Journal Journal: I'm home for the Tsunamis 20
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