Tag: Floods

SYDNEY - Spot coking coal prices have risen around 10 percent in a month and look set to move sharply higher as Asia's steel mills scour the globe for new suppliers to cover production lost to Australian floods.
More than two months of torrential rains in Australia's Queensland state, the world's largest exporter of coal for steel-making, have left collieries underwater, rail lines inoperable and coal ports running at a trickle - if at all.
Spot prices for coking coal are at

BUNDABERG - Flood waters swept through vast areas of northeastern Australia Saturday, threatening to inundate thousands more homes in a disaster one official said was of "biblical proportions".
As Queen Elizabeth II sent her "sincere sympathies" to Queenslanders who rang in a damp new year, helicopters were being used to deliver food and other supplies to isolated towns. Up to 200,000 people have been affected by the floods, which have hurt the nation's lucrative mining industry

SYDNEY - Floodwater rose across a vast area in Australia's northeast on Friday, inundating 22 towns, forcing 200,000 residents out of their homes, and closing a major sugar export port.
Flooding has already shut coal mines in Queensland state and its biggest coal export port, forcing miners such as Anglo American and Rio Tinto to slow or halt operations. The worst flooding in about 50 years has been caused by a "La Nina" weather pattern, which cools waters in the eastern Pacific

KARACHI - Every morning Ruth Pfau stands short and frail before a tall crucifix in Karachi's St Patrick's Cathedral. She bows her head, shuts her eyes, places her right hand on her heart and prays. It is the beginning of another long day for the 81-year-old nun known locally as Pakistan's Mother Teresa, who has spent half a century caring for some of the country's poorest and most ostracised people.
Sister Pfau, who needs a stick to walk, admits some disquiet over security, but

ISLAMABAD: Environment managers in Pakistan have so far taken no serious view of a United Nations report which stated that the recent devastating flood have released some 3,000 tons of hazardous chemical posing potential threat to human health.
The report entitled "Climate Change and POPs Inter-Linkages" is due to be released by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) early next year.
The report presented at the climate moot held in Cancun, Mexico, last month revealed

ISLAMABAD: Shoppers were seen thronging markets throughout the capital, proving all gloomy prophecies predicting that the buyers would stay away from the markets because of an increased inflation rate and the floods wrong.
A day before the festival of Eidul Azha, a large number of women flocked to the markets to buy bangles, clothes and shoes for their kids and themselves.
Jinnah Super, Super Market, Karachi Company, G-10 Markaz and Aabpara Market were amongst those which

KARACHI: Repeating short-term measures for responding to future floods and rehabilitating flood victims would not be helpful, speakers at a two-day conference titled 'Flood and Beyond: Recovery, Reconstruction and Reforms' observed on Thursday.
The event was jointly organised by the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research, Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, South Asia Partnership Pakistan (SAP-PK), Sungi Development Foundation and the Centre for Peace and Civil Society.