The Tsunami

(Contributed by Nida Rofe, as lifted from “History’s Worst Decisions”… and the people who made them.  Illustrated edition – Stephen Weir.)

‘It won’t happen to me.’ It is the cry of the unprepared everywhere. But in the case of earthquake and volcanoes, it will. It’s the way the earth is. There will be another San Francisco earthquake. Mount St. Helen’s will erupt again. It’s simply a matter of when.
The Ring of Fire is the name given to an extensive underwater fault stretching from Japan as far as Indonesia, responsible for many earthquake and volcanoes including Krakatoa. Straddling the Pacific and Indian Ocean, the fault has frequently caused eruption across the region.

When a fault occurs at a spot where the water is shallow enough, and the seabed shifts, the resulting disruption causes a tsunami, a wall of water that tends to flow undetected over wide ocean, but builds to terrifying height as it approaches land. The majority of these take place in the Pacific Ocean, but the Indian Ocean has also seen many tsunamis, especially during the 19th century.

In the same area as 2004, tsunamis were reported in 1797, 1833,1843, and 1861, while the Krakatoa tsunami in 1883 killed 40,000.After the Chilean earthquake and the tsunami in 1960, which killed 6,000, a comprehensive Pacific Ocean sensor array was established, but there was nothing similar in the Indian Ocean. Given that a complete deep-water early censor system would cost only about US 30 million and the December 2004 tsunami caused billions of dollars of damage and claimed probably in excess of 200,000 lives, perhaps those governments that decided against the system out of sheer sloth might rethink before the next time. Beyond Indonesia, where victims would have had horrifying little time to escape because of their proximity, 35,000 died in Sri Lanka, between 12,000 and 18,000 in India, as many as 8,000 in Thailand and around 1,000 further afield. That’s around 62,000 people who could have been warned.

A few years before the tragedy, a senior Thai meteorologist warned that the massive resort complex building at Phuket could be exceptionally vulnerable if- when- another tsunami struck. He demanded that sirens and alarms be installed at all hotels, and recommended that new buildings themselves be placed some way back from the beaches. For his trouble, he was moved to another department and none of his suggestion of a tsunami might put tourist off, according to the government. So, little wonder that the Thai weatherman who saw the early reports and realized what was happening on December 26, 2004 decided to keep quiet.

Fortunately, the same reservations did not occur to Tilly Smith, on Maikaho beach in Northern Phuket, Thailand that morning. While the great seismic detectors of the world’s power- not to mention the non-existent deep-ocean sensors of the South Ocean countries- slumbered, Tilly, a ten-year old English girl, was enjoying a Christmas holiday on the beach with her family when she saw the tide doing strange things. A few months before, at her school, her geography teacher had played videos of a 1980s tsunami disaster and explained what happened. Her mother described what happened next: ‘Tilly said she’d studied this at school. She talked about tectonic plates and an earthquake under the sea. She got more hysterical. In the end she was screaming at us to get off the beach.’

There were other means of finding out what was happening and getting out of the way, none of which required especially modern technology. The inhabitants of Simulue event in 1906, and several thousand fled to safety in the island. Moreover, any islanders or beach dwellers who happened to observed the behavior of birds and other wildlife in the minutes leading up to the event were also able to escape. Interestingly, those coastal areas not remade by man survived comparatively well.

The office in Vienna of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had machines that picked up the activity, but they were unmanned for the Christmas holidays. Messages were relayed to the U.S. base at Diego Garcia, which is right in the middle of the Indian Ocean, but apparently its staff had no idea who they should call and didn’t have any appropriate phone numbers in their system. Australian embassies were informed and appeared not to have passed this information on to anybody. A lot of excuses were made, particularly about time frames. But it took almost two hours from the time of the earthquake for the waves to reach Phuket, longer still to reach Sri Lanka. It takes 10 minutes to clear a beach. The Japanese, who have been hit by more tsunamis than any other nation in the Pacific, have a three-minute alert system in place and reckon on being able to evacuate appropriate loss of 239 lives when a huge wave hit Hokkaido in 1993, this relatively small number illustrates just how effective such a system can be.

So, a ten-year old girl saved more than 100 people, and birds and animals, a few thousand more, while the pride of our modern technology saved none. Somehow it makes you think the final entry won’t be the last manifestation of such human fly.

December 26, 2004 – Indonesia bore the brunt of the catastrophe, with estimated fatalities of nearly 170,000.  Further afield the people of Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand suffered heavy casualties, and as many as 62,000 who could have been warned, had a suitable system been in place, died needlessly.
I didn’t know what a tsunami was, but seeing your daughter so frightened makes
you think something serious must be going on.
by Penny Smith

All of a sudden the birds starting flying off in a great commotion… I looked up
towards the sea and saw water coming at great speed. I knew I had to run, I ran
out of the hotel and kept on running and never looked back.
by Uditha Hettige, Sri Lankan naturalist

GOD BLESS PANGASINAN. GOD BLESS YOU ALL. GOD SAVE YOUR PEOPLE

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