Disaster

207 -- The number of murders or unjustified homicides in Baltimore so far, as of 12:01 a.m. Thursday. By Aug. 30, 2006, the city had recorded 179 murders. SOURCE BALTIMORE POLICE DEPARTMENT Saturday Mailbox XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX FIRE STUFF Kevin........ generally speaking, the red cross is a non profit organization. We work under a ....our basic charter eminates from congress. Red cross charted to resond to disasters in 1907....goes back tko clara barton. That's kind of where the beginina comes from.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is offering three new programs that provide benefits to farmers and ranchers who suffered losses caused by natural disasters. Eligible ranchers and other livestock producers who signed up by Sept. 10 can apply for benefits under the Livestock Compensation Program or the Livestock Indemnity Program. Farmers can sign up for the Crop Disaster Program beginning Oct. 15. The first program compensates livestock producers for feed losses and the second for livestock losses, both between Jan. 1, 2005, and Feb. 28, 2007.

ARMENIA, Colombia -- When the massive seismic waves subsided last week, the residents of the impoverished warrens in the south of this town could barely find an unchipped brick to salvage. But in the north, in what passes for the ritzy uptown of this city of 300,000, there were condominiums and apartments with hardly a crack.The town hit by the 6.0-magnitude earthquake is split by a socioeconomic fault line between the poor, who build where they can with materials at hand, and the more wealthy, whose housing was built with more care, under stricter codes.

The Maryland Disaster Recovery Center, established at 2662 Riva Road in Annapolis to assist victims of Hurricane Floyd, will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. beginning today through Saturday.The center will answer questions about housing assistance, flood insurance, problems of small businesses destroyed by the storm and other issues.To apply for disaster relief through the federal government, call 1-800-462-9029.

WASHINGTON -- The situation in Kosovo is rapidly taking on the dimensions of a disaster -- militarily and politically.The principal victims are the innocent bystanders -- in this instance, the tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians driven out of their homes.But one tangential added casualty of the disaster in Kosovo may be President Clinton's last shred of credibility as a national leader. It is clear that the president failed to understand the basic rules of political conduct of foreign policy written by the American experience in Vietnam a generation ago.The first rule is that no foreign adventure can be sustained without U.S. public support.

INTERESTED in getting in on the ground floor of all those hot IPOs? Wait, advises Linda Killian, manager of IPO Aftermarket Fund."Don't jump in and buy initial public offerings (IPOs) too quickly," she says. "Hot IPOs can double or triple on the first day, but then fall back. Wait a while and you might pay substantially less."COKE & VIAGRA: "Prices of many hi-tech stocks will collapse," says Personal Finance. "There are few examples of hi-valuation tech stocks doing well long-term. Of the Nifty Fifty stars of the early 1970s, the only strong performers were consumer franchises such as Coca-Cola Co. or drug companies like Pfizer Inc."

THE PROBLEM with various assurances about the so-called Y2K problem is that they all include caveats. Jack Gribben, spokesman for President Clinton's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, recently said, "There's no evidence at this point that people should be disrupting their lives in any significant way." But what does he mean by "at this point"?Similarly, Connecticut technology firm GartnerGroup may have excited nerves when it sought to reassure American consumers that Y2K won't seriously disrupt their lives.

"Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster," by Mike Davis. Metropolitan Books. 466 pages. $25. Disaster buffs and die-hard California-haters will relish this book, a compendium of virtually every calamity visited on the Los Angeles Basin by implacable nature and imprudent humankind. Those seeking turn-of-the-millennium portents of a dark future for America's cities will also find bleak comfort here. But non-Angelenos who accompany author Mike Davis on his ecotour of the region's most hellish vistas should bring their own broader geographical perspective and whatever optimism they require for the journey, since Davis supplies neither.

Riots, mudslides, earthquakes, O. J.Hasn't Los Angeles suffered enough already?Nah, someone in Hollywood said. Let's bake 'em.And so we have "Volcano," a mega-million-dollar production that turns L.A. into an open-air barbecue pit. It's L.A. as a lava-engorged, ash-spewing Armageddon. It's L.A., the makers of "Volcano" movie know all too well, the way a lot of people outside L.A. imagine seeing it.Imagine this: We survived the eons with a grand total of zero volcano feature films only to have two of them erupting in 1997.

PRESIDENT CLINTON was right to veto a $8.6 billion disaster relief bill sent to him by Congress because it is encumbered with an amendment that would stymie efforts to improve the accuracy of the U.S. Census.Inevitably this became a battle not over statistics but over raw politics. Republicans rebelled against proposed sampling techniques they said would be vulnerable to manipulation. But their real fear was that they would lose seats in Congress if the Census stops undercounting blacks, Hispanics and the poor.

When disaster strikes, a swift response from the private sector can be just as crucial as the government's response. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. famously sent water and other necessities after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, often before federal emergency workers arrived. And in Baltimore two years before then, amphibious Duck tour boats evacuated residents from flooded coastal areas after Hurricane Isabel. To make the most of such charitable outpourings, Gov. Martin O'Malley plans to announce Thursday the creation of a "Civic Guard" to better connect disaster victims and first responders with businesses and nonprofit organizations that might be able to help with extra manpower or resources such as shovels and medical supplies.

No one - let alone a governor, like Martin O'Malley, who hopes to win a second term - finds joy in a time of economic distress. At the moment, voters are probably cutting him some slack; he's not the big-bonus Wall Street master of the universe. He's just dealing with the mess they are partially responsible for making. But he has to act as if the responsibility was his alone. You get the feeling that governors in general are waiting for Washington - specifically, President-elect Barack Obama - to bail them out. Even a crisis like this one could bring opportunity.

Trouble the Water, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina fashioned partly from footage shot inside New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward before, during and after the storm, is enraging and inspiring. It boasts the miraculous quality of finding a letter in a bottle and discovering that its authors are alive. Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband, Scott, longtime residents of the 9th Ward, found themselves facing disaster on their own after Mayor Ray Nagin put evacuation orders into effect without providing sufficient transportation or information to citizens who lacked cars.

Myanmar's ruling junta has sacrificed the lives of its people to selfishly protect its secretive, repressive government. Human life means little to the generals in power, and their restrictions on food, shelter, water and other relief aid for cyclone victims is ample proof of that. Their indifference to the critical needs of survivors will consign so many more of them to death. Myanmar's rulers need only look to its neighbor to see that a military response to a natural disaster is foremost about saving lives, not safeguarding the regime.

The general manager and possibly other senior staff at the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah, where nine miners died in August 2007, hid information from federal mining officials that could have prevented the disaster and should face criminal charges, according to a congressional investigation the results of which were released yesterday. The report also said that the mining company should never have submitted a request to remove coal from the section of mine where the collapse occurred, and that federal mining officials should not have approved the proposal, because of foreseeable dangers.

With chaos on the ground in Myanmar and no reliable sources of information, Maryland disaster experts say it's no surprise that casualty counts from the cyclone that struck the country can range from 22,500 to 100,000. The remote nature of the devastated area and government restrictions on Western relief organizations mean that very little reliable news about deaths or the plight of survivors has appeared, said W. Courtland Robinson, deputy director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

BEIJING -- The death toll continued to climb in Myanmar yesterday as state news media reported that more than 22,000 people had died from a weekend cyclone and more than 41,000 were missing. Efforts to reach the victims and help up to 1 million people that United Nations officials believe were left homeless by Tropical Cyclone Nargis remained mired in bureaucracy, logistics problems and the isolation of many areas. The insular Southeast Asian nation, long ruled by a military government, has signaled that it will allow international aid groups to enter the country.

Ulman to speak at Feb. 14 breakfast Howard County Executive Ken Ulman will speak at the BWI Business Partnership's Signature Breakfast, to be held from 7:45 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Hilton Baltimore BWI Airport Hotel, 1739 West Nursery Road, Linthicum. Registration is required by Tuesday. Partnership members can attend at no charge or pay $25, depending on their membership level. Nonmembers pay $40, if seats are available. Members can register at www.bwipartner.org, and click on "Events and Activities" and "Register and Pay for Events," or call 410-859-1000.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is offering three new programs that provide benefits to farmers and ranchers who suffered losses caused by natural disasters. Eligible ranchers and other livestock producers who signed up by Sept. 10 can apply for benefits under the Livestock Compensation Program or the Livestock Indemnity Program. Farmers can sign up for the Crop Disaster Program beginning Oct. 15. The first program compensates livestock producers for feed losses and the second for livestock losses, both between Jan. 1, 2005, and Feb. 28, 2007.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is offering three new programs that provide benefits to farmers and ranchers who suffered losses caused by natural disasters. Eligible ranchers and other livestock producers who signed up by Sept. 10 can apply for benefits under the Livestock Compensation Program or the Livestock Indemnity Program. Farmers can sign up for the Crop Disaster Program beginning Oct. 15. The first program compensates livestock producers for feed losses and the second for livestock losses, both between Jan. 1, 2005, and Feb. 28, 2007.