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Group accused city of racial discrimination

The Boston Globe

By Joseph Williams
Globe Staff / June 30, 2009

WASHINGTON - A sharply divided US Supreme Court ruled yesterday in favor of a group of white firefighters who accused the city of New Haven of racial discrimination, potentially making it much harder for employers to bring racial balance to the workplace, while handing ammunition to critics of high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor on the eve of her confirmation hearings.

The 5-to-4 ruling struck down the decision of a three-judge federal appeals court panel that included Sotomayor, President Obama’s first Supreme Court pick and the first Latino chosen to serve on the nation’s highest court. Since her nomination, conservative Republicans have attacked Sotomayor’s views on racial preferences and stirring up hot-button questions about whether diversity and background should be considered for a lifetime judicial appointment. If confirmed, Sotomayor would replace retiring Justice David Souter, who agreed with her and sided with New Haven in the case.

Conservative legal analysts were quick to link the ruling, issued on the last day of the court’s session, to Sotomayor.

“It suggests that we have somebody who’s quite out of sync with the right approach to the law in this area,’’ said Roger Clegg, who heads the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank.

At the same time, legal analysts said the court’s decision dramatically shifts the affirmative action landscape. Opponents of race-based preferences cheered the ruling as a major step toward a society that doesn’t place significance on color, while supporters said the majority ignored the ongoing need for remedies to past discrimination, virtually wiping out advances made over the last quarter century.

Marge Baker, executive vice president for policy and program planning at People For the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, said the ruling is more evidence that Chief Justice John Roberts is presiding over “a piecemeal dismantling of really, really important civil rights protections.’’

“It’s going to make it harder for the typical employer to make choices in their employment decisions with an eye toward achieving some kind of racial diversity,’’ said Stephen Vladeck, an American University constitutional law professor. “These choices will invariably be seen as discriminatory against whites. The court has been moving this way for some time.’’

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Building containing about 142 infants and toddlers had only one exit.

Associated Press
updated 14 minutes ago

HERMOSILLO, Mexico - As the day care swiftly filled with smoke, caretakers, neighbors and parents fought to evacuate 142 children — many of them babies and toddlers — through a single working exit until rescue crews arrived.

No fire alarm or sprinkler system had gone off, and one mother said a second door to the day care was bolted shut and nobody could find the key.

Forty children were killed in the devastating fire, which raised doubts about safety standards at more than 1,500 centers where Mexico’s government provides low-cost care for at least 200,000 children.

President Felipe Calderon, who visited some of the 33 children hospitalized on Saturday night, pledged to launch a thorough investigation into the cause of a tragedy that has stunned Mexico.

Firefighters, parents and neighbors who rushed to help rescue the children said there was only one working exit — the front door — and that no fire alarm or sprinkler system went off. Several desperate civilians broke huge holes into the outer walls, including one man who rammed his pickup truck against the day care three times.

Passed safety inspection
Yet the ABC day care — a converted warehouse in Hermosillo, capital of the northwestern state of Sonora — passed a safety inspection less than two weeks before the fire Friday, according to Daniel Karam, the director of Mexico’s Social Security Institute, which outsourced services to the privately run center.

“How it is possible that they found no problems? Here we have the results,” said Karla Gastelum, whose 3-year-old daughter and 2-year-old niece were at the day care but escaped unharmed. Four children in her daughter’s class died.

The fire initially spread from an adjoining tire and car warehouse to the roof of the day care and sent flames raining down. Fire officials still don’t know how it started.

Gastelum, 25, said she was having lunch at her mother-in-law’s house about a block from the day care when she saw the fire and raced over. She found her daughter hovering near the door, swept her out of the smoky building and ran back inside to search for her niece. She did not find the younger child but later found out she had also escaped unharmed.

Gastelum said a larger door to the day care was bolted shut, and teachers later told her nobody could find the key. She said she heard no fire alarm and saw no sprinklers go off.

Hermosillo Fire Department Chief Martin Lugo said the building had fire alarms but they did not go off because they were not installed properly, the daily Reforma newspaper reported.

Holes punched through the walls
Another fire department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the fire, said firefighters fought to evacuate children through the only working exit and the huge holes that civilians had punched through the walls.

Similar problems have been blamed for previous disaster in Mexico: In 2000, a fire killed 21 people at a glitzy Mexico City disco that only had one available exit, lacked smoke detectors and did not have enough fire extinguishers. Last year, 12 people died when police raiding a Mexico city nightclub blocked the overcrowded club’s lone working exit, creating a deadly stampede. The emergency exits had been blocked.

Only six caretakers were on duty
Although government officials initially indicated only six caretakers were on duty at the day care Friday, Gastelum and other relatives said the day care had about 20 staffers.

Gastelum said the day care practices fire drills, but on the day of the fire, some of the teachers seemed too injured or in shock to go back inside the building after initially rushing out with as many children as they could.

“I’m never sending my daughter to a day care again,” she said, adding that she thought the day care should not have been allowed to operate next to a tire and car warehouse.

Karam said documents from the May 26 safety inspection indicated that the day care had fire extinguishers and an emergency exit with signs leading the way to it. He said federal authorities would investigate why the day care had passed the test.

Witnesses being questioned
Sonora state Attorney General Abel Murrieta said he could not comment on whether the fire alarms malfunctioned or why nobody could get through the emergency exit until investigators finish questioning witnesses and rescue officials.

“There were marked emergency exits, but we must now determine whether these emergency exits were adequate,” Murrieta said.

Mexico’s government provides low-cost day care for almost 230,000 children of working parents at 1,562 centers across the country. Like the ABC day care, many of them are leased to private owners, a system Karam said has proved efficient for decades. After the fire, he said the government’s safety standards would be re-evaluated.

Antonio Castro, 22, an employee at a gas station, said he and several colleagues grabbed fire extinguishers and rushed to the day care when they saw the fire from across the street.

He said teachers were rushing from the building, many trying to hold several babies at once while herding older children in front of them. Castro said he brought out four limp toddlers and a baby in a carrier. He, too, said he heard no alarm and saw no sprinklers.

“We fought to save them but there were many we could not help,” he said.

Ofelia Quintero, who lives a half-block from the day care and whose grandson was picked up from the center just before the fire erupted, said panicked teachers rushed to her house carrying two or three infants at a time and begging her to look after them.

“Everything seemed very safe. We never imagined this would happen,” she said. “I just want to erase everything we lived through.”

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: MSNBC

Just in time for wildfire season, Space-Time Insight has the right solution to enable preventive action and rapid response.

FREMONT, Calif., April 23 /PRNewswire/ — Space-Time Insight customers use Space-Time Insight software to enable rapid, effective response to wildfires. The company’s customers estimate that using Space-Time Insight software during last year’s fire season, when 1500 fires raged across California, saved the state of California billions of dollars in avoided economic disruption.

Space-Time Insight is the only available software that both delivers powerful, real-time situation visualization to operations personnel and also connects directly to employee workflow systems to enable immediate step-by-step response, alerting and tasking to the right key response personnel to address the emergency rapidly and effectively.

Specific to wildfires, Space-Time Insight automatically monitors and alerts personnel about fire locations, their relative priority status, last observed time, wind gusts and direction, relative humidity, fuel moisture levels, temperature, and proximity to critical assets and enables managers to locate and provide step-by-step best practice-based tasking through remediation scripts sent automatically to the appropriate response personnel and through the Space-Time Insight interface.

With a project developed using Space-Time Insight software, one of Space-Time Insight’s utility customers won Utility/T&D Automation and Engineering magazine’s 2009 GIS Project of the Year Award and is featured in the March 2009 issue of that magazine. The utility used the application to view and track active fires, wind direction, and associated data, receive alerts when wind speed thresholds were exceeded, and have this information easily compiled on the dashboard. Having access to this information in real time relative to specific utility assets improved the utility’s response time, operational efficiency and effectiveness. The project showed its value during the 2008 fire season when the utility launched proactive fire-preparedness efforts.

Space-Time Insight’s CEO, Mark Feldman, PhD, says, “Space-Time Insight is the only software that provides operators both real-time visualization of a crisis as it’s unfolding and also enables customers to assign best-practice action scripts to the right response personnel to address that crisis immediately and directly from the same screen.”

Space-Time Insight delivers real-time crisis visualization, analytics, and management. Additionally, for advance planning, Space-Time Insight allows operators to run simulations to plan for better future response. Space-Time Insight further enables planners to roll-back time and re-play on screen actual historical events exactly as they unfolded for training purposes.

Space-Time Insight software is available now. To find out more about Space-Time Insight, visit http://www.spacetimeinsight.com/

Space-Time Insight is headquartered in Fremont, CA. Space-Time Insight solutions include Space-Time Energy Management, Space-Time Crisis Management, Space-Time Service Management, Space-Time Asset Management, Space-Time Renewables Management as for wind farms, and Space-Time Energy Market Management. Most Space-Time Insight commercial customers are in the utilities (power, water, gas), chemicals processing, oil & gas, telecommunication, and transportation industries.

SOURCE Space-Time Insight

Rookie, veteran killed fighting house fire in southeast Houston

By JENNIFER LATSON and DANE SCHILLER Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
April 12, 2009, 2:00PM

Two Houston firefighters - one just out of the academy and an experienced veteran - were killed fighting a house fire in southeast Houston early this morning.

HFD was called to fight a one-alarm house fire on Oak Vista just after midnight, and initially fought the fire from inside the house, said District Chief Tommy Dowdy. The homeowners, an elderly couple, had made it out of their sprawling 4,000-square-foot house safety.

Neighbors said that it looked like the fire was dying down when flames suddenly burst through the roof, and the fire erupted sideways, stretching the length of the house.

As the fire intensified, firefighters were called outside, but two people did not answer for roll call.

As many as 100 firefighters arrived to help, working more than an hour before cooling the structure enough to go inside. The two bodies were found in the house between 1 a.m. and 1:30 a.m., witnesses said.

Rescue workers attempted CPR, but it was too late, neighbors said. Fire department officials have not released the names of the firefighters who were killed.

Mayor Bill White, who was at the scene of the fire shortly after 2 a.m., said there would be thorough investigations about what caused the fire, as well as what led to the two firefighters’ deaths.

“What happened in this case will be determined by an investigation, but people should remember that interior fire fighting is inherently risky, and there is no such thing as a routine fire,” he said shortly after attending Easter church services this morning.

He declined to speculate on what might have started the blaze or what happened in the inferno.

“It is tough,” he continued. “I have learned from our unfortunate experience that even in something called routine there is significant danger.”

White called on the Houston community to keep firefighters in their prayers not just in the wake of this latest tragedy, but regularly.

He described as “remarkable” how current and retired firefighters - and their families - rally for years around those who have lost family members in the line of duty.

“I wish Americans could see that so that we could treat all the families of our (military) veterans who have lost their lives in the same manner,” he said of facing danger for others. “They never forget and have ongoing, continual support,” he said. “Family after family has told me that it is like have a huge, extended family they never knew about.”

Australia’s worst ever bushfires have left nearly 100 people dead and hundreds homeless as blazes continue to rage amid fears the death-toll could rise even further.

By Bonnie Malkin in Sydney
Last Updated: 2:49PM GMT 08 Feb 2009
Telegraph.co.uk

As authorities warned the number of dead, including one of Australia’s most loved newsreaders, could climb higher, Gordon Brown pledged British assistance to the devastated country.

More than 750 homes have been lost and several townships razed as nine fires devastated towns and farmland in the state of Victoria.

Officials are continuing the grim search for bodies in blackened and collapsed houses and charred cars as extreme temperatures and strong winds fan the flames.

The weekend of terror, already been dubbed “Black Saturday”, has left the country in a numb state of shock.

A Number 10 spokesman said the Prime Minister had offered his sympathies.

“The Prime Minister spoke to Kevin Rudd this morning to extend our sympathies to the Australian people, especially those families who have been affected by this tragedy,” he said.

“He praised Kevin Rudd’s leadership at this very difficult time, and said that the UK stood ready to provide any assistance that the Australian Government wanted.”

Police have confirmed the number of dead had far eclipsed the toll from Ash Wednesday in 1983 when 75 people died in two states.

The tragedy, in February 1983 was previously Australia’s worst bushfire tragedy, as it swept across Victoria and South Australia.

Authorities suspect arsonists are responsible for lighting or relighting some of the fires.

There is little information about the locations of the victims, but 29 are known to have died at Kinglake and four each at St Andrews and Wandong, in the country’s south-east

Among the dead were Brian Naylor, a veteran television newsreader, who lived in the fire-ravaged Kinglake West area, and his wife.

Several people were killed as they tried to escape the flames in their cars.

At least six bodies were found in one car at Kinglake and one woman’s body was found in another vehicle, with crockery on the seat beside her.

Police have not yet given the gender or ages of the victims, but one Kinglake resident said three members of the same family, believed to include a 14-year-old girl, a nine-year-old boy and an uncle, had died in the same house.

Keiran Walshe, Victoria’s deputy fire commissioner, warned that more children were likely to be among the casualties.

The extent of the damage has left the state, and the country, in deep shock.

John Brumby, the premier of Victoria, broke down while talking to the media about the number of people who had suffered severe burns.

He described the bushfires as “a monster that couldn’t be controlled” and said the state had experienced “hell on earth”.

Kevin Rudd, the prime minister, announced emergency funding for the state and has offered to send in the army to help firefighters.

“Hell in all its fury had visited … many good people lie dead,” he said.

News of the escalating death toll came as horrifying eyewitness accounts of the fires started to emerge.

Residents of the worst-hit regions told of how a thick blanket of black ash blotted out the sun, leaving a ‘horrible orange glow’.

Others described trees “exploding” and roads “peppered with burnt out cars”.

Many people abandoned their homes to shelter in their swimming pools and dams as the flames closed in around them.

One Kinglake resident said “it rained fire”.

Another witness, in Marysville, described the town as “a warzone, like a bomb had been dropped”.

Strathewen resident Mary Avola said her husband of 43 years, Peter Avola, was among those killed.

“He was behind me for a while and we tried to reach the oval but the gates were locked,” she told Melbourne’s Herald Sun.

“He just told me to go and that’s the last time I saw him.”

Firefighter Richard Hoyle described the scene as “a holocaust”.

“The road is riddled with burnt-out cars involved in multiple collisions and debris,” he said.

A cool change is now helping firefighters tackle the flames, but Mr Brumby warned the only thing that could put the fires out was rain.

Bruce Esplin, emergency services commissioner, said nature had given Victoria “a beating of unimaginable proportions” and warned worse could be to come as the baking summer continues.

Wildfires are a natural annual event in Australia, but the ongoing drought, warm winds and recent spate of extremely hot weather have combined to create the deadly conditions.

Bushfires have killed more than 250 people in Australia in the last 40 years.

<---End of Quote--->

Related Article:
Two arsonists charged as deadly blazes rage on

One 31-year old man and on 15-year old boy have been charged with starting the fires that may be linked to those that killed at least 108 people and are spreading rapidly across southeastern Australia as the result of high winds.

Sunday 08 February 2009
By Florence VILLEMINOT
France 24

AFP - Two people have been charged with arson after wildfires raged through southeastern Australia at the weekend, killing at least 108 and destroying more than 700 homes, police said Monday.

A 31-year-old man accused of lighting a major blaze that burnt through about 200 hectares (495 acres) of bushland in Peats Ridge on the New South Wales central coast was due in court Monday after spending the night in a jail cell.

A 15-year-old boy who allegedly set off an explosive that started a small scrub fire in the Blue Mountains near Sydney on Sunday was released on bail after being charged and will appear in court next month.

Neither of those fires killed anybody, but police suspect that arsonists were also behind some of the major fires in neighbouring Victoria state, where all of the fatalities occurred.

Victoria state police commissioner Christine Nixon said all bushfire areas will be treated as crime scenes to determine if arson was involved.

“At this stage we have a team at the fire at Churchill, in the Gippsland Valley, which is certainly one that we believe was deliberately lit,” Nixon said.

“Our fire experts and our own investigators have suggested that the way that it happened, how fast that it happened, that there is good evidence to believe that it was lit.”

Forensic investigators have also begun work in the Kinglake area where hundreds of homes were destroyed.

“Wherever a death has occurred, we investigate that as a crime,” Nixon told ABC radio.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Monday arsonists were guilty of mass murder.

“What do you say about anyone like that — there are no words to describe it other than mass murder,” Rudd said.

Arsonists, who are believed to have taken advantage of tinder-box conditions after a heatwave and high winds, could face life in jail if they are convicted on murder charges, police say.

The government’s Australian Institute of Criminology released a report last week which said half of the nation’s 20,000 to 30,000 bushfires each year are deliberate.

30,000 firefighters battle blazes raging across three states

Associated Press
updated 7:37 a.m. PT, Sat., Feb. 7, 2009
MSNBC

SYDNEY - Walls of flame roared across southeastern Australia on Saturday, razing scores of homes along with forests and farmland in the sunburned country’s worst wildfire disaster in a quarter century. At least 14 people died and the toll could rise to more than 40, police said

Victoria state police said the death toll might exceed 40 as dozens of fires burned unchecked across at least 115 square miles of forests, farmland and towns.

Some officials described the day as the worst in the country’s history of wildfires.

More than 30,000 volunteer firefighters were battling fires after dark, when helicopters and planes that hand-dumped millions of tons of water on the flames returned to base for safety reasons.

Residents in the paths of the fires reported seeing their towns ablaze, and television footage showed flames leaping at least 25 feet in the air.

Victoria Premier John Brumby, whose parents’ house was among those saved by firefighters Saturday, said the death toll was expected to rise “considerably.”

“It’s been, I think, the worst day in our history,” he said.

‘It came through in minutes’
“The whole township is pretty much on fire,” Peter Mitchell, a resident of Kinglake town, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. “There was no time to do anything … it came through in minutes.”

Officials said chaotic scenes on the ground and ongoing firefighting efforts had hampered the collection of information, including the number of deaths and properties burned.

Television pictures showed skies clogged with steel-gray smoke, flames roaring to two-story heights, homes and businesses afire. At least one fire truck was roasted, though the crew escaped injury and went on to rejoin the fight, officials said.

Victoria deputy police commissioner Kieran Walshe said 14 people were confirmed dead at four different sites, all connected to the same fire in Gippsland, a large farming region dotted by small towns and national parks of old-growth eucalyptus trees.

The deadly fire burned on a front of up to 12 miles and was moving at around 40 mph, officials said. At least 115 square miles was burned out by that one fire.

Of those killed, six died in the same vehicle at Kinglake town, Walshe said.

“This has been an absolute tragedy for this state,” he told a news conference. “We believe this figure may only get worse, we are concerned that this figure could even reach up into the 40s.”

Victoria’s fires were by far the worst of blazes in three states Saturday as temperatures soared to 117 degrees Fahrenheit.

Same danger Sunday
Victoria’s Country Fire Authority deputy chief Greg Esnouf said the conditions on Saturday were “off the scale” in terms of danger, and warned that the forecast for Sunday was the same.

Police said they believed some of the fires were deliberately lit and were questioning one man in relation to a fire near the Victoria state capital of Melbourne.

Wildfires are common during the Australian summer, as rising temperatures bake forest land tinder dry and blustering winds fan embers. Some 60,000 fires occur each year, and about half are deliberately lit or suspicious, government research says. Lightning strikes and human activity such as use of machinery near dry brush cause the others.

Australia’s deadliest fires were in 1983, when blazes killed 75 people and razed more than 3,000 homes in Victoria and South Australia. In 2003, hundreds of houses were destroyed and four people died when a huge blaze tore into the national capital, Canberra. In 2006, nine people died in fires on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

By Gavin Evans

Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — Firefighters across Australia’s southeast are on alert as near-record temperatures and forecast strong winds threaten to fan bushfires in three states.

More than 70,000 firefighters are on standby in New South Wales state, where the Rural Fire Service is dealing with 51 incidents, assistant commissioner Rob Rogers said. A large fire in Victoria’s Bunyip State Park has broken containment lines and threatens communities, said the state’s Country Fire Authority.

“It is quite concerning for us and we don’t yet have the impact of the winds,” Rogers said on Sky News today. “The conditions are such that if any fires start, they will escalate very rapidly.”

The fire risk today follows record temperatures the past two weeks that caused power blackouts in Victoria and killed as many as 22 people in neighboring South Australia, according to the state government. Total fire bans have been imposed in Victoria and South Australia, with most of New South Wales also under the same restriction, because of the extreme risk.

Temperatures in Melbourne, Victoria’s state capital, are forecast to reach 44 degrees Celsius (111 Fahrenheit) today. In Adelaide they will reach 41 degrees, while Penrith in western Sydney will get to 42 degrees, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s Web site.

Compounding Risk

High northerly winds will start swinging southwesterly in Melbourne late today and in New South Wales tomorrow, compounding the risk to firefighters, said government meteorologist Sarwan Dey.

“When you have a fire front, and then all of a sudden there is a change in the direction of the wind, that can cause all sorts of problems,” Dey said in an interview from Melbourne.

The combination of drought, high temperatures and changing winds makes the risks today comparable with the Ash Wednesday fires 26 years ago, Dey said. “Pray for rain.”

More than 100 fires started on Feb. 16, 1983, sweeping across Victoria and South Australia and killing 75 people, according to state government data.

While the southerly change will lower temperatures late today in Melbourne and tomorrow evening in Sydney, it is likely to bring very little rain, Dey said.

“The majority of New South Wales’ concerns will be tomorrow,” Rural Fire’s Rogers said. “Tomorrow will be a really testing day for us. If we still have active fires, then they are going to be extremely difficult for us to contain” because of higher temperatures and a change in the direction of wind, he said.

Temperatures in central Sydney will peak at 34 degrees tomorrow, from 31 degrees today, according to the bureau.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gavin Evans in Wellington at gavinevans@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: February 6, 2009 21:52 EST

14/10/2008 20h16

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Firefighters were bracing for more heavy winds on Tuesday as they battled to contain two wildfires blazing north of Los Angeles that have left one person dead and forced thousands to flee.

Continue reading ‘Firefighters battle deadly blazes in California’ »