Slashdot Mirror
Quake and Tsunami Devastate South Asia
pfb writes "From reuters, 'The world's fifth-largest quake in a century has hit southern Asia, triggering a speeding tsunami that crashed into Sri Lanka and India, drowning hundreds, and swamping tourist islands in Thailand and the Maldives.'"
...set off by the 8.9 magnitude earthquake...
Windows in JAKARTA, Indonesia, were rattling, and some even broke. And that is a 2-3 hour flight away from the epicenter!
They also have the ability to travel terrifically long distances. Sumatra to India isn't a small stretch, even if they're relative neighbours.
What I'd like to know is - did the wave reach the east coast of Africa? Madagascar? did the Seychelles feel any of the effect? It was only this year a BBC documentary about tsunamis indicated they could easily travel across the largest oceans, but there hasn't been any news of African flooding.
Geeks who were online found out about it pretty quickly. I heard about it on Fark. :P People in fishing villages and vacation sites my have missed the info, to their peril.
If you need a tech discussion, here's one, "How can you get the info to the people who needed it?"
Once the earthquake hit with a sea floor epicenter, everyone with a web browser knew a tsunami was going to hit somewhere. Again, no way to tell the people who needed the information. Seemed like the only thing we could do was just wait for news of further death.
Actually only the preceeding earthquake is unpredictable. When you know where the epicenter of the earthquake is and the topography and makeup of the ocean floor, you can see where the resulting tsunamis (if any are created) will hit hardest.
Unfortunately, you don't have much time between the quake and the tsunami hitting. I hear if Canary Island (The one ready to fall into the sea and wipe out the east coast) would cause a tsunami that could travel across the Atlantic Ocean in 45 minutes, and I read on the BBC that this most recent tsunami was going 2,000km/h, which seems to be roughly the same speed. Mind boggling though.
Also hurting any warning effort is how do you get a mass warning out to places like Sri Lanka? There's no mass media infrastructure and only the minimum of transport infrastructure. I suppose part of this tragedy is how unavoidable it was in these nations' current states. Only Japan has invested any significant amount of money in Tsunami warning systems.
Yup...
As these events are rare around this part of the world there has so far not been a need to set up a warning system.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Of course, this all happening at full moon will probably fuel the people who study whether the gravitational pull of the sun and moon impacts the occurrence of earthquakes like it does tides.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Can anyone put some kind of comparision between the energy release here and the energy release of the prospective planet impactor 2004MN4 ? It would help to put things into scale, if not perspective.
If MN4 were to hit, estimated release is 450-2000 MT of TNT, so how does a Richter 8.9 compare.
Steve
I'm on an island right next to Sumatra (relatively), and there were huge tsunami's hitting us too. The last I heard 15 people died in the floods. It's not as bad as what people in Sri Lanka and India experienced, but still...
My mom felt the quake at around 9, I didn't notice anything though. I'm very thankful Malaysia is relatively safe from quakes, but I feel so sorry for all who were affected.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I heard about it late last night on a net radio feed (my time EST 0 dark thirty am sometime, I was half asleep) right after it happened, but a tsunami wave travelling roughly the speed of a commercial jetliner doesn't give a lot of leeway even if the people in the soon to be affected areas hear about it.
And this one follows that 8. something quake that hit between tasmania and antarctica just the other day.
I think this story should be taken into consideration along with the asteroid stories, as this wave was only roughly 40-50 feet high, yet by some reports it traveled up to half a mile inland in some places. Just imagine one ten times higher (something like that) from a large asteroid oceanic strike.
But ya, you would think that their would be some sort of emergency alert tied to seismographs, that would automatically get posted to various radio and television and internet sources if it was of sufficient strength, ie, danger. I know we have this alleged emergency alert system in the US that will over ride the TV and radio stations OTA broadcasts, but no idea in other nations what they have for that. Civil defense is always lesser funded than military offense in most nations it appears. What would it really cost to develop a radio based alert system for these various nations? Cost of one jet fighter or tank? And it could be tied to cellphones for that matter through the various national carriers, say, in a true natural disaster (impending or otherwise) scenario, your phone might ring with a pre recorded short message.
I realise in the poorer areas it might be problematic, but surely someone in most areas has a phone or a radio or whatever, you don't have to get the message to every single human directly, just to enough of them in any given area for word of mouth to help out a lot. Wake up and alert one dude per poor village, he can go running outside yelling his head off for that matter, like "dang evac! Tsunami coming! Move it people!" something like that anyway. The old church bells ringing hard and fast deal.
What time exactly did the tsunami hit madras? Seems like early morning. Could have been much worse if it was say at 5 in the evening
Same thing has been bothering me too - guess they never did look at a tsunami possibility. We felt tremors at 6.30 AM - i looked up the seismology at USGS and saw Indonesia's quake -I did look at the map and said gee - there is just the sea between us - but I did not imagine a tsunami would wash ashore - but hey - Iam not the Met or the Oceanography guys - I am sure quiet a few people who could have done something stayed quiet. Even 2 hrs is enough to clear families from the shoreline - they need not have died - we lost about a 100 of them here in Chennai.
What is interesting is that there was another quake on the 24th of 8.1 off the coast of Tasmania, the other side of the continential plate that caused this one ( AFAIK). That end of the plate gave way and that affected this one? A warning? I don't know, but it might have been related.
Massive earthquake felt in Tasmania
December 24, 2004 - 7:55AM
The world's biggest earthquake in almost four years has struck 800 km
off the coast of Tasmania, Australian seismological officials said.
Geoscience Australia said the quake, measuring 8.1 on the Richter Scale
hit the Macquarie Rise, in the Pacific Ocean, at 1.59am. [...]
It's a Bagel.
You can see some pictures here. They're from a Norwegian newspaper.
http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=260157
Last I heard is that he lives at Barnes Place(a street) in Colombo. This is quite far from the coast, and Colombo itself hasn't been affected. So he probably should be safe.
The eastern,southern and south western coasts of Sri Lanka bore the brunt of the tsunamis. This includes a suburb of Colombo.
Sri Lanka is not a place where quakes and tsunamis happen. There were a few tremors, but not strong.There are no major faultlines near sri lanka.So the country is not prepared for this sort of thing.
clarke is probably safe (unless he had a heart attack or something.) one of is houses is near mine, and the other is in the heart of the city. long story short .. he's gonna be ok.
the most affected are the squatters living in improvised huts near the beach. call me cold hearted, but they went there, they grabbed the land, refused all attempts to base them elsewhere.
atb
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
I'm curious as to why a similar magnitude earthquake, also in the ocean, occurring off the coast of Australia shortly before this earthquake didn't cause a tsunami as well?
News about this earthquake here: http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11 778537%255E3462,00.html
Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but I'm curious as to what the differentiating factor is between these two earthquakes which means one creates a tsunami and the other doesn't.
Indeed, the last tsunami we had was in 1977, which came with a cyclone; my grandpa was involved in some heroics [which he loves to narrate whenever we go to his place in rural India ;-) ]. I don't know if this is how it is in, say, Hawaii or someplace, but the morning that tsunami hit the coast, everyone apparently went to work normally. It was only by 10AM or so that word spread that the sea was coming in (to use a vernacular phrase for 'tidal wave') and by then, all they could do was to climb onto rooftops and wait for the waters to recede.
More than mere navel gazing.
Realize that, like yourself, many did not associate the earthquake with a tsunami. CSI Miami (a US TV show) had a tsunami hit Florida in the program. So right now, when I hear "earthquake" and "water" my brain's primed to think "tsunami."
I imagine that a lot of earthquake people have the knowledge and training that they, too would think "earthquake." But they still may have been caught by surprise. The places that were close by could not be warned, and how many would have thought "hmmm - Sri Lanka's gonna get it?" It's a thousand miles away. Again, it may not have occurred to everyone.
For those it did occur to, there's the question "What do you do?" There may have been an assumption - "someone's got the job to issue the warning." If there is an appropriate "responder," often you can make things worse by trying to get involved and tying up resources as a result. So some may not have bothered because they thought that it would be handled. Others may simply not have known who to call.
I'm sitting here wondering. Let's say I'd been online looking at an Earthquake page when the 8.9 quit. Who would I have called to warn about a tsunami hitting Sri Lanka? I don't think I'd have thought my calling would do any good, first off. But let's say I put it all together and decided to start making calls. Who would I call? The Sri Lankan embassy? 911?
I have no freakin' idea.
This is why public safety organizations have emergency drills. Stuff like this happens and you do what you do every day. Who's job is it every day to warn the people of the Indian ocean if there's a tsunami? No one. So everyone did in the emergency what they do every day, which turns out to be just that - nothing.
The more I think of it, the more this looks like one of those events you learn from. At this point the question is, how much do you learn?
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
What a totally stupid, biased and ignorant remark. You're probably an astroturfing terrorist.
"So many Americans" have given their lives to rescue many parts of the rest of the world from dictatorships in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Where were you and where was your country when the Taliban were shooting women in the head on just the accusation of adultry, and Saddam Husein was killing hundreds of thousands just for sport? Perhaps you are from France, Germany or Russia, countries that were reaping big $PROFITS trading military hardware to Iraq for oil? Or, perhaps you are a Radical Islamic teaching your young to tie bombs to themselves and blow up innoocent civilians because you are too much of a coward to do it yourselves? What do you tell them, that Allah will be grateful and will give them 72 virgins in paradise?
Did you dig the graves for the bodies of the Americans who lost their lives in WWI fighting to free you, or are you the one defacing the graves of Americans buried in France because they rescued your mother and father from a life under Hitler's rule?
With the $Billions spent on the Marshall Plan in Europe following WWII the US has contributed $Trillions to the rebuilding of countries around the world. Americans have freely redistributed more of our wealth around the world than the collective contributions of all the Socialist/Marxist countries combined. The major export of those nations has been guns, bombs, violence and "revolution", and everywhere they've succeeded the result is a people even more oppressed than before.
How much money did you or your country give to the rebuilding of Europe and Japan after WWII? Did your country start a Peace Corp? Have you been sending Billions of tons of Care Packages packages around the world over the last 50 years?
Maybe you're a self-rightous Canadian who is vitriolic about American military power but enjoys letting America pay its military protection bill? Canada has a total of only 55,000 serving in all of their armed forces combined and they depend on the protection of America's military might.
But, maybe you're right. What if, from now on, we keep to ourselves, and when you flirt with tyranny again we won't come to your rescue after you take the dicator's bait? What if we dig up our sacred dead from around the world and bring them home to rest in peace and respect here? Besides the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corp and Care Packages, we have redistributed more of our wealth via job outsourcing than any other country in the world. Everything we buy here is made somewhere else by folks who are earning 10X more than they did before. Ninty percent of all programming jobs in the USA have been shipped overseas since 2000. Americans standard of living has dropped in direct proportion to its rise elsewhere around the globe.
We even let foreign Billionaires buy citizenship and then setup websites here using disgruntled Leftists/Marxists in an attempt to influence our Presidential elections!
What if we stop outsourcing our manufacturing, programming and other jobs and stop all HB1 and other job imports, canceled free donations of food, clothing, medical supllies and money? Would that be treating othes with more respect?
Interestingly enough, the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation was working in a project to provide early warnings / relief support in the event of tsunamis. From the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation's website (see here):
Note that the test was scheduled for 2005... unfortunately a little too late. Also, they were focusing on the Pacific instead of the Indian Ocean. Given that Clarke himself lives in Sri Lanka, I wonder how the current events would affect the project. It is clear to me that the Indian Ocean has been somewhat neglected.
You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything. --Donald Knuth
Yeah rather then "bothering" I'd say it is troubling, very much so.
1. Tsunami are not a new scientific discovery
2. Tsunami happen rather frequently
3. Tsunami can be pretty fucking devastating , killing thousands and destroying billions of goddamned property
4. Seismic networks aren't science fiction or experimental genetics, but a _reality_
So I think, what the fuck is needed to make some world seismic network with early warning ? We can make ONU, but we can't make one fucking seismic early warning network which, in layman terms, is a bunch of computers with telephone or satellite lines and a couple thousand people for maintenance ?
I guess that the next days we'll hear that
a. given that the quake was a rare event ( my ass is more rare there have been 5 of that in the last 100 years)
b. that the countries involved are piss poor with poor communication infrastructure ( RADIO goddamit Marconi invented it more then a 100 ago it still works ! Even U.S. NOAA still uses radio ! )
c. that there was some bureocratic problem (there are always buro problems, no matter if republicans/dems/martians are in charge)
d. that there was some economic efficiency problem (there are always economic problems unless you're the one paying for everything, but hey we have skyscrapers full of people counting money...cute)
Therefore thousand died..and we dare call ourselves civilized and advanced, we're bloody apes.
The island is called Los Gigantos, the one that Mt Teide is located on. The volcano itself isn't the real threat, it's the cliffs that rise almost a mile above the shore, with a fault line less than a mile offshore.
Yup...
This Indian Express article supports parent about the rarity of tsunamis in the Indian subcontinent.
There is no patch for stupidity
Visit my blog
Man, you just don't give up, do you? I will give you an example, I have no friends or relatives who lived in Indonesia or Sri Lanka or anywhere close. Yet I had friends who died in an earthquake in the 80s. Naturally, the recent news has affected me emotionally.
I can easily imagine a lot of other people who lost their loved ones in a fire, quake, terrorist attack etc. The news of a big earthquake, which is repeated in mass media stirs their emotions, consciously or subconsciously.
I am sure one can think of numerous other reasons why people get so emotionally involved.
You can see why your estimates of how many people are allowed (by you) to feel sorry for the people who died are not very useful.
By simpy calling everyone who cares idiots and presuming not only that you know but also that you have the right to give orders on how people should or should not react, you are making an idiot of yourself.
I first heard about it close to 12:00M PST while surfing.
What was interesting was the news coverage the next morning (disclaimer: I woke up at @ 9:00). Wolf Blitzer was going off about the 10 top news-worthy things in 04 (of course 9 of them had to do with the US), Paula Zahn went off about some reverend making boatloads of money off of G and there wasnt even an obligatory mention (screen-bottom tickers don't count) of an event that resulted in (unofficial) a deathtoll close to 11,500 (last BBC estimate). The only place I got to see anything about it on TV was an obscure (to me at least) channel called News World Intl. (366 on DirectTV) where CBC and then something called the German Journal talked about this most of the time. Of course the BBC was kind enough to provide a lo-rez video feed, but I still dont understand the complete glossing over of such an incident. Is it that unless americans die, the american media wont cover it? Seems foolhardy... but then it is the US. Nothing's unexpected. And of course I still dont know why the BBC World service is not available in the US.
--
Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous? -- Calvin (Bill Watterson)
Here is a home video of the wave crashing into the beach of Patong.
...what if there were no rhetorical questions?