December 27, 2004
NATURE PROVIDES SOME PERSPECTIVE:
At Least 13,000 Die in Tsunami: Waves Generated by 9.0 Quake Cut a Swath in Southern Asia; Many Are Reported Missing (Shankhadeep Choudhury and Paul Watson, December 27, 2004, LA Times)
A series of towering waves triggered by a massive undersea earthquake killed more than 13,000 people Sunday, wiping out whole villages and hammering resorts across thousands of miles of coastline in South Asia and beyond.Survivors described walls of water between 10 and 20 feet high toppling buildings and sweeping away victims from Indonesia to the Maldives. Even in Somalia, 3,000 miles from the quake's epicenter, nine deaths from the tsunami were reported.
The catastrophe began when a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the world's biggest in 40 years, struck just before 7 a.m. beneath the Indian Ocean 155 miles southeast of Banda Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
The quake, about 200 times as powerful as the 1994 Northridge temblor, spawned tsunami waves that traveled at high speed through a region that lacks any warning system. Ocean buoys in a tsunami warning network can alert people to a lethal wave's approach hours before it hits, giving them time to move to higher ground.
Possibly the worst-hit country was Sri Lanka, a war-ravaged island off the southern tip of India, where wave after wave of surging tides created rivers of seawater that carried people away along with cars and the rubble of collapsing buildings. More than 6,000 people died there.
In Indonesia, health officials said more than 4,400 people were killed on Sumatra, most of them in the northern province of Aceh, where entire villages were swept away and bodies were lodged in trees. Many of the dead were children, officials said.
Nearly 2,300 were reported killed in India, 600 in Thailand, including tourists, and more than 40 in Malaysia. In the Maldives, more than 30 were dead and two-thirds of the capital, Male, was underwater. A dozen people in Myanmar and at least two in Bangladesh also died. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless.
At least three Americans were among the dead, two in Sri Lanka and one in Thailand, the State Department said.
And we just had our one thousandth combat death in Iraq. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 27, 2004 7:45 AM
By happenstance, I just finished reading Simon Winchester's book on Krakatoa. While he takes a while to get to the actual eruption, after setting up the social structure of the Java and Sumatran area, it does give you a lot of detail on the strength of that eruption and the ensuing tsunami -- carring one steam-powered boat over a mile inland -- as well as the effects on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in southern Indonesia in the aftermath of the eruption, as the fundamentalists took advantage of the tragedy to increase their recruitment numbers.
It's something he notes in the book is pertanent to today's history, so I would expect to see him as a talking head on some show within the next few days.
Posted by: John at December 27, 2004 9:34 AMAnd how many of the deaths, preventable, had the area in question had the kind of early-warning bouys that pepper the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile the "feel good" elites want the world to sacrifice trillions of $ in the sexier battle against global warming. Why focus on imminent, uncontroversial, reasonably resovable issues when you can indulge in epic battles of good (nature) against evil (capitalist man).
Posted by: Moe from NC at December 27, 2004 9:37 AMWatching the devastation on CNN this morning, I thought I would kill if I heard one more "How did you feel as all this was happening?".
Posted by: Peter B at December 27, 2004 10:22 AMAllah is annoyed. Again.
Posted by: Uncle Bill at December 28, 2004 9:33 AM