Heartfelt Sympathy!

[Sun-SSS]

If that is the case then I would say that there are people who need to be held accountable for it.

My point from the start, but let's not hold our breath — no one will be held to account.

I don't think there are too many places in the world today with no access to radio and TV. (I, too, can be wrong.) Many of the places devastated were tourist resort towns. Many of the dead and missing were Swedish visitors, according to TV news I just saw. A Swedish man who owns a hotel, I think in Aceh province, has lost his hotel. It is destroyed. Interviewed, he weeps, because all his staff and all his guests are missing…

 

[hay82]

My point from the start, but let's not hold our breath — no one will be held to account.

I don't think there are too many places in the world today with no access to radio and TV. (I, too, can be wrong.) Many of the places devastated were tourist resort towns. Many of the dead and missing were Swedish visitors, according to TV news I just saw.

You are probably right in saying that noone will be held to account.. As far as I have heard about 1000 swedish are dead or missing, but the total deaths is now up to about 112 000. Then there'll be diseases...

 

[Sun-SSS]

Yes, disease. A man has the job of going around cutting a finger from each corpse before it's buried, so they'll have something to identify by DNA, when they get around to it.

It's 12:34 where I am, so I'm going to bed now. Cheers, hay82 — nice talking to you.

 

[Beatrycze]

US seismologists knew more than an hour in advance that a tsunami would follow the earthquake off the coast of Sumatra

US seismologists couldn't know one hour in advance about tsunami. It travels near the sea bottom and isn't viable even from satellite. It can be noticed only 1-4 m from the coast, which is about 2-5 min before hitting. Knowledge about eathquake isn't enough to know whether tsunami occurs and where it will hit- it's route is unpredictable.

 

[baddichter]

The sheer enormity of it is dizzying. Sumatra is about the size of California and, as mentioned, that moved a hundred feet. There are a multitude of tiny islands off Sumatra such as the Mentawai where existence is pretty much still stone age, with many villages along the sea. And if you consider an underwater arc several thousand miles long, moving five hundred miles an hour, and reaching the horn of Africa, it's pretty indefinable.

 

[Cathy C]

They had spokesmen from Taiwan and Indonesia on a national news program from Canada (News World International, or NWI, for those of you who watch). They were asked if they were angry with the U.S. about not being notified about the quake and they both said "No." Even though there were sensors in the Pacific that noticed this quake, one had NEVER occurred in the Indian Ocean in their living history and there was no reason to think that it could happen. And apparently there were several countries that DID recieve notification e-mails, but again "it had never happened before" and some local officials thought the e-mail was overreacting. Sigh.

Needless to say, more small seas and ocean locations will probably be installing quake sensors, despite "never having happened before"!

 

[baddichter]

I saw an unusual news piece about the lack of dead other than we humans. I would guess many highly intelligent folk, as well as computers filled with vast information, floated away. Meanwhile, the rats and snakes and deermice were headed for higher ground. Some kind of moral fable there, but I don't know what it is.

 

[Crystal]

not tend to be offensive/harsh

haven't finished reading all the replies carefully. But so far, the vague grip of what the posts have said only made me feel even more sorry and sad for the dead bodies there. Be peace with all of them.

 

[Sun-SSS]

US seismologists couldn't know one hour in advance about tsunami. It travels near the sea bottom and isn't viable even from satellite. It can be noticed only 1-4 m from the coast, which is about 2-5 min before hitting. Knowledge about eathquake isn't enough to know whether tsunami occurs and where it will hit- it's route is unpredictable.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the letter I quoted, or the knowledge of its author, but the newspaper it appeared in is a conservative daily, too timid to publish such provocative views without deeming them to have some validity.

Seismologists detect and measure earthquakes and pinpoint their epicentres, they don’t look at ocean waves. Your assertion that “knowledge about an earthquake isn’t enough to know whether tsunami occurs and where it will hit,” is plainly wrong. An earthquake of that magnitude on the ocean floor will inevitably give rise to correspondingly powerful tsunami. And given its epicentre, a child with a school atlas could have predicted where it would hit. Or do you think it might have somehow snaked its way out of there and migrated to the North Atlantic or somewhere?

 

[Sun-SSS]

haven't finished reading all the replies carefully. But so far, the vague grip of what the posts have said only made me feel even more sorry and sad for the dead bodies there. Be peace with all of them.

Maybe the world needs more people to sit around feeling sorry for dead bodies, or maybe it needs more people to notice what is wrong with it, or rather with the way it is run.

 

[Jenem]

I'm sure you have a point here, Jenem, but I fail to see what it is. [What] is easier said than done, and [what] is what it takes?

my point was that sometimes it takes something like this in order to make things happen. because nothing like this had ever happened in the region before, a warning system had never been put in place. easy to say some seismologist at NOAA or wherever could have made a phone call to sumatra (or anywhere else) and given a warning - good luck to getting anything done in one hour.

what is easier said than done is that an adequate warning could have been made.

what it takes is something like this to get the system into place.

it sucks, but it's reality

 

[dele]

What a horrible tragedy. God be with all of them.

 

[gallagher672003]

We have heard rumour that our local hairdresser has been caught up in this disaster.Its apparent that the tragedy is going to reach far and wide in the months even years that follow.

I dont suppose that it was ever considered a threat before Sunday. Geographically it doesnt look like there could have been a worse place for it to happen.As I write this it is reported that some 125,000 people have lost their lives and there are still so many missing.

We have seen such tragedy in recent years,in the name of religion,politics and intollerance.Nature it seems holds no such prejudice.

Love,light and peace to the victims.

 

[Jenem]

The point is, they (those in authority in Indonesia and elsewhere) didn't get the chance to warn anyone, because they weren't warned themselves, by those who knew. How they would have got the information out to those who needed it, well, the same way as would happen in your country, or mine, I suppose. Radio and TV are good means of communication. "Abandon everything! Gather your family! Go to higher ground! Take a radio and await further instruction!" Might have been the message, and thousands of lives been saved by it.

I don't know what picture you have in your head of South East Asia. It ranges from sophisticated modern cities to delightfully rural backwaters, but they don't communicate by smoke signals or something.

I don't know how easy it is to get on TV and the radio in Australia, but it's not that easy in Canada. It's also not easy to phone a government official. If someone wanted to get an urgent message on tv, it would take a lot longer than an hour. That's why we have advance warning systems in place - everything is all ready to go and everyone knows what to do when we see the red flashing tv screen and hear the high pitched beep. We have drills on TV occasionally, too. And that's all part of the system we put in place in advance because we know (on the west coast) that we're on the fault line and susceptible to quakes (and tsunamis). Without that system in place, I seriously doubt that even in Canada we could have been warned early enough to do anything about it (if the same thing happened over here and we had no warning in place). Same goes for the US.

Many people were out of doors, going about their daily business. They weren't in front of tvs or radios. Tourists were sunbathing, eating in restaurants etc. You send a person screaming into the middle of a busy street that there's a giant wave coming to destroy everything and most people would have thought that he was nuts.

I don't feel no one should have bothered with a warning, only that it probably wouldn't have made much difference, so there's no use getting angry about it.

 

[Jenem]

Maybe the world needs more people to sit around feeling sorry for dead bodies, or maybe it needs more people to notice what is wrong with it, or rather with the way it is run.

that's a pretty ignorant thing to say. we don't feel sorry for the dead bodies, we feel sorry for the survivors. the families of the people who were lost, and now have to deal with disease and possibly famine. people who lost their homes and everything they owned. we can feel sympathy and still notice what is wrong with the world and the way it is run.

 

[Jenem]

I dont suppose that it was ever considered a threat before Sunday. Geographically it doesnt look like there could have been a worse place for it to happen.As I write this it is reported that some 125,000 people have lost their lives and there are still so many missing.
.

that is what i heard. nothing like this ever happened in the area. and i dont think anyone has ever heard of a 9.0 richter earthquake. scares the hell out of me, since i live on a fault line

 

[gallagher672003]

We actually had a quake a couple of years back here in the UK.I Think it was about 4.5 on the Richterscale.Never having considered quakes in terms of scale I was shocked to find that people a couple of miles away felt it too.I was even more shocked when the media told us that it was felt throughout the midlands.
We all get complacent but ultimately there is little we can do to in the face of these "acts of god".

 

[Freya]

haven't finished reading all the replies carefully. But so far, the vague grip of what the posts have said only made me feel even more sorry and sad for the dead bodies there. Be peace with all of them.

Ditto.

Aside from hugging trees, a lot of my course concerns disasters such as these. My issue now, is whether to base my next essay on this particular event, or stick to one a little less raw.

 

[Freya]

We actually had a quake a couple of years back here in the UK.I Think it was about 4.5 on the Richterscale.Never having considered quakes in terms of scale I was shocked to find that people a couple of miles away felt it too.I was even more shocked when the media told us that it was felt throughout the midlands.
We all get complacent but ultimately there is little we can do to in the face of these "acts of god".

Manchester is an active quake-site. There's lot of earthquakes everywhere, all the time. Just a matter of how large they are.

 

[hay82]

Saw these pictures while I was reading the news. Frightening