticed a crack in the ceiling. She took her daughter and rushed downstairs, climbing to safety by way of a firefighter’s ladder.

Officials said four people were taken to hospitals, one with cuts from broken glass, one with heart trouble, and others with breathing problems.

Residents speculated that maintenance on the building’s water pipes that began Monday morning could have been at fault. Police and firefighters said a gas leak or explosive device were also possibilities.

Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu, who arrived at the site Monday night, said maintenance work with welding equipment may have been to blame.

Meanwhile, St. Petersburg police defused an explosive found in the entry way of another city apartment building on Monday. The device was equipped with a timer but had no batteries, and police spokesman Elmar Shakhirzayev said it was likely being stored in the building.

Aging infrastructure has led to many accidents in Soviet-era state-built apartment blocks, which house a large portion of Russia’s population. St. Petersburg has seen four apartment buildings collapse in the past four years, but none resulted in casualties until Monday.

Vladimir Yakovlev, governor of St. Petersburg, said on Inform TV that he ordered that all those who lost their homes be provided with new apartments. Until then, the residents will live at a nearby kindergarten or school.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27