World
Nikki Haley’s South Carolina declared disaster hit
Washington: As South Carolina Tuesday began a slow recovery from what its Indian-American governor Nikki Haley called a “1,000-year level of rain” President Barack Obama signed a disaster declaration ordering federal aid to help recovery efforts.
Haley said authorities were expecting to evacuate more people as the floodwaters flowed from the state’s midlands to the coast.
“This is not over – just because the rain stops doesn’t mean we are out of the woods,” she told reporters, according to NBC.
“Even though you’re not seeing rain, there is still water out there.”
“We are at a 1,000-year level of rain,” Haley said earlier. “That’s how big this is.”
Experts said this means that the amount of rainfall in South Carolina has a 1-in-1,000 chance of happening in any given year.
South Carolina officials also warned Monday that the dangers from the state’s unprecedented floods that began Oct 1 weren’t over and that clearing skies didn’t erase the threat of shifting water and unstable roads.
At least 12 weather-related deaths in the Carolinas were blamed on the vast rainstorm – 10 in South Carolina and two in North Carolina.
The state Office of Emergency Management said at least eight dams across the state had been breached by flood waters.
Obama’s declaration makes federal funding available to people in Charleston, Dorchester, Georgetown, Horry, Lexington, Orangeburg, Richland and Williamsburg counties.
Haley also said she had talked to Obama, who offered his condolences and prayers as the state begins what the governor said would be a long assessment and recovery.
By Monday evening, 365 state-maintained roads and 166 bridges were closed, the state Transportation Department said.
Forty thousand people across the state remained without fresh running water, and 26,000 were without electricity.
Haley said 1,300 National Guard members were on duty and had performed 25 aerial rescues so far. Rescue teams were walking door to door to check on people stranded by the flooding.
Haley said that although the emergency services were shifting from a response to assessment mode, the state remains in a “vulnerable” situation after going through a storm it “has never seen before.”
While Hurricane Joaquin missed the East Coast, it fuelled a “fire hose” of tropical moisture aimed directly at the state, the weather service said.
The record for the most rain in 24 hours had been 14.80 inches, set during Hurricane Floyd in 1999.
That was smashed in several places, with some areas of the coast getting as much rain as they normally would in eight months, the National Weather Service said.
It reported almost 25 inches in Kingstree, 24 inches in the town of Longs in Horry County and 21 inches in Georgetown.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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