Old Weather Forum

Dr PP Venugopalan, director of emergency medicine at a hospital in Kozhikode, believes the community action saved at least 10 lives.

"The people in the neighbourhood had received some training in trauma care and how to handle such a situation," he told the BBC.

"In 2012 the district administration conducted a mock drill on air crashes involving some 650 people, which I think was the biggest in India. The [Air India] plane fell exactly on the same spot."

"It took one month to train the local community members, including taxi drivers. Everyone received hands-on training. I think that also helped to reduce the casualties."

Lane Unhjem was driving his combine harvester across a field of durum wheat on his North Dakota farm earlier in the month, when suddenly smoke began billowing from the machine. Before Unhjem could figure out what was going on, flames started leaping around him.

Unhjem’s neighbors saw the fire and raced over, helping him extinguish the blaze and saving the field from ruin. But the shock of the moment, coupled with the thick plumes of smoke Unhjem inhaled, triggered the 57-year-old farmer to go into cardiac arrest.

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When other farmers in Divide County, N.D., heard what happened to Unhjem on Sept. 9, they immediately halted their own harvesting. Nearly 60 of them showed up at Unhjem’s farm, equipped with a range of heavy-duty machinery, to finish his harvest for him.

Randi wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 10:56 pm With video calls and an army of volunteers, this 15-year-old is battling pandemic loneliness in nursing homes

It was the summer of 1948 when U.S. Air Force pilot Gail “Hal” Halvorsen noticed children clustered around a barbed-wire fence watching military planes at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin.

World War II had ended, and Halvorsen was part of an air mission to deliver food and fuel to desperate Berliners after the Soviet Union had blocked land and water access to areas of the country, leaving millions without access to basic goods.

Halvorsen, then 27, decided to park his plane and say hello to the kids at the fence.

“I saw right away that they had nothing and they were hungry,” he recalled. “So I reached into my pocket and pulled out all that I had: two sticks of gum.”

Halvorsen tore the Wrigley’s Spearmint gum into small strips — one for each child, he said. Then he made the kids a promise: He would return the next day to drop a load of chocolate bars from the sky.

“I told them that I’d ‘wiggle’ my wings so they’d know which pilot had the goods,” he said. “Then I went back to the base and asked all the guys to pool their candy rations for the drop.”

Following his first sweet mission — hundreds of Hershey chocolate bars were wrapped in parachutes made of handkerchiefs — Halvorsen returned again and again during the 15-month humanitarian airlift.

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Christel Jonge Vos, who now lives in Keizer, Ore., said she was never able to catch a chocolate parachute because the teenage boys in Berlin ran ahead of her.

“But that was not important to me or the other kids who did not get one,” said Vos, now 86. “We knew there was an American pilot called the Candy Bomber who cared about us. He laid the ground stone to the fact that enemies could become friends in Berlin.”

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“I was 14 and had seen too much evil to believe in anything good, when the Candy Bomber made a place for himself in the heart of every West Berlin child,” [Dagmar Snodgrass] said.