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Only Cyclone Tracy (1974) and the Sydney hailstorm (1999) caused more insured losses, and this year’s East Coast Flood is the costliest flood in Australian history, analysts report.

Close to 225,000 insurance claims relating to the event have now been lodged across both states, an increase of 3.6% on last month’s count.

However, as claims assessments continue to be completed, insurance costs for the event have increased 12% on last month, ICA data shows, driven in part by increasing materials and labour costs.

Almost 30% of claims have been closed and $1.5 billion has already been paid to policyholders.

This week marked four months since the ICA first declared the floods as an insurance catastrophe.

The event stretched over several days and many claims were not made until days, weeks or months after the initial event, with locations like Lismore being hit for a second time at the end of March, generating many new or additional claim lodgements.

“The sheer scale of the extreme weather event that devastated Queensland and New South Wales is something we have never seen before, and the cost continues to rise,” said ICA CEO Andrew Hall.

“Money is flowing into these devastated communities with $1.5 billion already paid and this number increasing every day,” he continued. “Past experience has shown us that local councils need to be looking at what they can do to process the higher than usual number of development applications we expect to see as a result of this flood.”

“The time it takes for some property claims decisions to be made has been a consistent issue raised at our policyholder forums in New South Wales and Queensland,” Hall acknowledged. “There are clear obligations and regulations on insurers around claims, but ultimately the type of claim, the assessment required and the complexity of the repair or rebuild can impact that process.”

Source: https://www.reinsurancene.ws/2022-floods-among-australias-costliest-ever-disasters-ica/

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The post At Least 1,000 Dead After 5.9 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Afghanistan first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Searching through the debris, in what is left of his family home, Agha Jan’s eyes well up with tears.

“These were my sons’ shoes,” he says, brushing the dust off them. His three young children and two wives were killed in the earthquake as they slept.

As the tremors struck in the early hours of Wednesday, Agha Jan rushed towards the room where his family was staying.

“But everything was under the rubble,” he tells the BBC. “Even my shovel. There was nothing I could do. I called out to my cousins to help but when we pulled my family out, they were already all dead.”

The area around Agha Jan’s village in Barmal district, Paktika province, is one of the worst affected by the earthquake, in which around 1,000 people are believed to have been killed and 3,000 more injured.

It’s a three-hour drive to the nearest big city, on mostly dirt roads – the remote location making it all the more difficult to transport the injured. Some had to be flown to hospital in the Taliban’s military helicopters.

Almost every house in the village, generally constructed from mud and stone, appears to be badly damaged. Almost every family seems to be grieving a lost relative.

Habib Gul was across the border in the Pakistani city of Karachi, working as a labourer, when he heard the news. He rushed back to his village in Barmal to discover 20 of his relatives had been killed – 18 of them in a single house.

“Whose names can I give you? So many of my relatives were martyred, three sisters, my niece, my daughter, young children.”

Every villager we meet wants to show us the destruction to their home. Partly because they want the world to see the devastation, but also, more practically, because they are hoping their names can be added to aid distribution lists.

“If the world looks on us like brothers and helps us, we will stay here on our land,” Habib Gul tells the BBC. “If they don’t, we will leave this place where we have spent so long with tears in our eyes.”

Overhead, military helicopters whir through the sky. They’re no longer transporting injured victims but delivering supplies. Taliban officials tell us the rescue operation has been completed and is now over.

The most pressing need is shelter for the hundreds of families left homeless.

Agha Jan and one of his surviving sons are pitching a large sheet of tarpaulin between wooden sticks on a piece of empty ground. Other families are in tents, flanked by the remnants of homes they worked so hard to construct.

Khalid Jan is now responsible for his five young grandchildren who mill around by his feet. Their father, his son, was killed in the earthquake, along with two other of Khalid Jan’s children.

“I am all they have left,” he tells the BBC, perched on a metal charpoy – a traditional bed – underneath a tent. “But the house and everything here has been destroyed and I will never be able to rebuild it.”

Afghan and international aid agencies are assessing the damage and delivering supplies, but this is a major and developing crisis, one which comes on top of the country’s already dire humanitarian situation.

The United Nations, which is also helping support victims, is warning of the risk of a possible cholera outbreak.

At Habib Gul’s village, men have gathered to offer prayers commemorating the dead. Almost 50 people have been killed out of a population of around 250. Attention will now turn to the survivors, and how fast aid can reach them.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-61918430

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According to the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), the quake hit on Thursday, June 9th, 2022, at 4:32 am local time at an intermediate depth of 79 km. The exact magnitude, epicenter, and depth of the quake might be revised within the next few hours or minutes as seismologists review data and refine their calculations, or as other agencies issue their report.

Our monitoring service identified a second report from the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) which listed the quake at magnitude 5.6. A third agency, the citizen-seismograph network of RaspberryShake, reported the same quake at magnitude 5.6.

Based on the preliminary seismic data, the quake should not have caused any significant damage, but was probably felt by many people as light vibration in the area of the epicenter.

Weak shaking might have been felt in Antofagasta (pop. 309,800) located 81 km from the epicenter, and Sierra Gorda (pop. 480) 130 km away.

VolcanoDiscovery will automatically update magnitude and depth if these change and follow up if other significant news about the quake become available. If you’re in the area, please send us your experience through our reporting mechanism, either online or via our mobile app. This will help us provide more first-hand updates to anyone around the globe who wants to know more about this quake.

Source: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/earthquake/news/183060/Significant-magnitude-54-quake-hits-81-km-southeast-of-Antofagasta-Chile-early-morning-.html

The post Significant magnitude 5.4 quake hits 81 km southeast of Antofagasta, Chile early morning first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

EXCLUSIVE: Russia’s war in Ukraine has sparked a global crisis, and experts warn that hunger poses the greatest worldwide security threat as millions face famine and starvation.

“The conflict in Ukraine isn’t just increasing hunger conditions within the country or even within the region,” Steve Taravella, senior spokesperson for the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), told Fox News. “The number of people who are on the brink of famine is now about 48.9 million in 43 countries.

“That is really dramatic.”

Taravella said that roughly three-quarters of a million people are facing starvation in just five nations across the globe, including Ethiopia, Yemen, South Sudan, Afghanistan and Somalia.

RUSSIA WAR WILL HAVE ‘SHATTERING’ EFFECT ON FOOD SHORTAGES IN AFRICA: ‘YOU’RE GOING TO SEE GOVERNMENTS FALL’

“These aren’t people who just don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” he continued. “These are people who are really facing starvation.”

These highly vulnerable nations have been embroiled in brutal conflicts, which has not only made providing humanitarian care more difficult but has also stunted global production.

“The link between conflict and hunger is really essential for understanding what is happening in Ukraine,” Taravella said. “Bottom line: When people are fighting they’re not farming.”

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Global drought and the coronavirus pandemic had already created serious hunger conditions for the most vulnerable nations, but Russia’s war in the grain-rich sector of the world has pushed dangerous conditions into catastrophic realities.

“Hunger is soaring to terrifying levels, and the global situation just keeps on getting worse. Conflict, the climate crisis, COVID and surging food and fuel costs have created a perfect storm — and now the Ukraine war is piling catastrophe on top of catastrophe,” David Beasley, head of the U.N. WFP, tweeted this week.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres echoed these comments last month when he told the Biden administration that global hunger levels had reached “a new high.”

“In just two years, the number of severely food insecure people has doubled, from 135 million pre-pandemic to 276 million today,” he said. “More than half a million people are living in famine conditions — an increase of more than 500% since 2016.”

But Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought a new reality to the alarming situation.

“It’s a global storm with a global impact,” Taravella explained.

In 2019, Ukraine provided a staggering 42% of the world’s sunflower oil. In addition, it also provided 16% of the world’s corn exports, 10% of all barley exports, and nearly 9% of all wheat exports also came from Ukraine.

Kyiv also contributed 40% of all wheat exports the WFP received to assist vulnerable nations worldwide before it became the target of a deadly conflict.

As much as 25 million tons of grain remain holed up in storage facilities in Ukraine as Russian naval vessels hold an export blockade over ports located along the Black Sea.

Taravella explained that not only is there an urgent need to distribute the grain to assist with food demands now, but its circulation is also needed to ensure that any current grain harvesting can be stored.

Food prices have risen worldwide, but countries with the lowest GPD index will see the greatest spikes in costs at the market.

ZELENSKYY’S GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS PREDICTION MAY BE 10 WEEKS AWAY, UN OFFICIAL SAYS: ‘SEISMIC’

“The people who now have to cough up the dramatically greater amounts of money for food are the very people who can least afford it,” the WFP official told Fox News.

This is largely due to the fact that countries in the Middle East and Africa have been highly reliant on Ukrainian exports and food assistance programs like the WFP – which is also incurring substantially greater costs.

Before the war, Lebanon received 80% of its wheat imports from Ukraine while Tunisia, Libya and Pakistan all received nearly 50% of their wheat needs from the former Soviet nation.

Iraq imported nearly 88% of its sunflower oil from Ukraine, while India and Egypt relied upon Ukraine for 76% and 54% of their sunflower oil needs, respectively.

Experts are concerned the food crisis will not only lead to a spike in global hunger but pose a major security threat worldwide.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“One of the drivers of the conflict in what we now call the Arab Spring was the inability to get affordable food. When people are hungry, they become desperate and they turn to desperate measures,” Taravella said. “We are all very nervous that as the numbers of hungry grow around the world, political instability could grow with it.

“The last thing the world needs is more conflict. How many more countries in conflict can the world sustain?”

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-global-food-crisis-49-million-famine-starvation-expert

The post Russia-induced global food crisis pushes 49M to ‘brink’ of famine, starvation: expert warns first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The USGS said the quake hit at a depth of 51 kilometers off the eastern tip of Timor island, which is split between East Timor and Indonesia.

An AFP journalist in the East Timor capital, Dili, felt the earthquake and said that, although it lasted only seconds, “the jolt was quite strong.”

“I saw people rushing out of their homes and children running outside of the school,” the journalist said.

The earthquake was more violent around the town of Lospalos in the east of the country, but local authorities were still assessing the situation and did not give a breakdown of the damage or possible casualties.

The quake was also felt in Darwin, Australia, which lies across the Timor Sea from the epicenter.

Darwin resident Joel Willingale, who works in heavy manufacturing, said “it went on for about 30 seconds.”

“The whole room shook and slammed down,” he said.

“We only really feel the effects of a quake occasionally, usually in the Banda Sea. But this one was a big one.”

The Banda Sea lies north of Timor island.

To the north in Indonesia, the earthquake triggered panic and prompted people to evacuate buildings in the southwest of the Moluccas archipelago, according to the National Emergency Management.

Authorities did not report any damage or casualties.

The United Nations’ tsunami monitoring agency warned that the quake “could generate a tsunami affecting the Indian Ocean region.”

No national authority in the region has yet issued a tsunami warning, however.

“No #tsunami threat to Australia from #earthquake felt in Darwin, NT,” said Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology in a tweet.

East Timor and Indonesia sit on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of intense seismic activity that stretches through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

In February, a 6.2 magnitude quake killed a dozen people when it struck Indonesia’s North Sumatra.

In 2004, a 9.1-magnitude quake hit the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 people throughout the region, including about 170,000 in Indonesia.

East Timor has a population of about 1.3 million and is Southeast Asia’s youngest country, recently celebrating the 20th anniversary of its independence from Indonesia.

The mostly rural economy has been badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the World Bank saying 42% of the population live below the poverty line.

Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/magnitude-quake-strikes-off-east-timor-/6591870.html

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