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Vancouver residents displaced after major fire burns homes as crane collapses

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VANCOUVER – Leslie Guerin watched ashes and burning embers the size of bowling balls falling from the sky in Vancouver on Tuesday night.

Guerin said he was 14 blocks away from a fire in the city when he heard four large explosions.

A fire was consuming a multi-storey apartment building under construction, while the flaming embers started nine other nearby homes on fire, and the crane being used to construct the apartment building collapsed onto a home across the street, the city’s fire department said.

Guerin said he was fixing his bicycle when he heard the blasts.

“My decision was, it’s an emergency, so I loaded my tools away and raced uphill with my bicycle,” said Guerin, who has been volunteering as part of a block watch program for the police department since 2008.

He said he arrived to witness the construction crane falling across the street. The heat from the fire was so hot, it felt like his jacket was melting, Guerin said in an interview on Wednesday.

“There were ashes falling down for about an eight-block radius in every direction and they were about the size of bowling balls, some of them were a foot by a foot in regards to insulation,” he said.

“There was a lot of material falling from the sky, from the winds, blowing the fire and smoke in one direction northwest where a lot of it went in that direction and a lot of homes where roofs did catch fire.”

More than 40 fire trucks flooded the area and police officers were in every direction he looked, he said.

The Dunbar neighbourhood was dark after power was cut off because of the fire, he said.

The fire broke out at about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday and Vancouver Fire Rescue Service said burning embers set off the additional fires, forcing people out of their homes and creating “excessive smoke” in the area of southwest Vancouver.

Keith Stewart, the department’s assistant chief, said in an interview that two of the nine homes were heavily damaged, while the rest suffered minor damage.

A statement from the department said roads in the area remain closed to traffic on Wednesday, as the crane will take time to clear.

Video posted on social media while the fire was raging shows the crane toppling as a column of thick, black smoke billowed into the sky.

Vancouver fire Chief Karen Fry said during a media availability that the crane landed in the middle of a home across the street from the burning building.

“An individual was trapped inside that house. Between our firefighters and (Vancouver police), we extricated that patient from a window in order to evacuate them from the house when it was safe to do so.”

It was the second major fire in Vancouver on Tuesday after flames broke out at a vacant apartment building that was slated for demolition. The fire service said the blaze along East 10th Avenue began at about 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and the city’s chief building official has ordered the building to be torn down with work starting in the coming days.

Mayor Ken Sim said during an unrelated news conference that the two fires around the same time stretched the department’s resources “incredibly thin.”

He said his heart goes out to all those who are affected by the fire.

Stewart said the cause of the fire at the Dunbar site and the circumstances that led to the crane collapsing are under investigation.

A couple of firefighters suffered minor injuries battling the blazes, he said.

A statement from the fire service said residents around the fire aren’t yet allowed to return to their homes.

Damini Singh, a first-year student at Langara College, said she was in bed Tuesday evening after writing an early-morning exam when explosions woke her.

“I thought, ‘what was happening,’ I could feel my whole bed was shaking because of the explosions,” said Singh.

“I heard that people were just screaming outside my house: get out of the house, get out of the house,” she said.

She stepped out of her home to see a mass of flames, then rushed back to grab some of her belongings.

After wandering around with her suitcase for a few hours, friends in neighbouring Burnaby gave her a place to stay for the night.

“I was hoping that once I came back in the morning, I could either go inside or just stay there. But now that I’m here, they just told us that the whole block is closed for safety reasons and I still don’t know when I will get an update and when will I come back here,” said Singh.

Tanya Faire said she was walking from her house to her car when she heard a big explosion, which “sounded like bombs dropping.”

Faire said the explosion was followed by another blast, and then she saw a plume of smoke and flames erupt from the fire.

“I think I felt startled. I was in Fort McMurray when the wildfires happened and had to get evacuated,” she said.

“My first thought was that looks like it could jump from house to house, and are we going to have to get evacuated?”

The City of Vancouver has directed displaced residents to Crofton House School at 3200 West 41st Ave., saying city staff were on site to provide assistance.

People outside that block of houses have been allowed to return home, though the fire service said BC Hydro was still working to restore power to some customers.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 7, 2024.

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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.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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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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