It wasn't exactly an act of God — the blame should go to a poorly run natural gas drilling project — but the out-of-control mud flows near the Indonesian city of Surabaya certainly resembled something out of a disaster movie. The problem started in late May, when hot mud broke into a well that had been drilled without proper protective casing. When the company tried to stop up the mud with cement plugs, it eventually flowed to the surface and burst through the ground in a series of foul geysers. By October the mud was flowing at rate of about 170,000 cubic feet a day, utterly submerging neighboring villages and factories, and leaving over 10,000 people homeless.
South Asia Floods
Subject to the monsoon rains, home to billions, South Asia is forever teetering between too little water and too much of it. This summer it was the latter. A series of abnormal monsoon rains in northern India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh in July and August eventually led to what UNICEF called "the worst flood in living memory." By mid-August some 30 million people across the region had been displaced, and more than 2,000 would die in the floods. Damages were estimated to be at least $120 million, which was less a measure of the severity of the floods than the utter poverty of affected areas.
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