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Rescuers lift hundreds of motorists trapped on B.C. highway to safety – CBC.ca

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Rescuers, using helicopters, are lifting hundreds of people to safety after they were trapped along a southern B.C. highway amid landslides caused by extreme weather.

The landslides, which occurred on Sunday on Highway 7 near Agassiz, B.C., about 125 kilometres east of Vancouver, came as communities in southern parts of the province dealt with heavy rainfall.

As many as 275 people, among them 50 children, have been trapped on the stretch of highway since Sunday evening, according to a joint news release from the City of Vancouver and Canada Task Force 1, the locally based urban search and rescue team.

The rescuers were joined by Chilliwack Search and Rescue and a geotechnical engineer to survey the area for anyone who may be trapped in the debris, the statement said.

Canadian Forces Cormorant helicopters started the first of multiple rescue flights on Monday, transporting evacuees between the slide area and a reception centre in nearby Agassiz.

WATCH | Rescuers face ‘very dangerous situation’: 

Rescue team near Agassiz, B.C., prepares to free travellers trapped by mudslides

14 hours ago

The CBC’s Heather Hiscox talks to David Boone, the director of the Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Task Force, about the hazards they face to free dozens of people trapped between two mudslides near Agassiz, B.C. ‘It is a very dangerous situation,’ said Boone. (Shane Mackichan) 17:09

David Boone, the team director of the Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Task Force team in B.C. and an assistant chief at the Vancouver Fire Department, said his team arrived to support members of the fire department in Agassiz, who had already rescued at least 12 people trapped in vehicles from the debris flow.

Two others were rescued on the east side, by either a search and rescue team or workers from the fire department in Hope, he told CBC News Network.

A vehicle is caught in a landslide near Agassiz, B.C., on Monday. (Susana da Silva/CBC News)

“What complicates this situation is we have two slides on Highway 7 and we have people that were trapped in the debris … and some have been rescued,” Boone told CBC’s Heather Hiscox, noting that officials are not yet sure if there are other vehicles missing and other people who are not accounted for.

He said officials believe there are approximately 50 vehicles trapped on Highway 7 in between the two debris fields, with approximately two to three people in each vehicle.

B.C. Minister of Public Safety Mike Farnworth said search-and-rescue crews were mobilized early in the morning, but the conditions have been difficult.

Officials believe about 50 vehicles are trapped on Highway 7 between the two debris fields, with approximately two to three people in each vehicle. (Julia Murray)

“This is a very harrowing time,” he said at a news conference late Monday afternoon. “People are working as hard and fast and safe as they can.”

Farnworth said that there are no known fatalities connected to the ongoing storms and mudslides across the province.

WATCH | B.C. minister defends response: 

B.C. minister defends response to travellers stuck in mudslides

10 hours ago

British Columbia’s Minister of Public Safety Mike Farnworth was pressed by reporters to explain the provincial response to residents currently stranded by mudslides near the small community of Agassiz, B.C., in the southern part of the province. 1:47

Boone said he spoke to a nurse who was travelling in one of the vehicles who was doing assessments. The nurse found those they had seen were “safe and secure at this time.” People trapped between the slides have been urged to stay in their vehicles for now, he said.

‘It’s very scary’

Martina Martinkova, who was trapped in her vehicle with her daughter on Highway 7, said she was “very stressed.”

“We don’t have any information,” she said in an interview with Heather Hiscox Monday morning. She said she’s been trying for hours to find out what will happen with rescue efforts.

People were starting to share their food and water, she said, noting that she saw at least one family on the highway with a baby.

She said she’s been in touch with her loved ones, who know she and her daughter are safe.

“You see this in the movies, honestly, and you thought it will never touch you,” she said. “It’s very scary.”

Adam Wuisman and his fiancé were travelling back to their home in Richmond, B.C., on Highway 7, following a weekend trip in Nelson, when he said a landslide came down behind them. 

“We were going westbound and there were huge lines of traffic … and all of a sudden, I noticed there’s no vehicles behind us, which was odd,” he told CBC’s The Early Edition on Monday morning. 

“We must have just missed the first [landslide] and now somehow we’re between both of them.” 

WATCH | ‘I’m so scared,’ says mother trapped in car with daughter:

Trapped traveller near Agassiz, B.C., describes close brush with mudslide

11 hours ago

Martina Martinkova tells CBC’s Heather Hiscox that she and her daughter were about two minutes away from being pounded by one of the mudslides near Agassiz, B.C. ‘We were lucky it didn’t hit us.’ 8:02

The pair have been stuck on that stretch of Highway 7 since 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Wuisman said. 

“It’s a very eerie feeling here,” he described. 

“When we got here, everybody had their headlights on and then slowly, as the hours passed, headlights went off and everything became pitch-black.”

Emergency officials said they don’t yet have a complete picture of how many people are trapped. Wuisman, however, said he thinks there are far more than 50 vehicles stuck — estimating around 200 to 300 vehicles stranded on that patch of highway. 

“I definitely heard people screaming for help,” he said. 

“It’s kind of helpless to feel like you’re between a very vulnerable mountainside side and the Fraser River on the other side. And there’s really nothing you can do about it, but hope nothing comes down on top of you.”

Fire crews responding to a mudslide on Highway 7 near Agassiz, B.C., gather at a command post set up at a nearby gas station on Sunday. (Shane Mackichan)

Officials hope to survey from air

Boone, who noted that officials are “still a bit blind” on the full scope of the issue, said the stability of the ground and issues around hydro wires are complicating the rescue efforts.

He said it’s too dangerous to get close right now, noting that further assessments will come at daybreak.

“We’re assessing as to the best access points for us to make entry into the area,” he said, noting that rescue workers will co-ordinate with CP Rail as the best way in may be along a rail line.

“We won’t put our rescuers into the area until we determine it’s safe to do so,” he said, noting that they hope to be able to survey from the air later in the day.

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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