Asian quake tsunami kills more than 7,000

[ghost of miles]

Man, this is terrible... I hadn't really checked out the news yet today and just saw the reports:

tsunami

[sheldonm]

They're now saying over 8500 are dead .

[Big Wheel]

My God. I believe we have at least one board member from Malaysia (LAL). Hope he and everyone he knows is all right.

[White Lightning]

Koh Phi phi is/was such a beautiful island with beautiful people. What a horror! My thoughts are with the people in the Tsunami range.

[Peter Johnson]

Whoa...I have good friends who landed on Bali Friday for vacation. I hope they're okay...

[Big Wheel]

From the few anecdotes I read at the BBC's website it sounds like Bali is mostly ok, though it still received some very high waves, which is pretty amazing considering how far and presumably protected it is from a tsunami originating off Sumatra. Most of the tourist stuff there is on the eastern side of the island, lessening the chance that anyone you knew was affected.

[Dan Gould]

This is really horrifying news. Given the size of the earthquake and tidal wave, I fear that the death toll will be many times worse than is currently being reported.

[7/4]

This is really horrifying news. Given the size of the earthquake and tidal wave, I fear that the death toll will be many times worse than is currently being reported.

I think so too.

I saw this when I got up this morning, around 5:30. There was almost nothing on the TV news and the web was only reporting 3,000 dead. I went back to sleep and woke up in time to start seeing footave on the Today show. I wonder what the aftershocks will do.

[7/4]

Yahoo News: Nearly 11,500 dead as huge earthquake triggers destruction across Asia

[7/4]

Yahoo News: "All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, said Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute. Speaking on SKY TG24 TV, Boschi said the quake even disturbed the Earth's rotation.

[1ngram]

A couple with whom I work flew out to Thailand coast for three weeks only a week ago. From the pictures on ITV news showing masses of people just being swept away by huge waves I fear the worst. Simply terrible.

[Leeway]

In this world of "virtual" everything, it is a sober reminder of the awesome power of Nature and the fragility of life.

[Guy Berger]

I suspect the post-disaster death toll might be even worse than the initial count. This is the kind of thing that breeds humanitarian disasters.

Bangladesh in particular is vulnerable because the country floods very easily.

Guy

[LAL]

My God. I believe we have at least one board member from Malaysia (LAL). Hope he and everyone he knows is all right.

Thanks for your concern. I was only aware of the incident/tragedy at 9pm (1pm GMT) on the 26th - i.e was not affected. However, apartment dwellers 50km away from where I am felt the quake tremors. The worst hit are those living on the coastal areas of Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia and to a lesser extent Thailand and Malaysia. Bali was unlikely impacted in any way.

From news reports, the tsunamis/tidal wave that hit the shores were as high as 6-7 metres (not sure if exagerated) and reached 1-2 km inland in certain places. Terrifying. Death toll is about 11000 and climbing. I guess the toll could have been reduced if each country had an early warning system to prepare for calamities such as this one. The tsunamis only reached certain land areas 3-4 hours after the quake.

[BERIGAN]

LAL, glad to hear you are fine!

The story just seems to get worse and worse! A lot of people are going to need a lot of help.

More than one million people were left homeless in Indonesia alone

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041227/D877MDP80.html

[Guy Berger]

For people who wish to donate money, there are some links here.

Guy

[brownie]

The death toll is now over 14,000 in nine countries..

Many could have been been saved with a proper alert system....

From Reuters

QUAKE WARNING COULD HAVE SAVED THOUSANDS

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. officials who detected a massive earthquake off Asia's coast on Saturday tried frantically to warn the deadly wall of water was coming, the head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said on Sunday.

But there was no official alert system in the region because such catastrophes only happen there about once every 700 years, said Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's center in Honolulu.

"We tried to do what we could," McCreery said. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world."

Within moments of detecting the quake, McCreery and his staff were on the phone to Australia, then to U.S. Naval officials, various U.S. embassies and finally the U.S. State Department.

They were unable to reach the thousands in the countries most severely affected -- including India, Thailand and Sri Lanka -- because none had a tsunami warning mechanism or tidal gauges to alert people, he said.

The 8.9-magnitude underwater quake -- one of the most powerful in history -- off the Indonesian island of Sumatra devastated southern Asia and triggered waves of up to 30 feet (10 metres) high, killing more than 11,300 people.

"We actually issued a bulletin about the quake but it only went to the countries in the Pacific ... that subscribe ... and that would include Australia and Indonesia," McCreery said.

Because of the lack of monitoring mechanisms, U.S. officials had no access to government or scientific information in the areas affected by the latest tsunamis and were relying on more general information.

A warning center such as those used around the Pacific could have saved thousands of lives, Waverly Person of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center, told Reuters.

"Most of those people could have been saved if they had had a tsunami warning system in place or tide gauges," he said.

"And I think this will be a lesson to them," he said, referring to the governments of the devastated countries.

Person also said that because large tsunamis, or seismic sea waves, are extremely rare in the Indian Ocean, people were never taught to flee inland after they felt the tremors of an earthquake.

Tsunami warning systems and tide gauges exist around the Pacific Ocean, for the Pacific Rim as well as South America. The United States has such warning centres in Hawaii and Alaska operated by the U.S. Geological Survey and NOAA. But none of these monitors the Indian Ocean region, McCreery said.

It takes a substantial investment and long-term commitment to set up a 24-hour communications infrastructure, operational capabilities and specialized training, he added, declining to estimate the cost.

In addition, U.S. seismologists said it was unlikely the Indian Ocean region would be hit any time soon by a similarly devastating tsunami because it takes an enormously strong earthquake to generate one.

But Person said governments should instruct people living along the coast to move after detecting a quake. Since a tsunami is generated at the source of an underwater earthquake, there is usually time -- from 20 minutes to two hours -- to get people away as it builds in the ocean.

A major tsunami, a Japanese word meaning "harbour wave," occurs in the Pacific Ocean about once a decade. It is generated by vertical movement during an earthquake and sometimes incorrectly referred to as a tidal wave, according to the Web site of the U.S. National Geophysical Data Center.

U.S. officials are now trying to help officials in the region set up some sort of informal warning system and feeling badly that more couldn't have been done, McCreery said.

"It took an hour and a half for the wave to get from the earthquake to Sri Lanka and an hour for it to get ... to the west coast of Thailand and Malaysia," he said. "You can walk inland for 15 minutes to get to a safe area."

[ghost of miles]

For people who wish to donate money, there are some links here.

Guy

Thanks for posting that, Guy.

Latest I heard on the death toll was around 23,000--and, as Guy observes, it's likely to climb even higher from post-disaster problems.

[Swinging Swede]

According to Swedish news tonight, 60,000 are either dead or missing.

Only from Sweden 2,000 charter tourists are missing, and that doesn't include the many that travel on their own. About 10 Swedes have offically been declared dead so far, but the real number is thought to be much higher. According to a hotel owner in Khao Lak, Thailand, there must be hundreds of dead Swedes there only. And that's just the tourists from one small country.

[Alexander]

This is, indeed, a tragic development and a sobering reminder of humanity's insignificance. I am reminded of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa which was equivilant to the detonation of a 200 megatons bomb (the largest man-made bomb ever detonated is 50 megatons). It completely atomized the island and caused the deaths of 30,000 people from the resulting tsunamis.

Above is an image of the island before and after the eruption. A new volcano has been forming on the same spot and will undoubtedly erupt again with similar results.

[brownie]

The full impact of the disaster has yet to be fully absorbed. The death toll is rising by tens of thousands...

The map of the Earth has changed...

From AFP:

QUAKE RATTLED EARTH ORBIT, CHANGED MAP OF ASIA

LOS ANGELES, (AFP) - An earthquake that unleashed deadly tidal waves on Asia was so powerful it made the Earth wobble on its axis and permanently altered the regional map, US geophysicists said.

The 9.0-magnitude temblor that struck 250 kilometers (155 miles) southeast of Sumatra island Sunday may have moved small islands as much as 20 meters (66 feet), according to one expert.

"That earthquake has changed the map," US Geological Survey expert Ken Hudnut told AFP.

"Based on seismic modeling, some of the smaller islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra may have moved to the southwest by about 20 meters. That is a lot of slip."

The northwestern tip of the Indonesian territory of Sumatra may also have shifted to the southwest by around 36 meters (120 feet), Hudnut said.

In addition, the energy released as the two sides of the undersea fault slipped against each other made the Earth wobble on its axis, Hudnut said.

"We can detect very slight motions of the Earth and I would expect that the Earth wobbled in its orbit when the earthquake occurred due the massive amount of energy exerted and the sudden shift in mass," Hudnut said.

Another USGS research geophysicist agreed that the Earth would have got a "little jog," and that the islands off Sumatra would have been moved by the quake.

However, Stuart Sipkin, of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden Colorado, said it was more likely that the islands off Sumatra had risen higher out of the sea than they had moved laterally.

"In in this case, the Indian plate dived below the Burma plate, causing uplift, so most of the motion to the islands would have been vertical, not horizontal."

The tsunamis unleashed by the fourth-biggest earthquake in a century have left at least 23,675 people dead in eight countries across Asia and as far as Somalia in East Africa.

The tsunamis wiped out entire coastal villages and pulled beach-goers out to sea.

The International Red Cross estimated that up to one million people have been displaced by the natural calamity.

[Hardbopjazz]

At least 40,000 dead and another 25,000 may be also dead . I heard on the news this morning, the quake was so strong, it altered Earth's rotation.

[ghost of miles]

Some amateur footage of a tsunami hitting a resort has surfaced in an AP story (accessible through the Yahoo newsbox).

Edited December 28, 2004 by ghost of miles

[Hardbopjazz]

Quake rattled Earth orbit, changed map of Asia: US geophysicist

Mon Dec 27, 8:33 PM ET Asia - AFP

LOS ANGELES, (AFP) - An earthquake that unleashed deadly tidal waves on Asia was so powerful it made the Earth wobble on its axis and permanently altered the regional map, US geophysicists said.

AFP Photo

The 9.0-magnitude temblor that struck 250 kilometers (155 miles) southeast of Sumatra island Sunday may have moved small islands as much as 20 meters (66 feet), according to one expert.

"That earthquake has changed the map," US Geological Survey expert Ken Hudnut told AFP.

"Based on seismic modeling, some of the smaller islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra may have moved to the southwest by about 20 meters. That is a lot of slip."

The northwestern tip of the Indonesian territory of Sumatra may also have shifted to the southwest by around 36 meters (120 feet), Hudnut said.

In addition, the energy released as the two sides of the undersea fault slipped against each other made the Earth wobble on its axis, Hudnut said.

"We can detect very slight motions of the Earth and I would expect that the Earth wobbled in its orbit when the earthquake occurred due the massive amount of energy exerted and the sudden shift in mass," Hudnut said.

Another USGS (news - web sites) research geophysicist agreed that the Earth would have got a "little jog," and that the islands off Sumatra would have been moved by the quake.

However, Stuart Sipkin, of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden Colorado, said it was more likely that the islands off Sumatra had risen higher out of the sea than they had moved laterally.

"In in this case, the Indian plate dived below the Burma plate, causing uplift, so most of the motion to the islands would have been vertical, not horizontal."

The tsunamis unleashed by the fourth-biggest earthquake in a century have left at least 23,675 people dead in eight countries across Asia and as far as Somalia in East Africa.

The tsunamis wiped out entire coastal villages and pulled beach-goers out to sea.

The International Red Cross estimated that up to one million people have been displaced by the natural calamity.

[Christiern]

How telling it is that our so-called "president" wants to help the tsunami victims with 50 million dollars. If memory serves me right, he sent infinitely more money to Florida when hurricanes claimed far fewer victims--but, of course, there were votes to be had (legal or otherwise). Then, too, look at the money he has and continues to throw away in Iraq. If ever there was a group of thugs with warped priorities, it is the one that occupies the seat of power today.