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Heat Wave Kills More Than 1,100 In India
An anonymous reader sends word that a week-long heat wave in India has resulted in the deaths of more than 1,100 people. Temperatures reached 47C (117F) on Monday and are expected to stay dangerously high throughout the week. The heat and extreme dryness are being accompanied by strong westerly winds. "About one-third of the country's 1.2 billion people have access to electricity, meaning millions are enduring the blistering heat without relief." The local power grid has been struggling under high demand from fans and air conditioning. In some states, citizens are being advised to stay indoors during the middle of the day, when the sun is at its peak. Many hope the upcoming monsoons will return temperatues to less dangerous levels.
You're the moron, monsoons cause several hundred deaths a year there.
i visited bangalore in 2006, to see a friend living there. he explained that when the trees were cut down in the cities (so that more housing could be built), temperatures soared by an additional 10 *centigrade*. so, the ambient temperature surrounding the cities would be 45 degrees, but in bangalore it would reach *fifty five* centigrade. the point of mentioning this is that it's a much more direct version of how man has an effect on his immediate environment. change the landscape, you change the weather, it's as simple as that. we can learn from that... or simply die. it's our choice.
You know you live in the wrong place when you're looking forward to one horrific weather pattern to replace another.
The monsoons are not horrific. They are a normal part of the annual weather cycle. Complaining about monsoons in India is as silly as complaining about snow in Minnesota. Far more horrific, is when the monsoons are weak, which has historically led to famine.
Actually it's not, that's the problem. The humidity is around 30% during the day, which may not sound like a lot, but at 47C that's a heat index of over 55C! That's well into the extreme danger zone, you will get heat stroke extremely easy, even without being in the sun. And then of course the humidity will jump up during the night, so it may only be 30C outside, but the heat index is still in the 40s.
This weather is a very nasty combination of heat and humidity. You're basically looking at a sauna at times. Which is all well and good when you can leave the sauna, but even in the best of health the human body struggles to deal with these kinds of heat indexes over an extended period of time.
Knock it off, Hudson.
Minus: You failed to use an obscure unit of measurement. I propose Congresses. This heat wave has killed 2.056 Congresses of people.
Plus: You used a decimal comma instead of a decimal point, allowing people to respond saying that you're adhering to a regionally specific custom that differs from their own regionally specific custom, and therefore are clearly doing it wrong.
Overall i rate your slashdotness at 77.3%, by means of an obscure personal rating system which i can't describe succinctly but will argue about endlessly if anyone disagrees with my conclusion.
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That's fine for Israel, a modern developed country with good infrastructure, and relatively civilized people who don't try to treat everyone as slaves.
Indie is far less developed, and access to water itself is scarce. Even electricity is scarce - if you have it, you only have it for a few hours a day, especially if you're not in the city. (And during the worst heat, even that's not guaranteed).
Couple that with bosses who don't care and consider breaks to be the sign of a lazy workforce...
'airlift some water'
Well, that's about the dumbest thing I've read today.
Let's assume that 500,000,000 citizens are at risk in India.
Let's further assume that they would benefit from a mere 2 liters of water each, per day.
Water = 1kg per liter
747-400 MTOW - operating empty weight = ~215,000kg. So a 747 can lift 215,000 liters of water (assuming it actually fits inside)
To supply half a million people with 2 liters each, per day = 5,000 747 flights, every day.
airlift some water....right.
India's per capita income is around $2000/yr. If you go to any country with this level of per capita income, you will realize that India beats all of them in terms of quality of life. The 1100 death may be higher, but when adjusted for population it is paltry in terms of death tolls in Russia and France during extreme summers just few years ago. This is despite the fact that they are high latitude and the heat wave was less extreme. In fact, Indians are managing quite well under the circumstances.
True story: When taking a summer class in Alabama, on a particularly hot sticky day, the Indian students were talking nostalgically about how it felt like home.
I was curious, so I looked this up - 2013 birth rate numbers for India are 20.22 per 1,000. This translates to about 47 births per minute, using the old numbers.
Population (est): 1,236,344,631
Birth rate: 20.22 per 1,000 of the population.
So 1,236,344,631 / 1000 * 20.22 [24,998,888 yearly] / 365 [68,490 daily] / 24 [2,853 hourly] / 60 = 47.56 every minute.
If my math is wrong, I'm sure someone will point it out, but 1000 since Monday is rather conservative.
I can't tell how many dickheads there are today. Can you google it for me?
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Um, no.
For the period 1999-2003, the average # of US deaths due to heat was 688 per year, which is not at all similar to 1100 per week.
Once again, posting false information on Slashdot proves to be no impediment to being modded +5 informative.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Yep, exactly. Living in a "tornado-prone" area describes a very large section of the US midwest and south. Hurricane prone region describes the entire south-east US coastline. Tsunamis or monsoons are a danger to anyone living near the coast of the Pacific or Indian Oceans. Flood plains are among the most fertile ground on the planet, so you're at least going to see farming communities living there. Oh, and don't live anywhere near a major fault line!
If you start looking for "completely safe" areas, you're going to exclude an awful lot of real estate on the earth. Mother nature is a bitch. We just have to deal with her as best we can.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.