Tsunami Satellite Images

JakeisBland writes "Here is a collection of before/after satellite pictures of the devastation in Asia due to the tsunami/earthquake."

Comments

Tsunami

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply amazing. I think that every so often Mother Nature decides she needs to show everyone who's boss, a sort of bitchslap to bring the nations of the world together; if only for a little while.

one point about the Sri Lankan pictures...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's worth noting that the pictures show Kalutara, a town about 25 miles south of Colombo, and situated on the west coast of Sri Lanka, which pretty much escaped major damage and loss of life compared to the the south and eastern coastlines.

Flooding caused at least 40 deaths in Kalutara, though...

Re:one point about the Sri Lankan pictures...

[OffTheLip]

The people of Galle, one of the hard hit areas on the west coast, might take exception to your comment about escaping major damage.

Are you stingy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

Re:Are you stingy?

[ScentCone]

Bush could have scored some real points if say he'd cancelled his $40 million "I got elected again" party and given the money to the cause.

Reminds me of the scene in - was it Animal House? - where the witless, self-important sorority girl participating in the dance planning committee says something to the effect of, "I don't see how anyone can have a party when there are hungry people in the world!"

But of course, dramatically not having a party doesn't magically create self-sufficient economies, rule of law, rational discourse, and all of the other things that make countries more able to weather trouble. If our Atlantic coast cities were built the way the tsunami-impacted areas are, our recent hurricane season would have been catastrophic. But we have the infrastructure and financial resiliance that comes from our industrious culture. South Asia is working on that too, but they have a lot of catching up to do... and now even more.

If the plight of a million people living and dying in misery should be a reason to cease the celebration of our nation's recurring elections and the success of our constitutional structure, then we should stop every party, all the time. Many, many more millions live in what we would call deathly misery, tsunamis or not. How, oh how can we enjoy, strengthen, and insure our prosperity under those circumstances? Or, is the cancel-the-party political camp so breathlessly partisan, and so desparate to score a fleeting shot on Bush (only appreciated by the same crowd anyway) that it takes a more immediate calamity like this to leverage that bit of theatre?

People who say "Bush should have done X" (even as all sorts of critical things were already under way the same day as the earthquake, and will be for years now) are being sleazy opportunists. To imagine that Bush won't take the opportunity of the upcoming inaugural to comment on the Asian disaster is ridiculous. Now: please comment on why Clinton and his show-biz supporters threw such big parties, even as people were dying - in numbers just as big, but in slow motion - throughout Africa, and Burma, and North Korea. Oh, that's right: he "felt their pain," and that took care of it, right?

A couple more images

[centipetalforce]

http://eobglossary.gsfc.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImage s/images.php3?img_id=16774Very
http://eobglossary.gsfc.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImage s/images.php3Devastating
If you donated to lokitorrent but not this, I don't know what to say to you...

Re:don't hear too many

[oz_canetoad]

From the CIA world book on Sri Lanka;

Buddhist 70%, Hindu 15%, Christian 8%, Muslim 7% (1999)

I can see why you wouldn't, but continue to play your banjo...

Videos

[Vicsun]

Here you can find videos of the tsunami captured by tourists.
Here you can find torrents of said videos in case the original site dies under the load.

Re:wow

[Gentlewhisper]

Current death tolls approaching 130k people.

If you thought 9/11 was big think again, we are talking about FOUR HUNDRED 9/11s here.

Helping

[gregbaker]

Perhaps this would be a good time to donate to the Red Cross? (US, Canadian, others)

The Canadian one, at least, is a fast online credit-card donation. You can print out your tax receipt right away. (hey, before midnight gets it in for this tax year, right?)

Or, there are plenty of other organizations that would be happy to receive a donation.

Re:wow

[shadowmas]

i'm a sri lankan. i wasnt in the effected area but the footage that i saw was so disturbing i simply stopped watching tv after a few hours.

busses with people still in it were swept away as if they were paper boats. people who were trying to hold on to a building were swept away one by one. and while all this was happenning the people who were taping the scene along with a few others who were on a bridge could do nothing to help. it makes you feel completly helpless.

so many people have died that even identifying them is simply impossible. most of the dead are being buried in mass graves. and most of them havent even been identified.

its simply unbreable.

Re:So much for clean water....

[Malc]

Have you thought that perhaps most of that discolouration is no more than just sediment such as top soil? It isn't necessarily related to human activity at all.

If I were there, smell would be the least of my worries. I'd be more concerned about things such as cholera, and other miscellaneous tropical diseases and the general environment that means even a simple scratch can become life threatening.

Rescue efforts update... and some thoughts

[asliarun]

Speaking as an Indian, a big heartfelt THANKS for all of you who've empathised with the tragedy and have helped the rescue efforts. It's in trying times like these that one's faith in humanity is restored.

Thankfully, in spite of Indian bureacracy being well Indian bureaucracy, rescue and rehabilitation efforts are going on VERY effectively. An enormous number of people in India, be it the government, armed forces, or even the common woman/man is pitching in. Most companies here have setup collection boxes and at the very least, we're donating medicines, soaps, toothbrushes, disinfectants, clothes, utensils, non-perishable food items etc. There's also an army of volunteers who's landed in the disaster struck areas with truckloads of donated stuff and are distributing it to the needy.

Strangely enough, it seems that too many clothes are being donated! A friend of mine is physically helping out with the rescue efforts and he tells me that there's piles and piles of clothes lying around but of little use to anybody. Well, i guess too much help is always better than too little help.

Another thing that amazes me is the resilience of the common man or woman. Here are people living on the edge of poverty, getting hammered everyday with issues like eking out an existence. Perhaps they've scrounged and saved enough to get their daughters married, hidden a few hundred rupees in a hole in the wall. Perhaps they've just bought a shiny new radio or a bicycle. What do they wake up to? A tsunami that takes away their children, their friends, and everything they own. What do they do? Shrug it off eventually and mark it off as karma, god's will, or god's punishment depending on their religion (no, most poor Indians cannot afford the luxuries of athesim or agnosticism). Then, they take it one day at a time and slowly start rebuilding their lives.

You want to see miracles, mental strength, and the answer to life, the universe, and everything? You don't have to look far in times like these.

I've said it before and I'll say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

WWI: 16-18 million.
WWII: 40 million.

On a single day in the American Civil War, approximately 30,000 men were killed.

Feel free to dispute those figures, they vary from source to source. You'll not escape the orders of magnitude.

That's what war is like in the age of modern machinery. 9/11 was murder, not war.

Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again

[MightyMartian]

Well, the fact remains, that under international law, the attack on the Pentagon was not a legal act of war. It was not preceded by a declaration of war, it was not done by soldiers fighting under a flag, and it involved the intentional killing of civilians.

I don't have any problem with the US battling terrorism. Battling terrorism is a good thing, even if it isn't a winnable thing. Overthrowing the Taliban was a good thing. They were nothing more than an arm of a much larger international terrorism ring and were only recognized by three countries as the lawful government of Afghanistan anyways.

Attacking Iraq was a) stupid, b) illegal and c) has mired the US in a mess that no one else wants and it will be pumping money and manpower into for years to come.

Re:Philosophy 101

[Kiryat Malachi]

Because if God overrules free will, even once, he's made the entire thing meaningless. If he, even once, says "Hey, humans, I'll save you from the consequences of your collective choices", he's just made free will meaningless, because its no longer free - its free 'to a point'. By giving us free will, God inherently relinquishes both his right and his duty to overrule our actions.

Trying to make a valid philosophical argument by comparing police to God is bunk, man. The police aren't omnipotent, omniscient, and they aren't the ones who have the ability to decide whether or not we get free will. Of course, anyone who stands by is partly culpable. However, if God intervenes, he destroys the idea of free will. The only way to maintain free will is to stay out of it; as such, by rigorously asserting free will, God becomes non-culpable - he has, in essence, said "I will not interfere, because the consequence of interfering once is to mean that I must take responsibility for all of your actions that I allow to occur." It is, in an odd sort of way, similar to the search engine DMCA exemption - software that indexes material is legal and non-culpable, even if it indexes illegal material, except if it ever filters out some undesirable material on basis of copyright or legality, at which point it immediately becomes culpable for all such infringing material found on the service.

This is just one more reason why God is a bunch of crap. Study the origin of ethics and look into hard vs. soft command, and you'll begin to come towards my point of view, which is that ethics in and of themselves point to the non-existence of God via contradiction.

Perspective, yes, but not as personal as this:

[Anonymous Coward]

The sattelite images show the extent of damage, but remains impersonal. This picture graphically shows the actual devastation and number of deaths..

http://img145.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img145&image=ruumi ita4ft.jpg

Re:Perspective, yes, but not as personal as this:

[madprof]

After seeing this I feel physically revolted.
Every one of those people could well be someone's brother or sister, or parent....or child....

Re:Perspective, yes, but not as personal as this:

[abelsson]

Horrific. I just donated $150 to the red cross. I had been thinking about it, but it was that image that pushed me over the edge.

Re:Over here in Finland (and Scandinavia I bet)

[XenonDif]

Meanwhile, Bush is planning to spend $30-$40 million in lavish inaguration festivities.

per capita counts are unusable

[klang]

Denmark: 300M DKR (USD$55M) at a population of 5.4M .. that's $10,14 per capita ..
USA: USD$45M at a population of 293M .. that's $0,15 per capita

both theese sets of numbers are what the Government provides, not what is collected privately. (no taxreductions are given for donations in Denmark)

I guess that every country will give what it can.

Re:wow

[alexre1]

It's sad that this type of inward looking nationalistic thinking is the norm these days. When will people realize that we are responsible for all of humanity? Does no one teach social responsability anymore? Let me let you in to a little secret here. The rest of the world *is* under an obligation to help SE Asia. Under a *big* obligation. Why? Because of international treaties? Nope. Because of legislation, or UN decisions? Nope. As humans, we are morally responsable for the welfare and well-being of the rest of the world.

Composite images

[AstroDrabb]

The images look a lot more powerful when you stack two in layers and set the top layer transparency to around 80%. You can really see all the homes under water. I put some together here

Re:wow

[Anonymous Bullard]

Or one-twentieth of US dickwaving in Vietnam.

Shhh, hush now. You're spoiling it.

When asked "how many died in Vietnam war", nine out of ten Americans give the ballpark of "60,000". The two, perhaps three million Vietnamese deaths don't simply register.

Of course the USA still refuses to accept responsibility for the continuing tragedy caused by the massive Agent Orange contamination that is still killing and causing birth defects among the Vietnamese population.

More recently the US and UK war machines have scattered hundreds of tons of toxic and carcinogenic depleted uranium (used in hardening projectile shells) across Iraq. Does anyone think these two countries will ever take responsibility of the devastating consequenses affecting the current and future generations of Iraqi civilians?

While I can reason the deaths and injuries caused by the Indian Ocean Tsunami to be part of the cost of our existance on a living planet (I say this knowing that close friends of mine lost many friends and relatives, and my own relatives holidaying in Thailand only barely escaped death thanks to help by quick thinking locals), I find no good excuses for sending massive war machines to foreign countries to kill massive numbers of locals and to poison their lands for generations to come.

Rhetorical

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Question.

Why can't we get these images from Fallujah?

As a Christian Libertarian...

[SonicSpike]

As a Christian Libertarian... I half agree with you and halfway don't.

My faith says that yes, we should help our brother in time of need, however my political philosophy says the government shouldn't be the ones to do it.

Legally, internationally, politically we are under NO obligation or responsibility to do such - nor should we be. However since we do have an abundence of wealth, I don't see a problem with the government having am emergency aid fund, or even low interest loans for foreign countries in times of crisis. But this should be used rarely and saved for large scale disasters such as this.

I don't think that the US Gov should dispense money to anyone out there who has a papercut however. The country shouldn't be overly philantropic.

As a Christian, yes I feel obligated to help anyone who needs help when they do - it is just the right thing to do. I would rather give my money to a private fund that I know, respect, and trust to properly distribute my donations. The government is usually the LAST place to trust in terms of spreading goodwill.