Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
User Journal

Journal metlin's Journal: I'm home for the Tsunamis 20

Journal by metlin

Well, I came home to India a couple of weeks ago to my home-city of Chennai, and it so happened that this is one of the places badly hit by the Tsunami.

While it is definitely sad that the whole Tsunami thing happened, the way aid organizations, world governments and others are handling this is really quite disgusting.

It's become a blame-game of trying to find whom to blame - and nobody seems to care about the facts and how to prevent such things from happening again.

The thing is that this region has never experienced Tsunamis before. I've experienced a few small Earthquakes as a kid on several coastal cities in India, but we've never had to worry about Tsunamis. And for the most part, Chennai has been protected by Sri Lanka which bears the brunt of most of the tectonic activity in the ocean.

So the government did not feel that an early warning system was economically justifiable (the exact words that they used) - until now. And now, they're trying to find people to blame for this whole event.

This is a natural disaster, and natural disasters happen. You cannot really do anything and merely warning systems will not suffice. One needs to tell people where to go and what to do.

Mere warnings will result in rioting and looting and mass panic, and would genuinely cause more loss of lives than no warning at all. We need a system in place which can really handle this through proper procedures, channels and processes -- not merely just a warning system.

I wish our politicians understood this -- now you can be fairly sure that for the next N years, any tectonic activity around the oceans will be considered as Tsunamis and there would be mass panic.

We also need to worry about another thing - the spread of epidemics. We're scared of approaching the beaches of Chennai for the simple reason that these places had (and still have) a lot of carcasses and the whole place is rotting. The government needs to take care that the areas are well protected from any unwanted spread of disease.

That said, one of my very good friends from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands got married in Car Nicobar. Her husband is in the Air Force and apparently an entire Air Force base has been wiped off Car Nicobar. I've not been able to get through to her or her family (who are in Port Blair). I can only hope they're alright.

Update: Well, to make matters worse Andaman & Nicobar Islands have been experiencing even more quakes and tremors, and that's been scaring people from continuing with the rescue/clean-up effort. And no news yet from my friend :-/

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

I'm home for the Tsunamis More

I'm home for the Tsunamis

Comments Filter:
  • We're all sorry to hear about the devastation, and I'm really disappointed to hear that politics have arrived before the aid.

    I'd like to wish you all the best and hope that your friends and family are all safe.

    • Thanks. Yeah, it is quite unfortunate.

      The best part is that the rescue workers were hovering in Helicopters too scared to do anything, while the real rescue was taking place by fishermen and the locals.

      And most of my friends and family are safe - two people I know are missing, other than the two in Andaman that I wrote about :-(
  • I can't believe the actions of politicians and the such either. It's as if they think they can control nature or something, and they can't. And your're right. What good is a warning system really? And do natural disasters like this happen often enough to justify a fancy schmancy warning system that will only lead to said panic and looting?

    I'm sending good karma out to your friend. I hope she and her family are OK, all things considered.

    I've otherwise donated money to Save the Children and will probably

    • I can't believe the actions of politicians and the such either. It's as if they think they can control nature or something, and they can't.

      Worse than that, I saw a page somewhere already ranting about this being an evil US conspiracy, revolving around the top secret HAARP weather control system in Alaska...

      What good is a warning system really? And do natural disasters like this happen often enough to justify a fancy schmancy warning system that will only lead to said panic and looting?

      A warning shortl

      • Actually, here in Madras/Chennai, there is a really huge stadium right next to where this happened. It would not have taken much to take the people there - but unfortunately, while the information was there, coordinating it into something useful wasn't.

        And I hope your Godmother's cousin is doing alright!
      • I heard about that too. A plot to get rid of Muslims and other non-Christians.

        Karma to your godmother's first cousin as well...

        • Yeah, I saw some of that reaction on Slashdot too. Disgusting. One guy had put it as Jesus' way of taking revenge at non-believers. Sheesh!

          I think most people do not even realize the scope of this tragedy - latest stats say that maybe upto 100,000 people may have died. That is a huge, huge number by *any* standards.

          Millions more that are left homeless, orphaned or have lost friends and family. Really sad, and reactions like this make my blood boil.
          • > latest stats say that maybe upto 100,000 people
            > may have died. That is a huge, huge number by
            > *any* standards

            I wish you were right. Unfortunately, 1.5-3 *million* people were killed in India due to preventable famine not 2 generations ago: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/letters.htm#Bengal [erols.com]
            • While a million or more is definitely high, I think that it is not often that you have a global natural calamity that kills so many and most certainly not in the recent past.

              Or maybe what makes this worse is the fact that we are so well networked now that we are in fact discovering the actual death tolls of such events.
    • Yeah, it's quite disgusting to see the way politicians are acting. Atleast it's a lot better in India -- watching the Sri Lankan television (we receive SL TV channels here) makes me want to puke. The politicians there are trying to leverage this into a political scenario.

      India sent a fleet of its naval ships with food and water and the like. Now, SL has been having a civil war with Tamil speaking folks (which is the same language that people in the region I'm speak) in their country, and therefore a goodwi
      • Their politicians made me sick before this catastrophe.

        Norway is trying to broker peace between the Sri Lanken government and the Tamils, at least the Tamil Tigers. Some info here [by.com].

        There are a lot of Tamils/Sri Lankans (I should probably look this up to be sure who is who) here in Norway. They're doing a very good job in getting out and collecting money for the victims...

        • Oh yes, I'm quite aware of Norway's role in trying to broker a peace deal - good job & good luck to them!

          Incidentally, Tamil is one of my mothertongues - and these Tamil militants in Sri Lanka are a painful bunch of asses themselves. They were responsible for the killing of one of our former Prime Ministers, Rajeev Gandhi [wikipedia.org] because he tried brokering a peace deal between the SL government and the Tamils.

          SL primarily has Sinhalese speaking people, who kinda oppressed the minority Tamils. So, rather than
    • They did find the time to warn the animals [nwsource.com], though :7

      • heh (Score:2)

        by tuxette ( 731067 ) *
        Animals know. They always know, and they escape. Humans are pathetic ;-P
      • One of my friends who has a beach house had his dogs barking early in the morning, and he woke up only to see a Tsunami rushing at his house. Fortunately, they lived a good half-kilometre away from the shore and on higher ground, so they weren't hit.

        Perhaps animals do know =)

        *bow wow*
  • I don't think it's fair to blame people for a freak natural disaster that hasn't happened for genereations and maybe never will happen again. Resources are finite, and spending them protecting yourself against something unlikely but possible is hard to justify. Sometimes, shit happens. The best we can do is take care of the victims and move on.

    I have a completely different opinion about building luxury homes in the Outer Banks of North Carolina that get slammed by hurricanes on a regular basis. Still a nat

    • Well, I live in Atlanta in the US and everytime there's a Hurricane in Florida, we have folks who come rush down to Georgia.

      These folks know what they are up against - agreed, some don't have a choice. But most do, and while it is unfortunate, you ought to be aware of where you are and the risk that you take in being there.

      But the unfortunate thing about this incident is that most of the people who lived near the sea were the fishermen and the poor. And worse yet, since this happened quite early in the mo
      • Yeah, it's horrific. All these broken up families and orphaned children.

        My point was that you can't blame anyone for it though. Large earthquakes are possible in any ocean. Even if you know it's coming how do you warn people before it's too late. There was a tsunami that hit the California coast in the 50s and they warned on the radio about it, it had the opposite effect, people went to the shore to watch it coming.

        • Ofcourse.

          Worse still are the wind-surfing crowd who try riding Tsunamis =) I hear parts of Japan and Hawaii are often filled with those.

          Some people...
          • I've seen that firsthand. I grew up in Hawai'i along the main route to the north shore of Oahu. Every time the civil defense sirens would go off, you could count on a monstrous traffic jam of surfers heading to the primo beaches.

Slashdot Top Deals

egrep -n '^[a-z].*\(' $ | sort -t':' +2.0

Close