Oklahoma Tornado

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Survivors sifted through what little was left of their communities on Sunday after tornadoes tore across several states leaving a trail of death and destruction. Tornadoes caused at least 22 deaths in three states.

Picher, Oklahoma was particularly hard hit. The twister devastated a 20-square-block area. Picher was once a busling mining center that had a population of 20,000 that dwindled to over 800 as families fled due to lead pollution. Piles of mine waste, or chat, have long towered over the town across a highway from the devastated neighborhood; they’re now peppered with debris from homes flattened by the tornado.

Residents say the tornado created a surreal scene as it moved through Picher. Overturning cars and throwing house hold debris high into the canopy of trees. One survivor said she could barely recognize her own town.

“This is utterly devastating. This is just like a bomb dropped out of the sky and hit and just destroyed everything in its path,” Picher Police Lt. George Brown said.

The storm then moved into Missouri claiming more homes and lives across a mile-wide path of destruction. In many cases residents said they had no warning that tornadoes were approaching.

“It was clear, there weren’t any clouds, there wasn’t any rain. And we sat back down and was talking a little bit longer and It just kept getting louder. And it hit,” one witness said.

The twister killed 15 people in three southwest Missouri counties. Authorities say the death toll could rise.

More than three dozen tornadoes moved across the South and Midwest this weekend, in what has been the most volatile tornado season in decades. Twisters have claimed more lives so far this year than in all of 2007.

China Earthquake

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China’s most devastating earthquake in three decades caused a wide swath of damage, sending people fleeing with their few salvaged belongings. Earthquake rescue experts in orange jumpsuits extricated bloody survivors on stretchers from demolished buildings, and some 34,000 troops swarmed into the region to help.

The US Geological Survey said on its website the main quake struck at 0628 GMT at a depth of 6 miles.

A day after the powerful 7.9 magnitude quake struck Monday afternoon, state media said rescue workers had reached the epicenter in Wenchuan county — where the number of casualties was still unknown.

The death toll rose Tuesday to 11,921, said Wang Zhenyao, disaster relief division director at the Ministry of Civil Affairs. At least 4,800 people remained buried in Mianzhu, 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the epicenter, Xinhua said, citing local authorities.

“The road started swaying as I was driving. Rocks fell from the mountains, with dust darkening the sky over the valley,” a driver for Sichuan’s seismological bureau was quoted by Xinhua as saying, as he was driving near the epicentre.

As many as 10,000 in Beichuan were feared injured and 80 per cent of the buildings there had been destroyed, Xinhua said. There had been more than 300 aftershocks and an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed in Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County alone, state media said.

Beichuan’s population is 161,000, meaning about one in 10 residents were killed or injured. The county is a part of Mianyang city, and about 100 miles from the provincial capital, Chengdu.

Hundreds of people were buried under rubble in Shifang in Sichuan as several schools, factories and dormitories collapsed during the quake, the official Xinhua news agency said.

About 6,000 people were evacuated, Xinhua said, adding that more than 80 tonnes of highly corrosive liquid ammonia had leaked.

At least 45 had died in Chengdu, Xinhua said, citing an official with the local seismological bureau. Another 600 people were injured, 58 of them critically, in the sprawling city.

Some 57 have been confirmed killed in northern Shaanxi, 48 in northwestern Gansu, 50 in Chongqing municipality, and one in Yunnan province, Xinhua said, citing the national headquarters of disaster relief.

In Beijing and Shanghai, office workers poured into the streets as the tremor hit. In the capital, there was no visible damage and the showpiece Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium was unscathed.

It has come at a bad time for China, which holds the Olympic Games in August, and has been struggling to keep a lid on unrest in ethnic Tibetan areas and the heavily Muslim northeastern Xinjiang region.

The quake was China’s deadliest since 1976, when 240,000 people were killed in the city of Tangshan, near Beijing in 1976. Financial analysts said the quake would have only a limited impact on the country’s booming economy.

Myanmar Typhoon

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The tropical cyclone that struck Myanmar at the weekend left thousands of people killed. The latest estimate is 22,500 dead and more than 40,000 still missing, according to some government officials. Rice fields littered with corpses, desperate survivors homeless and with nothing to eat or drink.

According to the United Nations, the disaster ravaged a huge swathe of southwestern Myanmar, affecting 24 million people or nearly half the country’s population.

Foreign Minister Nyan Win said his nation would welcome international aid.

Nyan Win welcomed Thailand’s promise to send emergency food and medicine, saying Myanmar would welcome international aid from other countries.

“We will welcome help like this from other countries, because our people are in difficulty,” he said.

Few outsiders are allowed to work inside the reclusive country, and fewer still have been able to reach the swampy Irrawaddy river delta which was hardest-hit when cyclone Nargis slammed into the coast on Saturday.

Christian relief organisation World Vision, one of the few international agencies allowed to work inside the military-ruled state, said its teams had surveyed the worst-affected regions and witnessed scenes of desperation.

“They saw the dead bodies from the helicopters, so it’s quite overwhelming from that height,” said Kyi Minn, an adviser to World Vision’s office in Myanmar’s main city of Yangon. “Even from that height it’s devastating.”

Kyi Minn likened the impact to the 2004 tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean, killing 220,000 people in a dozen countries but causing little damage in Myanmar.