Born on this day

Tuesday, March 11, 1952. :   Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, is born.

Douglas Noël Adams was born on 11 March 1952 in Cambridge, England. He attended Brentwood School from 1959 to 1970; one incident which inspired Adams through many later periods of writer’s block was when he took an English class, taught by Frank Halford, where Halford awarded Adams the only ten out of ten of Halford’s entire teaching career for a creative writing exercise. Adams went on to have many of his reports and articles published in the school newspaper and magazine. An essay on religious poetry that mixed the Beatles with William Blake earned Adams a place at St John’s College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature.

Some of Adams’s early work appeared on BBC2 (television) in 1974, in an edited version of the Footlights Revue from Cambridge that year. This captured the attention of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, eventually leading to Adams contributing to skits for Monty Python. However, he is best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a science-fiction comedy radio series first pitched to BBC Radio 4 in 1977. The series led to Adams expanding the concept as a novel, and for adaptation to television. Adams also contributed to the Dr Who television series, particularly episodes starring Tom Baker.

Adams died of a heart attack on 11 May 2001, while working out at a private gym in Santa Barbara, California, where he had moved in 1999. He was survived by his wife Jane and daughter Polly. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery in north London.

Australian History

Saturday, March 11, 1871. :   The springs after which Alice Springs, central Australia, was named are discovered.

The city of Alice Springs is located 1524 km from Darwin and 293 km north of the South Australian border. It is the second largest city in the Northern Territory, with a population of over 25 000.

In 1862, explorer John McDougall Stuart’s third expedition succeeded in finding a route through the Centre of Australia to the north coast, navigating and mapping the country for white settlement. The construction of the Overland Telegraph Line from Adelaide to Darwin was completed in 1872, making it viable for pastoralists to take up leases in the Red Centre. The springs after which the town was named were discovered on 11 March 1871 by the team building the Overland Telegraph Line. They lie to the north-east of the town and were named after the wife of Charles Todd, the man instrumental in securing the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line for South Australia. Surveyors William Whitfield Mills and John Ross both claim credit for the discovery of the springs.

Alice Springs was the name given to the telegraph repeater station which operated from 1872 to 1932. The actual town, originally surveyed in 1888, was 3km south of the telegraph station. Until the early 1930s, the official name of the town was Stuart. However, this created confusion for administrators in Adelaide, so on 31 August 1933 the township of Stuart was officially gazetted Alice Springs.

Australian History

Wednesday, March 11, 2009. :   Rough seas from Cyclone Hamish cause a major oil spill from a container ship off the southeast coast of Queensland.

Australia’s official cyclone season begins on 1 November every year and ends on 30 April. During these six months, the country’s coastline can be battered by up to 10 cyclones or even more in some years. While most cyclones occur along Australia’s northwest, Queensland’s coast is also prone to being hit by cyclones.

Cyclone Hamish was the eighth cyclone to form in Australian waters during the 2008-2009 cyclone season. Forming out of a low pressure system near Cape York Peninsula early in March 2009, Hamish rapidly intensified into a severe tropical storm with winds exceeding 120 kilometres per hour, and began tracking in a south-easterly direction. By 7 March, Hamish had intensified into a Category 5 cyclone, with winds of 215 kph. Residents in risk areas prepared for evacuation. The following day, the cyclone began to weaken, finally dissipating on 14 March without making landfall. However, it did cause damage in an unexpected way.

The MV Pacific Adventurer, now renamed to the MV Pacific Mariner, was a 183m cargo ship on its way from Newcastle to the Port of Brisbane, carrying 60 containers of ammonium nitrate. As the vessel approached Cape Moreton, it encountered rough seas caused by the downgraded Cyclone Hamish. At around 3:15am on 11 March 2009, 31 containers holding 620 tonnes of ammonium nitrate fell into the waters around Cape Moreton; one damaged the hull of the vessel as it fell, resulting in about 250 tonnes of fuel and oil spilling out into the sea.

Over the next few days, the spill expanded, washing up along 60 km of coastline, and affecting critical habitats along beaches, rocky reefs, coastal wetlands and mangroves. There were concerns that if the ammonium nitrate were to mix with the fuel, it would cause a major explosion. By the time the clean-up was completed in July 2010, the economic cost of the spill was $A34 million, while the environmental cost was immeasurable. In August 2009 the company that owned the ship, Swire Navigation and Bluewind Shipping, agreed to pay $25 million compensation.

World History

Friday, March 11, 1864. :   Over 240 are killed as the newly-completed Dale Dyke Dam bursts in Sheffield, England.

During the mid-1800s, in response to increasing demand for water, the Sheffield Waterworks Company planned four large reservoirs. Construction began on the first of these, the Dale Dyke Dam, on 1 January 1859, and the dam was completed by February 1864. By Friday, 11 March 1864, the new dam was almost full and work had already begun on the second dam in the area. A local worker returning home noticed a crack of a finger’s width but quite some length running across the embankment. The Sheffield Waterworks’ chief engineer, John Gunson, declared it merely a surface crack, but ordered the water level to be lowered anyway as a safeguard until the damage could be properly investigated.

By 11:30pm, water began to pour over the widening crack in increasing torrents until the dam suddenly burst. The resultant breach in the dam wall sent an estimated 3 million m³, or 700 million imperial gallons, of water flooding down the Loxley valley, through Loxley and Hillsborough, and then down the River Don through central Sheffield, Attercliffe and as far as Rotherham. Between 240 and 270 people who lived in Sheffield and the villages in the valley below the dam were killed. The flood subsided after half an hour, leaving a trail of destruction about 15km long. 415 dwelling houses, 106 factories/shops, 64 other buildings, 20 bridges and 4478 cottage/market gardens were either partially or totally destroyed. The cost of the flood was estimated at half a million pounds, an incredible sum for the time.

World History

Friday, March 11, 1955. :   Biologist and bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming dies.

Alexander Fleming was born near Darvel in Ayrshire, Scotland, on 6 August 1881. He was educated at St Mary’s Hospital medical school in London until World War I, when he gained further experience in a battlefield hospital in France. After seeing the effects of infections in dying soldiers, he increased his efforts to find an effective means of fighting infection.

It was Fleming’s untidiness as a worker which led to his greatest discovery. In the summer of 1828 he went away for a holiday, but left a clutter of plates growing various bacteria lying about his desk. After his return, whilst working on an influenza virus he noticed that mould had developed accidentally on a staphylococcus culture plate, and that the mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. Further experimentation proved that even a weaker-strength mould culture prevented growth of staphylococci. Thus, Fleming initiated the development and practice of antibiotic therapy for infectious diseases.

Practical difficulties with creating and isolating the discovery which he named Penicillin prevented Fleming from continuing his research. However, after 1939 two other scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain, continued to work to develop a method of purifying penicillin to an effective form. The 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was shared between the three men. Fleming died of a heart attack on 11 March 1955: his legacy lies in the millions of lives that continue to be saved through his discovery of penicillin.

World History

Thursday, March 11, 2004. :   170 die as bomb explosions devastate trains in Madrid.

On 11 March 2004, Madrid, Spain, became a target of terrorist attacks. A series of ten coordinated terrorist bombings which hit the city’s commuter train system between 7:39am and 7:42am left 191 people dead and nearly 1,800 wounded. The attacks were the deadliest assault by a terrorist organisation against civilians in Europe since the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 and the worst terrorist attack in modern Spanish history.

The attacks were initially believed to be the work of the Basque armed terrorist group ETA, or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, meaning “Basque Fatherland and Liberty”. ETA, which usually claimed responsibility for its attacks, denied having any part in the train bombings. Later evidence strongly pointed to the involvement of extremist Islamist groups, with the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group named as a focus of investigations. This group appeared to have links to Al-Qaeda. In October 2003, Osama bin Laden had issued a public threat to carry out suicide bombings against any countries joining the US-led invasion of Iraq. At the time, Spain had approximately 1,300 soldiers stationed in Iraq. In addition, bin Laden had spoken earlier of wishing to return the southern Spanish region of Andalucia to Muslim control, reversing the Reconquista of 1492. Responsibility for the attacks, however, has never been conclusively proven to belong to any one group.

World History

Friday, March 11, 2011. :   A 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Japan causes widespread destruction and, ultimately, almost 16 000 deaths.

The Pacific Ring of Fire, sometimes referred to as the Rim of Fire, is a roughly horseshoe-shaped basin extending from New Zealand, along eastern Asia, north across Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, then south along the coast of the Americas. Positioned at the borders of the Pacific Plate and other major tectonic plates, the Ring of Fire contains more than 75% of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes, and is known for its seismic activity. Countries which border the Ring of Fire are particularly prone to experiencing earthquakes. One such country is Japan, which has been hit by dozens of earthquakes, many of them resulting in significant destruction, in the last 200 years alone.

Early in March 2011, a number of foreshocks were felt off the Japanese coastline. On 11 March 2011, the strongest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history occurred off the coast of Tohoku, in the northeast of the country. The 9.0 magnitude earthquake, which hit at 14:45 JST, was centred 130km off Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, at a depth of 24.4km, where it elevated the seabed by three metres. The force of the earthquake moved Japan’s main island, Honshu, east by 2.4m, while the Pacific plate was estimated to have slipped by between 20 and 40 metres. Even Earth’s axis was shifted by 10-25cm by the power. The initial quake was followed by a 7.7 aftershock, then hundreds more aftershocks in the ensuing months, with almost 2000 aftershocks of 4.0 or higher recorded in the years since the event.

The earthquake also generated a series of powerful tsunamis which reached heights of up to 40.5m. Because the quake caused a 400km section of coastline to drop vertically by 0.6m, the waves travelled further and more rapidly inland than expected, causing more damage than the quake itself. Large portions of major cities and entire towns were inundated, resulting in thousands of deaths. Tsunami warnings were also issued along the Pacific coastlines of Canada and the USA, Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and numerous other countries. Even Antarctica, 13 000 km away, was affected, with tsunami waves breaking off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf. Further disaster occurred when, due to the connection to the power grid being severed, the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station overheated, with backup power systems failing when they were inundated by seawater. Numerous explosions resulted, and radioactive leakage followed. 200 000 people had to be evacuated from the area. Coolant water continued to be leaked for several months. The nuclear crisis was described as second only to Chernobyl, with the full effects of the leakage unlikely to be known for years.

Four years after the earthquake, a report from the Japanese National Police Agency officially confirmed 15 894 people had died, while another 2 562 were still missing. The earthquake is listed as the world’s fourth most powerful quake since 1900.