• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Heartfelt Sympathy!

Thank god we seem to be relatively safe from the more severe ones.

We actually had two within months of each other and they were pretty quick.I cant imagine the terror of a sustained quake.
 
gallagher672003 said:
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".
Click to expand...
we have little ones somewhat frequently. i used to work on the 27th floor (that used to be high for Vancouver) and we had a rather strong quake one day and the building started to sway. turned out the epicenter was just out of seattle, which is 119miles/192km away. i dont recall how strong the quake was exactly, but a few old buildings in seattle crumbled down, some local schools here were damaged. we had another one just about 20 miles away and it woke me up in the middle of the night. the only thing you can do is stock up on supplies.

everytime i feel something, i go here:
Current Earthquake info (Canada)
 
super scary! actually, i was hung over that morning and at the very moment we felt it, i had my head down looking at the floor trying to make my headache go away. then i felt swaying and i thought to myself "geezuz, i AM hungover" then i looked up and the ficus tree and wall were swaying against the view of horizon and i knew what was going on. the other guys in my office thought nothing of it. i work for a japanese company and everyone else in my office is from japan - they get them there all the time, or so the guys say.
 
gallagher672003 said:
Christ they are scary!! I wonder if any shipping was caught up in that? I have heard little information on this.
Click to expand...
A tsunami is only about a ½ to 1 meters tall at open sea, its only when it comes to shore that it gets big, I assume that would mean that you would be safe a sea... but I'm not sure at all..
 
gallagher672003 said:
Christ they are scary!! I wonder if any shipping was caught up in that? I have heard little information on this.
Click to expand...
funny, i haven't heard yet that there were any lost (and i use international shipping). i think i heard, though, that the damaging effect happens when the wave breaks against the shallower ground. so you're ok if you are out to sea. not sure if that's exactly right, but i am sure i heard it
 
Tsunami ('soo-nar-me') is a Japanese word; 'tsu' meaning harbour and 'nami' meaning wave. Tsunamis are sometimes incorrectly called tidal waves but have nothing to do with tides. Tsunamis can travel up to 950 kilometres per hour - as fast as a passenger jet! Tsunami waves move outwards, away from their source. One or more waves can be created per event. Successive peaks can be anywhere from five to ninety minutes apart. The wave train that reaches the coast can range from 30 metre high breakers to barely noticed ripples - but in the open ocean, tsunamis have relatively small heights.

A tsunami is different from normal waves on the ocean. Wind-made ocean waves cause the water to move down to about 150 metres at most. In contrast, the passage of a tsunami involves the movement of water all the way to the seafloor. This means that the speed of a tsunami is controlled by water depth - as the wave approaches land it reaches increasingly shallow water and slows down. Compared to the front of the wave, the rear is still in slightly deeper water (so it is going slightly faster) and catches up. The result is that the wave quickly 'bunches up' and becomes much higher. The highest tsunami occur if they encounter a long and gradual shallowing of the water, because this allows enough time for the wave to interact with its surroundings and cause extensive damage to low-lying areas.
Taken from http://www.ga.gov.au/urban/factsheets/tsunami.jsp
 
Unfortunately, an event like has happened before. In 1883, the Island of Krakatoa split itself in half with a volcanic eruption. The geological tools of the day found that the shockwaves went around the earth 7 times. Even the English channel was affected. Yeah, not too small. Krakatoa was uninhabited, but thousands of people died from four tsunamis and some died from choking on the ash in the air.

A warning is not possible without a rapid response system in place. If you inform the proper authorities, you have to convince them you know what you're talking about. Then, they have to convince someone to listen to them, and it goes on and on. Bureaucracy is there to prevent bad things from happening rapidly. You need a rapid response emergency plan or system to get word form the US Geological Society to remote beaches in Sri Lanka. Let me give you an example. The US ran an antiterrorism drill. The people and agencies involved knew beforehand they would be participating. The drill failed miserably because the 40+ agencies involved couldn't communicate. If US government agencies couldn't communicate efficiently and work together in the same city with preparation AND a "system", how can we get word to Sri Lanka that a wave is travelling toward them at 500 miles an hour without some sort of rapid response system?

I see a lot of tension in this thread, and I understand people being angry. I mean, someone in the world knew that thousands of people were going to die and could do nothing about it. It makes us feel helpless. Now, we have to donate money and push world leaders to set up warning systems.

I just saw Jack Hanna on Anderson Cooper 360. He made a good point. He said that people have built cities and resorts over coastal mangroves. These mangroves are there for a reason. They would absorb the majority of tsunamis. I'm not a "hippie" (but I have nothing against them), but there is a message there. We can inhabit those places, but we do so at a price. Look at what happened to Florida during the hurrican season. Hanna also discussed the "sixth sense" of animals. He explained in much less mystical terms that were every bit as interesting.
 
gallagher672003 said:
Its too shocking for words. The sheer magnitude of the event opens your eyes to how insignificant we really are.
Click to expand...


yet somehow you seemed to have found just the right words to describe it. good job.
 
RitalinKid said:
Unfortunately, an event like has happened before. In 1883, the Island of Krakatoa split itself in half with a volcanic eruption. The geological tools of the day found that the shockwaves went around the earth 7 times. Even the English channel was affected. Yeah, not too small. Krakatoa was uninhabited, but thousands of people died from four tsunamis and some died from choking on the ash in the air.

A warning is not possible without a rapid response system in place. If you inform the proper authorities, you have to convince them you know what you're talking about. Then, they have to convince someone to listen to them, and it goes on and on. Bureaucracy is there to prevent bad things from happening rapidly. You need a rapid response emergency plan or system to get word form the US Geological Society to remote beaches in Sri Lanka. Let me give you an example. The US ran an antiterrorism drill. The people and agencies involved knew beforehand they would be participating. The drill failed miserably because the 40+ agencies involved couldn't communicate. If US government agencies couldn't communicate efficiently and work together in the same city with preparation AND a "system", how can we get word to Sri Lanka that a wave is travelling toward them at 500 miles an hour without some sort of rapid response system?

I see a lot of tension in this thread, and I understand people being angry. I mean, someone in the world knew that thousands of people were going to die and could do nothing about it. It makes us feel helpless. Now, we have to donate money and push world leaders to set up warning systems.

I just saw Jack Hanna on Anderson Cooper 360. He made a good point. He said that people have built cities and resorts over coastal mangroves. These mangroves are there for a reason. They would absorb the majority of tsunamis. I'm not a "hippie" (but I have nothing against them), but there is a message there. We can inhabit those places, but we do so at a price. Look at what happened to Florida during the hurrican season. Hanna also discussed the "sixth sense" of animals. He explained in much less mystical terms that were every bit as interesting.
Click to expand...



i aint reading all this shit..........j/k
 
There's a guy on CNN right now talking about tsunami warning systems. There are systems in place, but he just said the Indian Ocean is NOT monitored, and that some of the countries hardest hit are not participating. He also said that this event was hard to imagine much less prepare for.

To pitch in, CNN gave these sites

www.careusa.org
www.redcross.org
 
just popped in quick to say, RitalinKid, that i agree with your post. glad it's long, you state more cohesively what i was trying to.

ps - made my donation to the red cross yesterday.

be well, gotta go for now :)
 
Jenem said:
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
Click to expand...

If the letter I quoted is accurate, a system IS in place: i.e, the earthquake was detected an hour or so before disaster struck. And world-wide communication systems are well known.

Easier said than done? Well, yes, I guess it is easier for some people to sit on their backsides and do nothing when someone else is in imminent danger, than it is to warn them; but where I live that sort of inaction is a serious crime. People go to jail for that.
 
Jenem said:
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.
Click to expand...
For you to get on radio or TV may be hard, but how hard is it for your governments?

How far do you imagine people “going about their business” are from a radio or TV?

Do you think towns are without police to take charge in emergency? If you were in Indonesia and the military (they have military based everywhere) started telling you what to do you (screaming in the street, if you want to put it that way) you wouldn’t want to let them know you thought they were nuts. You’d want to do what you were told, and do it quick.

Getting angry may not be much use, but neither is getting complacent
 
Jenem said:
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.
Click to expand...

To fail to take into account what is being replied to is what is ignorant.

Watercrystal said she just felt sad and sorry for the dead bodies there. Those are her words, there to be seen if you care to read properly. Unfair of me to single her out, I must admit, but my sarcasm is directed at everyone here who is mealy-mouthing platitudes about how sorry they feel while studiously ignoring the real enormity of what happened.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top