Discovery
‘4K take part in eruption drill’: Nearly 4,000 people took part Sunday in a mass evacuation drill to test responses to a possible eruption of Japan’s highest peak Mount Fuji, weeks after a nearby volcano blew its top and killed at least 56.
The 3,776-metre (12,389-foot) Fuji last erupted in 1707 but geologists have included it as one of 47 volcanoes in the Pacific Rim country believed to be at risk of eruption in the coming century.
Some 3,900 residents in 26 cities, towns and villages in three prefectures around the volcano were taking part in the drill, said a disaster management official for the Shizuoka prefectural government.
Fuji is just 100 kilometres (63 miles) west of Tokyo.
In the city of Gotemba, about 800 people used their own cars to evacuate along designated routes because public transportation is scarce there, the official, Hayato Mochizuki, told AFP.
Elderly people in need of care were moved by bus. Firefighters, police and troops searched for people who could not evacuate in time, he said.
Eriko Yamatani, the state minister in charge of disaster management, and the governors of the three prefectures took part in a video conference to oversee the operation.
On September 27 Mount Ontake, some 120 kilometres from Fuji, erupted without warning — killing 56 people and leaving at least seven others missing in Japan’s dead-
South Africa’s largest bird conservation lobby on Sunday lashed out at the $900 “light sentence” imposed on a farmer who poisoned 46 threatened Cape vultures.
Armand Aucamp, 34, was on Thursday fined 10,000 rand ($902, 707 euros) after pleading guilty to lacing a sheep’s carcass with carbofuran, a powerful insecticide.
Forty-six Cape vultures ate the sheep and died in December last year. Less than 4,000 Cape vultures remain in wild worldwide.
Aucamp, who lives in the Eastern Cape province, also got a suspended one-year jail term. Kerri Wolter, the founder of vulture conservation group Vulpro slammed the “very poor (sentence), given the numbers of the vultures killed.”
“If one poaches a rhino, the impact is huge and the sentence is either a massive fine or jail term. We also want this to be applied to those who poison vultures,” Wolter told AFP.
She said there were around 3,700 Cape A rare northern white rhino has died in Kenya, a wildlife conservancy said on Saturday, leaving just six of the animals left alive and bringing the famed African species one step closer to extinction.
While there are thousands of southern white rhinos still roaming the plains of sub-Saharan Africa, decades of rampant poaching have drastically cut northern white rhino numbers.
Suni, a 34-year-old who was the first northern white rhino to be born in captivity, was found dead on Friday by rangers at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, about 250 km (155 miles) north of Nairobi.
The conservancy said Suni was not poached, but the cause of his death was unclear. It added that he was one of the last two breeding males in the world as no northern white rhinos are believed to have survived in the wild.
“Consequently the species now stands at the brink of complete extinction, a sorry testament to the greed of the human race,” the conservancy said in a statement.
The Kenya Wildlife Service vets will conduct a post mortem in the coming days, the conservancy added. Suni’s father, Suit, died in 2006 of natural causes, also aged 34. Born in the Dvur Kralove Zoo in Czech Republic, Suni was in 2009 one of the four northern white rhinos brought from that zoo to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy to take part in a breeding programme to try to prevent the extinction of the species.
Wildlife experts had hoped the 90,000acre private wildlife conservancy, framed on the equator and nestled between the snow capped Mount Kenya and the Aberdare mountain range, would offer a more favourable climate for breeding.
“We will continue to do what we can to work with the remaining three animals on Ol Pejeta in the hope that our efforts will one day result in the successful birth of a northern white rhino calf,” the conservancy added. (RTRS)