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| A Phone Call |
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| "Hello, you don't know me, but would you mind evacuating your entire coast for, oh, eight hours? See, there's been this earthquake...." |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, December 29, 2004. Of the many differences between the Third World and the First, there is one that proved devastating this week. In the West, the beaches mostly belong to governments and the wealthy. In the East, the beaches are generally crammed with the huts of the fishermen and the very poor. As tourism increases, beachs sport increasing numbers of hotels, and it was from the safety of the upper floors that foreign videos were made of this week's tidal wave, first enticing the locals and their children out to pick up fish flopping in the suddenly and inexplicably dry stretch of beach, and then rushing in powerfully, sometimes leaving their corpses ten miles and more inland. Sadly, many needlessly drown because they simply cannot swim. The incredible horror that envelopes the Indian Ocean rim must seem at odds with the beauty and calm currently. The news videos show the water is azure blue again, the seas mostly smooth. There is a lot about this disaster that does not make sense whatsoever. The utter lack of any warning is excused by the following: there had been no tidal wave for a hundred years in the Indian Ocean, so there was no need to install the warning system that the Pacific has. Um, okay. But when an earthquake registers beneath the sea, and every nation with a seismograph knows where and how big, and almost immediately villages disappear and radio contact ceases and entire sections of the coast vanish and new land appears, did it not occur to anyone that this alone might be worth a call to neighboring governments to spread the word that there was a good chance a tidal wave might be heading their way? Here in the United States, when we instantly knew that a huge earthquake had happened deep under the ocean off Sumatra, isn’t it a safe bet we knew that a tidal wave would be generated? Did anyone suggest to these nations to pull people back from the coast for a couple of hours? Traveling just under the speed of sound, it doesn’t take long for tsunamis to travel long distances. Is that unfair, to complain if no phone call was made? Maybe such calls were made, but the highly inefficient and fatalistic societies of the subcontinent may not have been able to do much other than instill mass panic if a warning was given. And frankly, where were those millions to go? The fishing economies of entire nations are pretty much gone, the fleets destroyed, the men drowned. These nations, less than democratic, now have a lot of desperate people primed not to be impressed with their own government’s ability and interest with help. The Maldives, a nation of something like 1700 small islands, most under the height of the wave, apparently has no current clue if it has a quorum of voters anymore. It’s possible they lost half their population. They do not know one way or the other. How is it that the US naval base on Diego Garcia, directly in the wave’s path, has no damage? And most curiously, my US age group grew up with the full understanding that Krakatoa, a volcano that blew itself apart at the end of the 19th century, was located on the other side of Sumatra, and that this was the most active volcanic area on the planet, most of it underwater. If we know this, why didn’t the involved governments? If they knew, why didn’t they care and even notionally prepare? Because only 117 years ago it was far worse. When Krakatoa exploded in 1883, it could be heard by humans over about 10% of the earth's surface. Waves reached heights of 120 feet above sea level, and washed ashore coral blocks up to 600 tons. Tide gauges recorded the wave's passage and it reached Yemen in 12 hours, 3800 nautical miles away. Three months after the eruption, the ash in the atmosphere caused such red sunsets that fire engines were called out in New England to put out supposed fires. These sunsets continued for 3 years, and the global temperatures sank 1.2 degrees. This week’s underwater eruption or shift of plates just happened on the other side of Sumatra. It was a much smaller event because it all happened deep under the ocean, which weighs a lot, and tamped down a wave that could have slaughtered millions in hours. Look what a twenty foot wave just did. Add a hundred feet to it. Is it worth a call then? |
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