Extra money is to be invested in making mainstream education more accessible for disabled students. £30million of public finances is to be set aside to fund the new Government initiative which will see things such as wheelchair ramps introduced to schools to make tackling the school terrain easier for those with physical handicaps.   An estimated 1900 schools will be able to benefit from the initiative which is being funded by a slice of a much larger funding pie- around £100million to make schools more accessible in a number of different ways.

It is hoped that the money will help people with a range if disabilities feel more at home within the school environment; money has been set aside for such essentials as stair lifts and those students who are visually impaired will have easier access to Braille books and customised computers.  The initiative is part of the Government’s aim of “social inclusion”, with the ultimate goal being that more students with physical or mental handicaps should be integrated into mainstream education rather than being excluded and pushed into separate special schools.

Behind these very large sums of money, often too high for us to comprehend fully, are personal stories which bring home just how helpful this funding will be.  A new dyslexia support centre will be set up in Lewisham, South London with a £90,000 grant and will help around 40 pupils who suffer from the said learning difficulty.  A grant of £100,000 is to be given to St. Ives Community School so that a lift can be installed in a three-storey building. It is hoped this lift will help those pupils of the school who have difficulty walking. The minister behind the funding, Jacqui Smith, has said that “The funding reflected the government’s efforts to improve the standards of education available to pupils with special needs,” but of course all children in the school will benefit if their learning environment is stimulated by people of different abilities and from different backgrounds.

It is hoped that this funding will be the first step in a grander program which will see exclusion of certain pupils from mainstream education come to an end and that a more inclusive state education system can be built up. The money put into schools now will pay off in the future when our children are schooled together and not separately.

A beauty spot in the stunning Australian state of Victoria became the scene of a massive rescue mission as 18 people were injured and 65 trapped when a chairlift collapsed.  Scarily, the pylon tower which supports the ski-lift broke which caused the cables to come down.  This caused about 12 cars to crash 10 metres to the ground; many passengers suffering strained necks or spinal injuries as a result of the plunge.

No injuries were life threatening and indeed it transpires that the situation could have been much, much worse if the emergency breaking equipment for the ski-lift had not kicked in.  If the cars which were not involved in the initial fall had kept moving then the result could well have been tragic but, luckily, the worst case scenario did not occur.  Three of the more severely injured passengers had to be airlifted away from the scene of the disaster, one said to be in a stable condition whilst another two were deemed to be in a serious but stable condition.

The rescue operation, which was launched as soon as emergency services learned of what had happened, was hampered by the uneven and difficult terrain which the lift crosses over. Some people were trapped for up to six hours as the rescuers had to employ the use of ropes and hydraulic lifts to attempt to pull people back up and take them away for treatment.  The chairlift crosses 950 metres of such difficult terrain and rises to a staggering height of 740 feet. Had the collapse happened when passengers were at the peak of this height then things could been a lot worse.

The focus now that everyone has been treated is to attempt to get to the bottom of what actually caused the accident and how it can be prevented from happening again in the future.  Investigators from Worksafe Victoria are on the scene in an attempt to find answers to people’s questions.  The problem, because the emergency brake system work but the tower itself broke, is likely to be discovered to be structural rather than technological and thus this is likely to be the focus of any rebuilding and reworking of the lift.  At this point it is unknown whether or not the chairlift will reopen in the future and thus tourists will have to find another way of getting to the top of the 300m high Arthur’s Seat.

It’s not how they may have envisaged the 20th Century ending, but the people of Taiwan are now struggling to come to terms with what is thought to be the biggest earthquake to hit the island in more than a hundred years.  More than 300 people are known to have been injured in the earthquake which struck in the early hours of the morning whilst most people were still asleep.

The timing of the earthquake meant that more people were trapped in their homes than perhaps would have been had the earthquake occurred later on in the day when more people were out on the streets or at work.  The rescue effort has now been mobilised with desperate attempts being made to save as many of Taiwan’s 22 million resident as possible.  The scale of the devastation is almost unprecedented with entire buildings being destroyed and fire-fighters having to battle hard to work out how best to get inside and look for survivors.

The quake measured 7.6 on the Richter scale and the epicentre is believed to have been west of Nantou which has long been known to be a seismically-active area.  Dozens of earthquakes occur in the region every year but most avoid such devastation as has been seen with this one because they take place far offland in the Pacific Ocean. This time Taiwan was not so lucky and it is thought to the worst ‘quake since the devastating one of 1935 which killed over 3000 people.   Death tolls are not as high for this one, but still around 1000 are thought to have perished, with many more left injured and homeless as a result of seismic shudder. Warnings of Tsunami’s were also issued but, thankfully, nothing came to fruition to add to the destruction.

Amongst the devastation, there are stories of hope. A young girl, frightened but apparently uninjured, helped from the rubble of a ruined building. A young boy being rescued from a 12 story hotel in Tapai. Such stories provide temporary condolence but do not erase the sheer scale of the tragedy which has unfolded here and the unease with which the Taiwanese will now be living with in case such a powerful earthquake should strike again. Rebuilding the infrastructure will begin immediately; rebuilding the psychological scars of what has happened may take a considerably longer period of time.

An ambitious project is being launched to try and save a historic lighthouse at Beachy Head in Sussex. The Belle Tout lighthouse is in trouble after 30ft of land fell away into the English Channel because of the affects of coastal erosion. The lighthouse has been decommissioned for some time but found fame in its retirement through being the scenery in such BBC dramas as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.

By using a hydraulic lift and rollers it is hoped that the lighthouse can be physically moved back away from the coast’s edge and put in a much safer spot 50foot inland. Whilst this would not keep it safe forever, it would mean that it was safe in its moorings for a good few years to come.  This is clearly a task which is not going to be easy and a team of engineers is now engaged in what has been described as a race against time to save the historical treasure which has now been converted into a bed and breakfast.

The owners, Mark and Louise Roberts, were denied £200,000 of Lottery funding for the project and have thus had to go down the road of seeking out corporate sponsorship for their rescue mission.  The mission will take several months, with a team of 12 engineers arriving in December with a view to moving the lighthouse in February; it will be a painstaking process but one which will certainly be worth it.

 
Beachy Head

The Roberts’ have spoken of their horror of having to flee the lighthouse as the cliff suddenly collapsed one night. They had always feared that this might happen, because of coastal erosion, but they were still surprised by the suddenness of what occurred.  Another collapse is widely considered to be imminent and this had made time a priority.  A meeting with local business people is to be chaired and this, it is hoped, will turn up the 150 cubic metres which is needed in order to secure the lighthouse in its new home.

A relic which, for so many years, protected ships from the dangers of the sea is now at risk of being devoured by the waves itself. Time is not on the lighthouses side and, if it wishes to continue its retirement and reinvention as a bed and breakfast, engineers and businessmen will have to act fast before it is too late.

We’re such a television-obsessed culture now that, if we can’t find the remote we go from placid to violent in around five seconds. So spare a thought for Russia who, after a three-day black out, is only just beginning to receive transmissions once again.  A fire at the Ostaniko tower was the source of the trouble and three days later the two main Russian channels began to do a limited joint transmission service which included soap operas and news programmes.  T.V addicts may have longer to wait before many of their favourite shows are back on the airwaves, perhaps as long as a month and a half.

A much greater tragedy was unveiled as televisions across Russia staggered back into life; the deaths which were the result of the transmission tower fire.  Three people, lift operator Svetlana Loseva, Aleksandr Shepitsyn, a plumber and Vladimir Arsyukov, had been attempting to flee the burning tower in the lift when the carriage plunged and killed them. However, this is not the full horror of what actually went on. Russian T.V gave a surprisingly stark description of what happened. Before the car of the lift actually plunged down, it became suspended some 250 metres above the ground. Here, because of the fire, it became red hot and, in the pitch blackness, began to fill with smoke. The harrowing last words of one of the victims are said to have been: “We have one breathing apparatus between the three of us. We are suffocating”

Soon after this last message was sent the cables of the lift snapped and the carriage plunged towards earth, smashing through the concrete floor and ending up some seven feet beneath the basement.  Regulations apparently state that the lift should have been shut down as soon as the fire broke out but, tragically this did not happen.  The fire itself was also caused by a catastrophic failure to adhere to regulations. Out of the 38 regulations in place to prevent such a tragedy as this happening, only 16 were adhered to.  Russia will be sombre after learning of these deaths so tragic. People might be a bit miffed that they can’t get their favourite T.V show, but such petty annoyances will be replaced by a national grief at the horrific nature of these three people’s deaths. Investigations are now likely into why so many regulations were not adhered to.

A lift manufacturing company in France has been forced to begin removing the buttons from hundreds of its products after it was discovered that they contained the radioactive material Cobalt 60.  Shockingly, around 20 staff at the factory in question are believed to have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation because of the mishap which appears to have happened when 600 Otis lifts were refurbished using materials which had been supplied by an Indian firm.

The Nuclear Watchdog of France raised its alert level but qualified this by giving reassurances that there was no danger to human life.  The incident is only said to be a Level 2 on the International Nuclear Event Scale; a scale on which 7 represents the most serious nuclear accident.

A spokesperson for Otis has said that the company will remove buttons from 500 – 600 of its lifts as a precaution, even if some of these lifts may pose no danger to public health. This should go some way to reassuring customers who may have had their confidence shaken in the usually reliable company who take their name from the inventor of the very first elevator.  The company also reiterated the most important point which is that, ultimately, despite the scary-sounding nature of the event, the buttons do not actually pose and danger to human life.

The removing and checking of the buttons already installed on the renovated elevators is likely to take several weeks and all remaining buttons will likewise be destroyed. The Nuclear Watchdog has said that 5 Indian companies are believed to have been behind the exporting of the contaminated products and they are now all under investigation. The French authorities are to keep working very closely with the relevant Indian authorities in an attempt to  get to the bottom of what it was which actually went on. How were the materials contaminated, how did they get past safety checks and how was the problem not realised until many of the buttons had already been fitted?

These are questions which it will certainly take time to answer but another, perhaps much larger, question which has been raised by this incident is whether or not it points out the unintended consequences of a globalised world.  This incident was luckily very minor but health and safety checks will have to be tightened to ensure something like this, or something worse, does not occur again.