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Fresh push to coordinate tsunami aid

India rebuffs offers of international help as South Asia's death toll nears
80,000.

By Janaki Kremmer | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

SADRAS, INDIA – The stench of rotting fish mingles with something more
sinister in the balmy December air. The villagers of Sadras, many wearing
the last pieces of clothing they own, stand on empty spaces in the sand
where they trace with sticks the former locations of their homes.
Their thatch-roofed huts are gone, their cooking pots are gone, and many of
their children, women, and men are gone. "For us the sea is a goddess who
gives us everything; our children play in her arms and we depend on her for
our lives," says Jagan Mohan, a fisherman who lost his wife and his
daughter in Sunday's tsunami and whose grief is beyond tears. After a
moment, he quietly adds, "We didn't know that we would depend on her for
our deaths as well."

The death toll here on India's southern coast, and across Southeast Asia
continued to climb to at least 76,900 people. Indonesian officials say the
toll on Sumatra is more than 45,000. Wednesday, President Bush said the US,
India, Australia, and Japan have formed an international coalition to
coordinate worldwide relief and reconstruction efforts.

The British aid charity Oxfam said it raised $1.2 million in three days for
the relief effort, the most it had ever received in such a short period.

A spokeswoman told the Associated Press that the charity planned to send a
plane to Sri Lanka and Indonesia with water-storage tanks, emergency toilet
equipment, buckets, and plastic sheeting. Denmark said it will head a
Nordic-British-Dutch effort to establish a UN disaster coordination center
on the island of Sumatra.

When a local aid worker arrived in Sadras Wednesday, the villagers pulled
out white sheets of paper with handwritten petitions to the government for
money to buy boats, fishing nets, and to rebuild their homes.

As in many of the villages dotting this Indian Ocean coastline, the people
depend on the sea for their livelihood.

It is estimated that it will cost each family a minimum of $2,000 for each
fishing boat, and to get them back generating an income in the waters that
now glint gently just a few hundred meters away.

Officials hear say that nearly 4,000 people are believed to have been
killed by the tsunami here in state of Tamil Nadu.

As they talk, The Women's Collective, another local nongovernmental
organization, arrives with clothing piled high on the back of a truck and
begin to distribute it quickly. "We are being given food and water, but
what are we going to do about our boats and our motors without which we
will surely die?" asks another villager, Kali Amma who shows injuries to
her leg sustained as she swam to safety.

An NGO worker from the Association for Rural Women's Education and
Liberation (ARWEL), says that based on past experience, the Indian
government is likely to take six months before it responds to such
requests.

"The government here has said that it is willing to give one lakh of rupees
(about $1,000) to those families that lost members, but what about those
who lost [all their property] but nobody died?" Sadras villager Jayanthi
Jerome asks.

Delhi has advised the state governments to collect requests to provide
housing to those who have lost their homes, especially to fishermen. But
the state government is just started the process.

Local NGOs like ARWEL, armed with local knowledge, are the first to go into
disaster hit areas with fresh water and clothes, along with the government.
But the local NGOs say they don't have the manpower or resources for
dealing with a disaster of this magnitude.

The Indian government has pledged to spend about $116 million for victims
of the disaster, which it says is on par with the 1999 cyclone that hit the
state of Orissa and killed 10,000 people.

One official in Delhi told Reuters that India has not accepted
international offers of help because Sunday's tragedy was not of the same
magnitude for India as an earthquake that struck the western state of
Gujarat in 2001, killing 20,000 people. "In comparison to the Gujarat
earthquake we have the resources to handle the situation at this juncture,"
he said.

India's government, the UN, and local aid agencies have begun distributing
survival packs of food, water, and shelter to some160,000 people left
homeless along the mainland coast.

Oxfam plans to give nearly $500,000 to the tsunami victims in India, says
P.J. Chako, the group's humanitarian program manager in Delhi. He's not
surprised by the attitude toward outside help. "The Indian government has
for a number of years said that it can handle all disasters by itself, and
this tends to slow down the aid from the international community to us
because they then feel that their aid is unwelcome, and secondly they worry
that they will not be able to make sure where the money goes if no one
seems to care about it," he says.

Mr. Chako says that reluctance by the government to accept "outside help"
has in the past also resulted in a "deliberate" lack of coordination on the
ground with government officials. "This can lead to chaos and silly
delays," he adds.

UNICEF Chief of Emergencies in India, Vinod Menoni, says that a meeting
Wednesday evening was scheduled in Chennai, India, to help coordinate the
work of a number of international aid agencies. "Some are good at some
things and others at other things. This is going to be one of the largest
initiatives in the sense that it involves so many countries all at the same
time and we have to make sure that we get what we need for this country,"
he says.

RELIEF: Sri Lankans Wednesday unloaded sacks of rice donated by Norway.
Some 1.5 million Sri Lankans are homeless.
ELIZABETH DALZIEL/AP
=======================================
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1230/p01s04-woap.html

from the December 30, 2004 edition

Ripple effects of Indonesia's geological events

Earlier natural disasters in the 'Ring of Fire' had global repercussions -
and altered course of history.

By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Sunday's megaquake was not the first time, or even the second, that a major
geological event in Indonesia has killed tens of thousands.
From the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora to the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa,
Indonesia's seismic tragedies of the past two centuries have altered human
history well beyond the Pacific's so-called Ring of Fire, sending
geopolitical, economic, and even artistic repercussions across the planet.

The havoc wrought by the tsunami that swamped southern Asia Sunday is a
stark reminder that humanity is bound together as much by geological forces
- often unseen and occasionally devastating - as by the tides of commerce
and culture.

This latest natural disaster will have profound effects on the politics and
economies of the Indian Ocean. Separatist movements in Sri Lanka and in
Indonesia's Aceh province suffered thousands of casualties, and India's
pummeled Nicobar and Andaman islands have often been used by rebels from
both movements.

How well governments respond to the tragedy, say historians, could shape
those conflicts and their nations for years to come. "Some people think
natural calamities are a signal from god," says Taufik Abdullah, an
Indonesian historian trained at Cornell University. Historically "quite
often natural rebellions have triggered social rebellions," he says.

Indonesian quakes have touched off global political aftershocks before.

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa off southern Sumatra is considered by some
historians to be the world's first global media event. The invention of the
telegraph and creation of news services like Reuters allowed Americans "to
read of the devastation over breakfast the next day," says Simon
Winchester, a trained geologist and author of the 2003 book "Krakatoa: The
Day the World Exploded."

Tsunamis generated by that eruption killed 40,000 on Java and Sumatra. The
explosion was heard as far away as Australia and India, and threw millions
of tons of ash into the atmosphere that affected global weather for years.
Krakatoa's ash helped cool temperatures around the world and led to
stunning sunsets in Europe and the US that captivated artists.

Late Hudson River School painters were drawn to the gaudy evening skies,
and some art historians now believe the blood-red heavens in Edvard Munch's
iconic painting of alienation and fear, "The Scream," were inspired by
those sunsets.

In Europe, Mary Shelley penned her grim tale of Frankenstein while huddled
inside that year, and her literary friend Lord Byron wrote, "the bright sun
was extinguish'd..., and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the
moonless air."

The 1883 explosion also helped generate one of the largest early challenges
to Dutch colonial rule in the archipelago, and also planted the first seeds
of modern Islamist political activity in Indonesia.

Imams on the northwest coast of Java preached that the eruption was a sign
of Allah's displeasure at infidel rule, and urged a violent jihad,
according to Sartono Kartodirdjo, am Indonesian historian.

The Dutch knew the political stakes, and knew that improved global
communications would bring unprecedented scrutiny to the disaster, says Mr.
Winchester, by phone from his home in England.

"The Dutch made this superhuman effort to bring relief to the area because
they were aware of the significance of the event and that the Muslim
clerics were quickly making political capital from the event," he says.

Nevertheless, emboldened clerics and destitute peasant communities
sharpened their rhetoric and began an assassination campaign against Dutch
officials and planters, culminating in the Banten peasants' revolt of 1888
that killed dozens of Dutch and hundreds of Indonesians.

That failed movement helped further the cause of Indonesian nationalism and
eventual independence, as well as the country's minor strain of Islamist
movements that find their modern expression in the Jemaah Islamiyah
terrorist group that killed over 200 in an attack on a Bali nightclub in
2002.

The 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora, too, had far-reaching effects. It killed
100,000 people on Sumbawa island and spewed so much ash into the air that
1816 became known in the US and England as "the year without a summer."

Some historians say that crop failures in New England that year spurred an
exodus of tens of thousands of farmers to more-fertile soils of the
Midwest, speeding the American conquest of the continent.

For now, Indonesia is simply trying to save as many lives as possible.
Steve Aswin, an officer with the United Nations in Jakarta, said it would
take a year or two for Aceh to recover.

"No government could cope with a disaster of this magnitude," says Puji
Pujiono, an Indonesian relief expert.

In Sri Lanka, relief efforts have already touched off recriminations
between the Tamil Tigers and the government in Colombo, with the rebel
movement saying earlier this week that the government is deliberately
slowing relief efforts.

And fingerpointing has begun in Thailand and elsewhere about the failure of
governments to warn of the tsunami. A group of Indonesian seismologists,
for example, has been warning of the likelihood of devastating tsunamis for
years.

Tsunami expert Hamzah Latief says he urged the government in a 2002 paper
to set up an early warning system.

"Now it's too painful to watch TV," he says. "I can't forget the people's
suffering."

• Tom McCawley in Jakarta contributed to this story.

===========================
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1230/p06s01-wosc.html
from the December 30, 2004 edition

Tourists stranded after tsunami

Vacationers trickling into the Sri Lanka's capital say local towns are
struggling to cope with the devastation.

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA – Four days after two tsunami waves pummeled this island
nation, as many as 22,000 foreign tourists remain stranded and are
increasingly fearful.
As the magnitude of the disaster in Sri Lanka becomes clearer, with the
numbers of the dead here being revised upwards from 12,000 to 23,000 and
displaced persons now estimated at 1.5 million, relief efforts are
uncoordinated and the situation is deteriorating, according to vacationers
who escaped destroyed beachfronts, Sri Lankan officials, and the Red Cross.
A catastrophe of Sunday's magnitude would tax even the most well-equipped
country. But in this developing nation, surviving tourists trickling into
the capital paint a picture of local townships and neighborhoods struggling
to cope. Many of them, the tourists say, are overcome by surges of inertia
and emotional devastation that often seem as powerful as the watery walls
that hit up and down the country's east coast. Police are described as
unaware of what steps to take, and authorities seem unable to coordinate
cleanup efforts. The army has been seen on the street, but not involved in
basic relief services.

And accurate information is at a premium: Foreign ministry officials have
said the roads to the south were washed out, yet tourists arriving
Wednesday say they were intact, though filled with debris. Travelers say
they are having to fend for themselves.

"You feel completely isolated; you feel like you have to help only yourself
and that no one will help you," says Stuart Welsh of Nottingham, England,
who got out of the southern town of Galle on Tuesday night with his wife,
Stella, on a tractor run by a five-horsepower motor. "It is a siege
mentality. You don't know where to go. You can't turn on the TV, there's no
electricity. There are a lot of tourists still down there, and there are
still a lot of bodies lying around."

Southeast Asia is a winter refuge for holidaymakers, especially from
Europe. Tourism on this tear-drop-shaped island boomed after a 2002
cease-fire between the separatist Tamil Tigers and the majority ethnic
Sinhalese government. Tens of thousands of vacationers now flock to the
southern beachfront each year, where boutique hotels mingle with
colonial-era architecture, and the famed elephant park known as Yala.

Yet the tsunami, originating 1,000 miles to the east off the coast of
Indonesia, slammed Sri Lanka's southern beaches hard. Refugee tourists say
that in addition to a lack of electricity, there is very little diesel
fuel, long lines of cars picking their way through debris, and little clean
water and fresh food.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said Wednesday in Berlin that hundreds
of Germans may have perished; some 1,000 are missing and 26 are confirmed
dead. Meanwhile more than 2,000 Scandinavians are reportedly missing. In
Thailand, of the 1,600 people who perished, 700 were tourists, according to
the government. Israel says 100 of its travelers are missing, though some
1,500 have been found alive.

Evacuations are patchy and scattered, often via single helicopters.
Tourists on group packages were fortunate, with teams back in Colombo
sending in buses. Japanese tour organizers have worked the phones around
the clock to get their groups away. Austrian airlines offered free trips
back to Vienna for Austrian nationals. Yet Westerners traveling in smaller
groups or who booked their hotels and travel on the Internet had no real
backup.

"A lot of tourists like us are sitting down in Galle and Unawatuna like
they would be in England or Canada, waiting for the police or the fire
brigade to come, and nothing is coming," says Jo Fletcher-Lee of North
Yorkshire, England, who, along with her husband Philip, took a seven-hour
ride in a truck to get to Colombo, after hiking for hours.

Tales of how Sunday's events unfolded continue to emerge. Tourists say many
of the fatalities occurred when curious locals and vacationers came back to
the beach, unaware of a second wave on the way, hours after the first one
struck. Many lost money, IDs, clothing, passports - along with loved ones.

"A lot of us didn't know what was coming next," says Andrew Burr of
Britain. "The rumors were of a third wave at midnight, and, well, you start
thinking what's really important, and it isn't anything material."

Sri Lanka is claiming about a third of the 76,000 Asian fatalities in 12
countries. Nor are all reports in. Each day brings new information. The
southern coastal train here, usually about 16 packed cars, was mostly swept
away as it chugged along on Sunday; few of about 1,000 passengers are
accounted for, and only three cars are intact. More than 80 jeeps at the
elephant park set off along the coast that morning; only half have been
found. Several large remote hotels on the beachfront have not been heard
from at all, and rescue teams reached on the phone Wednesday in the south
and east report entire shanty communities wiped out.

The Red Cross has two small warehouses in Sri Lanka, and both have been
emptied in the past four days.

"We've been helping deal with an armed struggle in Sri Lanka, which has
been slowing down," says Marcal Izard, head of the Sri Lankan Red Cross.
"We were not prepared for a natural disaster. A lot of rescue teams are
still trying to reach some of these areas. Not every place has been
visited."

In a solemn address to the nation, Sri Lankan President Chandrika
Kumeratunga asked her often divided fellow citizens to use the tragedy as
an opportunity to "take a fresh look at society and at ourselves," and
overcome religious and ethnic differences, "as difficult as that may be to
imagine." She proclaimed Dec. 31 as a national day of mourning.

Meanwhile, tourists say ordinary Sri Lankans have treated Westerners with
great care. "The Sinhalese have been fantastic, I have to say that," Mr.
Fletcher-Lee says. "They guided us, found shelter for us, and helped us. I
have nothing but good things to say about them."

===================================
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1227/p08s03-comv.html?s=u
from the December 27, 2004 edition

Tsunamis Need Not Take Lives

A giant offshore earthquake sent killer waves around southern Asia Sunday.
They left a death toll in the thousands from Sri Lanka to Thailand. Almost
all of those killed had no warning of these tsunamis as they made massive
and speedy arrivals from off the coast of Sumatra.
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Even if all the shoreline residents had been alerted, they might not have
been prepared. That lack of warning and preparedness, however, isn't true
in every country. Japan and the United States are world leaders in using
ocean bed sensors to try and forecast tsunamis. They have slowly developed
public training for evacuations, special construction codes for coastal
buildings, and shoreline embankments to lessen the impact of these waves.

Such measures are still far from perfect. And Hollywood's summer
catastrophe movie, "The Day After Tomorrow," about a giant Atlantic storm
surge striking Manhattan, is an overwrought reminder of what such a watery
tragedy can bring.

Despite more and more seabed sensors being placed around the Pacific's
"ring of fire" volcanic and earthquake zone, tsunami predictions are still
a budding science. Hawaii, which saw a 1946 tsunami kill 159 people on the
islands, has had a number of false alarms about pending tsunamis. These
evacuations cost millions in lost productivity. And the state needs to
improve its tsunami-emergency drills for residents.

Still, a milestone was crossed last year when one prediction proved
accurate. In October, the National Data Buoy Center, an arm of he National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, tracked a wave that arose
from a 7.5 magnitude quake off the Aleutian Islands. At first a warning was
given to Hawaii, but then canceled. The islands only saw a relatively small
wave.

Although more "tsunami-meters" are needed, one limiting factor is the lack
of accurate topographical maps of ocean and coastal bottoms. Much of the
size, direction, and speed of a wave is determined by the contours of the
seabed. More ocean-bed data collection is needed to make predictions more
accurate.

Also needed in every coastal nation are stronger buildings for those living
less than 50 feet above sea level and within one mile of a shoreline.

The 20th century saw some 70,000 people killed by tsunamis. This century
need not see the same toll.

======================================
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1227/p01s02-woap.html?s=u
from the December 27, 2004 edition

Major tsunami thrashes SE Asia

A massive tsunami swept across southeast Asia Sunday, killing more than
8,000 people.

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

One of the most powerful earthquakes in history Sunday triggered a tsunami
that swept across thousands of miles of shoreline in southern Asia,
swamping fishing villages in India and Sri Lanka as well tourist resorts in
Thailand and the Maldives, and killing more than 8,000 people (see map).
This tsunami - a wall of water up to 30 feet high - was spawned by an 8.9
magnitude underwater earthquake off of Sumatra.

While tsunamis are relatively rare in the Indian Ocean, the devastation is
likely to prompt calls to extend a 26-nation tsunami warning network in the
Pacific, where most tidal waves occur. And strong aftershocks could trigger
more tsunamis. The earthquake may also have created new quake zones
hundreds of miles away.

"Tsunamis occur in all oceans," and the warning center the US runs in
Hawaii "does a good job of monitoring the Pacific," says Harley Benz, chief
scientist for the US Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information
Center in Golden, Colo. But this event was outside the area monitored by
the network.

This tsunami originated where two plates in the Earth's crust - the India
and Burma plates - collide. A 620-mile segment of the boundary snapped.
Suddenly the Burma plate's margin stood at least 15 meters higher than the
India Plate. With a preliminary magnitude of 8.9, the quake was the
strongest anywhere in the globe in the last 40 years and perhaps the
strongest ever recorded in this region. It followed by three days a
magnitude 8.1 quake off of Tasmania. The sudden shift in plate-boundary
heights was like slapping the underside of a full pail of water. It
triggered a tidal wave that reached an estimated 20 to 30 feet high when it
made landfall.

Depending on a location's distance from the undersea quake or landslide,
warning times may be short. In the open ocean, a tsunami can travel several
hundred miles per hour, with the distance between wave crests stretching
for 300 to 400 miles. At sea, a tsunami's height may only reach a foot or
two above the surrounding ocean. Only when it begins to feel the sea
floor's friction along a coast does it slow down and rear up.

Hardy Bebuch, a German tourist staying on Thailand's idyllic Phi Phi
island, was looking out over the bay from his second-floor hotel window
when the first wave hit about 10:30 a.m. local time. Moments before, he
recalled by phone, "The sea went back. I said to my wife, 'I've never seen
those rocks before, they must be hundreds of meters away.' It was
incredible," he said. Then the first wave swept into his beachfront hotel,
submerging the floor below. Wooden boats were hurled into trees. "We were
staying in a strong building. It didn't collapse. But there were many
villas washed away."

Associated Press reported that 200 bungalows were destroyed on Phi Phi
island, where "The Beach," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was filmed. It's off
the southwest coast of Thailand.

Mr. Bebuch said the first wave was one (3.3 feet) meter high, the second
was almost 10 feet high, with a gap of two and a half minutes between them.
"People were running everywhere," he says. He joined hundreds of tourists
and tourist workers in scrambling to higher ground on the island, as more
waves crashed onto the shore.

Kim Yongmi, an oil painter from Korea who was vacationing on a small island
off Phuket, Thailand, said by phone that she and half of the island's
tourists sought refuge in a Buddhist monastery on a hill on the island.
They plan to spend the night there.

On Phi Phi, electricity and phone lines were cut by the tsunami. Army and
police helicopters landed on the island later Sunday afternoon to evacuate
some 600 tourists.

Bebuch left on a private ferry bound for Phuket and met a Dutchman who was
asking if anyone had seen his wife. "They were walking on the beach when it
happened, and he said they were running away, but they went different
directions. He didn't see her after that," says Bebuch.

Arriving in Phuket, also devastated by high waves, Bebuch joined hundreds
of other foreign tourists trying to find rooms for the night away from the
coast, where hotels had been evacuated. Many were wary of aftershocks and
more waves. "They think there's more on the way."

In Sri Lanka, where the death toll was more than 3,500, thousands fled
their homes. Idyllic beaches were turned into fields of debris and
destruction. "I think this is the worst-ever natural disaster in Sri
Lanka," N.D. Hettiarachchi, director of the National Disaster Management
Centre, said. Officials appealed to the world for aid, saying that one
million people, or 5 percent of the Sri Lankan population, were affected.

"The real tragedy is that although you cannot predict an earthquake, you
can predict a tidal wave that might follow, but the meteorological
department failed to inform anyone about this," says Jehan Perera, media
director of the National Peace Council, reached by phone in Colombo, Sri
Lanka. "The earthquake took place around 7 a.m. our time and the tidal wave
came in around 9 a.m. That's enough time to give people some warning."

In the Indian coastal state of Tamil Nadu, a government official said at
least 1,625 had been killed. Rescuers were searching for hundreds of
missing fishermen, and thousands were homeless.

In Indonesia, 2,583 people were reported killed. The earthquake badly
damaged the provincial capital, leaving cracks in major roads. Aceh is
currently closed to international media and aid agencies due to a 30-year
old conflict between the government and separatist forces. Lhokseumawe, an
area badly affected by tidal waves and home to the local operations of US
company Exxon Mobil, has also been a site of fighting.

Researchers say that one concern now is the effect this quake may have had
on adjoining plate boundaries - indeed, Sumatra is sandwiched between
three. Research in other parts of the world along land-based faults have
shown that a major earthquake in one fault segment can change patterns of
stress in the crust surrounding other faults hundreds of miles away.

"That is a real issue," Dr. Benz says. "What is the failure rate for this
fault, and what sort of loading" does this quake place on them?

The problem is more challenging for undersea faults, such as the one that
triggered Sunday's tidal wave. Quakes of this magnitude are rare worldwide.
Researchers must rely on the historical record and on modeling seismic
activity, which has made major strides over the past two decades.

This two-pronged assault on understanding submarine faults and plate
boundaries has allowed seismologists to advance from reporting the
magnitude and location of an earthquake to reconstructing information on
depth, likely displacement, and the transmission of seismic energy through
the crust. Though this information comes after the fact, it remains
critical to assessing earthquake and tsunami hazards and taking steps to
minimize casualties, if not property damage, when these events occur.

"If you could model an earthquake before it happens, that would be great,"
Benz says. "But information afterward is just as important. It lets you
know where you are in the earthquake cycle" of a particular fault system.

Researchers will be monitoring the Sumatra epicenter closely now: There is
the potential for other tsunamis if aftershocks top a magnitude of 7.5.
More tsunamis may accelerate the call for a more extensive, and better
monitoring system.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning System is a network of seismic-monitoring
stations and sea-level gauges that detects earthquakes and abnormal changes
in sea level. Currently, Japan has the most advanced tsunami system in
Asia.

All warnings are based on such information as the scale of the earthquake
as measured by special cables on the seabed. A warning takes about 10
minutes to issue, and is flashed on TV screens nationwide in Japan, and
sent to disaster-prevention agencies at local government offices that sound
evacuation alarms. Many of Japan's coastal towns also have water gates to
shut out waves that might head inland via low-lying river networks.

But even this technology has been criticized as slow and able to provide
only a rough projection of the height of a wave. After a government study
in 2003 showed that a tsunami resulting from an 8.6 magnitude quake in the
Pacific south of Japan could kill up to 8,600 people if evacuations were
slow, both government and private industry groups renewed efforts to
improve warning systems.

A Japanese research agency has since developed a method to accurately
predict the height of a tsunami just three seconds after an earthquake
hits. More seabed cables are currently being laid to broaden the area this
system covers.

The company Hitachi has developed another system using Gobal Positioning
System (GPS) satellite technology that can detect the presence of a tsunami
several kilometers offshore by measuring how much a giant 13-meter buoy
rises or falls on the ocean surface.

• Simon Montlake contributed reporting from Bangkok, Thailand, Tom McCawley
from Jakarta, Indonesia, Janaki Kremmer from Delhi, Bennett Richardson from
Tokyo, and staff writers Robert Marquand from Beijing.

A tsunami is a series of large waves usually generated by a violent
undersea disturbance. The word tsunami (pronounced tsoo-nah'-mee) is
composed of the Japanese words "tsu" (which means harbor) and "nami" (which
means "wave").

How big - and fast - are they?

In deep ocean, the height of the tsunami may be only a few centimeters to a
meter or more. Tsunami waves in deep water can travel at high speeds
thousands of miles and lose very little energy. The deeper the water, the
greater the speed.

For example, at the deepest ocean depths, the tsunami wave speed will be as
much as 497 m.p.h, about the same as that of a jet aircraft. In 1960, great
tsunami waves generated in Chile reached Japan, more than 10,439 miles away
in fewer than 24 hours, killing hundreds of people.

What role do earthquakes play?

By far, the most destructive tsunamis are generated from large, shallow
earthquakes with epicenters or fault lines near or on the ocean floor.

The quakes can disturb the ocean's surface, displace water, and generate
destructive waves that can travel great distances. Not all earthquakes
generate tsunamis. Usually, it takes an earthquake with a Richter magnitude
exceeding 7.5 to produce a destructive tsunami.

What else causes tsunamis?

Less frequently, tsunamis can be generated from displacements of water
resulting from rock falls, icefalls, and sudden submarine landslides or
slumps. Major earthquakes are suspected of causing underwater landslides,
which may contribute significantly to tsunami generation. For example, many
scientists believe that a major 1998 tsunami along the northern coast of
Papua-New Guinea was generated by a large underwater slump of sediments,
triggered by an earthquake.

The largest tsunami wave ever observed was caused by a rock fall in Lituya
Bay, Alaska, on July 9, 1958. Triggered by an earthquake along the
Fairweather fault, a massive rock fall at the head of the bay generated a
wave that reached the incredible height of 1,720 feet on the opposite side
of the inlet.

- The International Tsunami Information Center, Honolulu, Hawaii.
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/pr/itic/library/about_tsu/faqs.html#7
-===================================================
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1228/p01s01-wosc.html?s=u

from the December 28, 2004 edition

After tsunami, relief begins

Nations and businesses pledge aid to areas hit by Sunday disaster.

By Janaki Kremmer | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW DELHI – As people gathered on the beaches of southern India to scatter
flower petals on the sea, and began to bury the dead, nations and aid
organizations worldwide stepped forward with relief assistance for the
eight Indian Ocean countries struck by tsunamis Sunday.
In Kuwait, where thousands of Sri Lankans work as maids and janitors, the
government pledged $1 million in humanitarian aid. "Companies are coming
forward on their own, it's unbelievable," says Ahmed Izzeth Izzedeen, Sri
Lanka's ambassador to Kuwait. Other nations are offering clothing and food,
as well as their national airlines to carry the donations. Ships and
helicopters of the Pakistani Navy are helping evacuate survivors in the
Maldives.
Relief workers say that given the scale of the devastation over many remote
coastlines, the help is going to be needed. At press time, the death toll
was estimated at more than 23,000.

"It was over in less than 20 minutes, but ever since then I have been
helping recover bodies - at least 200 just on this beach alone and many are
still floating in the lagoon," says De Lima, who works for CARE
International, one of the world's largest humanitarian organizations, in
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

While poor countries such as Sri Lanka and India have aid organizations
with experience in dealing with floods in the region, many of those workers
themselves are personally affected.

"My family and I were returning from church on Sunday [when the tsunami
hit]," says Mr. Lima. "When I returned to my house and opened the door,
four feet of water came pouring out along with furniture, clothes,
telephones etc."

Although his home phone was washed away, De Lima has managed to restore the
phone in his office and is back in business the morning after, along with
38 other CARE workers based in the area.

"There is no lack of aid workers in Sri Lanka, in places like Trincomalee,
etc.," he says, "but this time around all the workers I know have been
themselves affected by the disaster. Most have lost at least one aunt or
uncle or other family member. It's nothing like what I have experienced in
the past."

Oxfam official Gurinder Kaur in Delhi says that the initial efforts are
aimed at preventing outbreaks of disease. "Although food and clothing are
in severe demand, aid workers are concentrating first on digging out bodies
buried in the sand to prepare them for identification and then burial. The
rest comes later," he says.

Most aid groups like Oxfam and CARE International have a significant
presence in Sri Lanka and have often dealt with floods and cyclones that
hit coastal areas. Mr. Kaur worked on relief efforts after a cyclone in
Bangladesh in 1991, when an estimated 140,000 people died. But he says that
this disaster is different: "No one around India and Sri Lanka has ever
witnessed or experienced a tsunami. While weather experts have had some
experience in tidal waves and there was some warning, most people were
still unable to get away. But this is a first for the Indian Ocean since
the 1830s."

Biranchi Uppadhyaya, South Asian regional manager for Oxfam, based in New
Delhi, says that the situation in India at the moment appears to be one of
a "localized emergency that the Indian authorities and the Army are capable
of dealing with, while the Sri Lanka situation is bad all along the
coastline and made much worse by the fact that it's a major destination for
beach goers getting away from northern winters."

Kaur agrees, noting that the tragedy was magnified in Sri Lanka because of
all the built up areas along the beaches - the hotels and beach bungalows
catering to vacationers.

ICRC, Care International, World Vision and other local NGOs have been
assessing the extent of the tragedy for the last 24 hours, but are not
expected to finish until later Tuesday. Disrupted phone lines and broken
mobile phone towers have made communications difficult. "Some of these
areas are remote and many have been totally submerged, so its difficult for
the aid workers to know what or who they are looking for in many instances,
says Kaur.

Lahiru Perera, director of programs at CARE International in Colombo says
that the situation less clear in the Tamil Tiger controlled areas in the
north. "We have heard that about 2,000 people in one Jaffna village have
been killed by the tsunami, but we are unable to confirm the information."

The Sri Lankan government has put together a coordinating committee to deal
with the disaster. Speaking from England, where she was vacationing,
President Chandrika Kumaratunga told the BBC that Sri Lanka wasn't prepared
for a disaster of "this magnitude."

As in Sri Lanka, the hardest hit areas of Indonesia are also in places
where the government has been fighting separatist rebels. Monday, for the
first time in 18 months, Jakarta lifted a ban on foreign journalists and
international aid agencies traveling to the war-torn Aceh province, where
an estimated 5,000 have died.

"I'm panicking and I'm praying," said Ani, an Acehnese woman in Indonesia's
capital Jakarta who had not heard any news from her family in Banda Aceh,
which was heavily damaged by the quake.

The relief effort may help Indonesia win over hearts and minds in Aceh,
where government soldiers have often been blamed for human rights abuses
going back to the 1970s.

An army spokesman in the North Aceh town of Lhokseumawe said that most
military units are assisting in the relief effort, helping tens of
thousands to evacuate. Baktiar Abdullah, a Swedish-based spokesman for the
Free Aceh Movement, said Monday that it had declared a cease-fire to allow
aid to enter the province.

In some parts of Somalia, waves traveled two miles inland, along riverbeds,
Umar Haji Ali, a fisherman in Kabaal, told Associated Press. The UN
Children's Fund says it is sending a team of aid workers to assess the
situation in northeastern Somalia, says Siddharth Chatterjee, a senior
program officer with the agency in Nairobi.

• Tom McCawley in Jakarta, Indonesia contributed to this report and
material from the wire services was also used.

How you can help
The following are among the aid agencies accepting contributions for those
affected by the earthquake and tsunamis in Asia. Contact the individual
group for information on how to send donations.

American Jewish World Service
45 West 36th Street
New York, NY 10018-7904
800-889-7146
www.ajws.org

The First Church of Christ, Scientist
Tsunami Relief
175 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
617-450-3205

American Red Cross
International Response Fund
PO Box 37243
Washington, DC 20013
800-435-7669
www.redcross.org

International Medical Corps
11500 West Olympic Blvd., Suite 506
Los Angeles, CA 90064
800-481-4462
www.imcworldwide.org

CARE USA
151 Ellis Street NE
Atlanta, GA 30303
800-422-7385
www.careusa.org

International Orthodox Christian Charities
PO Box 630225
Baltimore, MD 21263-0225
877-803-4622
www.iocc.org

Catholic Relief Services
PO Box 17090
Baltimore, MD 21203-7090
800-736-3467
www.catholicrelief.org

Mercy Corps
PO Box 2669
Portland, OR 97208
888-256-1900
www.mercycorps.org

Direct Relief International
27 South La Patera Lane
Santa Barbara, CA 93117
805-964-4767
www.directrelief.org

Operation USA
8320 Melrose Avenue, Ste. 200
Los Angles, CA 90069
800-678-7255
www.opusa.org

Doctors Without Borders
PO Box 2247
New York, NY 10116-2247
888-392-0392
www.doctorswithoutborders.org

Oxfam America
26 West Street
Boston, MA 02111-1206
800-776-9326
www.oxfamamerica.org

Source: Associated Press
=====================================
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1229/p01s03-woap.html
World > Asia Pacific
from the December 29, 2004 edition

New push for tsunami-alert system

Japan offers to help build one for the Indian Ocean.

By Bennett Richardson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

TOKYO – The estimated 10,000 people killed on the shores of Indonesia no
doubt were too close to the epicenter of Sunday's earthquake to be saved by
a tsunami early-warning system like the one used in the Pacific Ocean
today. But experts say that such a system could have warned people in
Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and on the African coast that the deadly waves
were coming.
South Asian officials are calling for the creation of an Indian Ocean
warning system, and Japan - home of the world's most advanced tsunami alert
system - is offering to help build it.
While most systems can take several minutes to determine if a quake poses a
tsunami threat, Japan has developed technology within the past year that
can calculate the size, speed, and direction of a nascent tsunami within
seconds.

"We know that a tsunami will occur if the [earthquake] magnitude is over
6.3, and that a tsunami will cause damage if it's over 7.0," says Yoshinobu
Tsuji, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo's Earthquake
Research Institute. "Even in the slowest case, the Japan Meteorological
Agency can judge within five minutes if a tsunami will occur."

Japan has an extensive system of 300 earthquake sensors that operate around
the clock to relay real-time information to six regional centers. Once a
tsunami threat is identified, local government officials nationwide are
alerted to sound evacuation alarms and broadcast information on radio and
TV. Coastal towns can also shut water gates to prevent waves from heading
inland via low-lying river networks.

One of the reasons Japan's system works, says Mr. Tsuji, is "because Japan
spends a lot of money on information transmission." He estimates that the
country spends $20 million annually on the alert system.

A tsunami that hit the island of Hokkaido in 1993 demonstrated that
community education and early warning systems save lives. Though 239 died,
casualties were significantly reduced thanks to a timely warning issued by
the meteorological agency, and because residents fled to higher ground
after feeling the initial temblor.

Along with the US, Japan is one of the founders of the International
Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific
(IGC/ITSU). Established in 1965 after a tsunami struck Alaska, the ITSU
early warning system now covers 26 Pacific-rim nations.

"But because the Indian Ocean is separate from the Pacific, there is no
information on tsunamis in that area," notes Tsuji. He says that at an ITSU
meeting three years ago, the point was made that there was a need for an
early-warning system in Indonesia. "The main sticking point for Indonesia
was cost and upkeep," says Tsuji.

In June this year, ITSU recognized that a significant threat of both local
and distant tsunamis existed in the southwest Pacific and Indian Oceans and
recommended that a group be set up to look into tsunami warning devices for
countries in the region.

Experts say the establishment of a regional center capable of acquiring and
analyzing both seismic and sea-level data would require a reliable
high-bandwidth Internet connection as well as highly trained staff.
"Putting in the sensors is the easy part," Harley Benz of the US Geological
Survey in Golden, Colo. told the Associated Press. "The difficult part
would be coordination between emergency response agencies in the region."

Reid Basher of the United Nation's Platform for the Promotion of Early
Warning (PPEW) in Bonn told Reuters Tuesday: "The international community
has to move ahead and build global systems to avoid a repeat of what has
happened in Asia this week." He said that would now be a key topic at the
World Conference on Disaster Reduction on Jan. 18 in Kobe, Japan. "It is
easy to be wise after the event, but we must remember that the Indian Ocean
has not had a major tsunami for over a century," said Mr. Basher.

As a nation that has a long history of dealing with earthquakes and the
deadly waves that they spawn, Japan has never stopped working to improve
its disaster mitigation systems. Even the current warning method has been
criticized as too slow, given that many quakes occur less than 18 miles
offshore, creating waves that take only five minutes to hit land.

By the time local authorities sound the alarm under the current system,
more than 10 minutes has sometimes passed from the initial quake - and
every second is crucial when a wall of water is moving at the speed of a
jet airliner. A government study in 2003 showed that a tsunami resulting
from an 8.6 magnitude quake in the Pacific south of Japan could kill up to
8,600 if evacuations were slow, spurring efforts to improve warning
systems.

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology has since
developed a method to accurately predict the height of a tsunami three
seconds after an earthquake hits. Current systems measure the correlation
between different types of seismic waves that earthquakes produce - the
initial P-waves and the slower S-waves. "But we can now estimate
earthquakes using Global Positioning System (GPS) precision clocks and a
method that measures only the first stage of the first P-wave," says Tsuji.

The new technology uses an existing system of quake-monitoring cables on
the seabed to measure changes in water pressure immediately after a quake
occurs with a pressure gauge attached to the cable. This system currently
covers an area in the Pacific directly south of Japan, long thought to be
the area where most tsunamis near Japan originated.

The Japan Meteorological Agency was allocated funding this year to extend
the tsunami warning system to an area including the Pacific coasts of the
Philippines and farther south toward Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The
project is set to begin in March, 2005.

Another system, recently developed by Hitachi Ltd. and the Earthquake
Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, uses GPS technology to
detect tsunami several kilometers offshore by measuring how much a giant
13-meter buoy rises or falls on the ocean surface.

• Sanae Benisty in Tokyo contributed to this story.

SOURCE: US NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION PACIFIC MARINE
ENVIRONMENTAL LABORATORY, US NATIONAL DATA BUOY CENTER; © 2004 KRT
================================
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1228/p10s01-woap.html
World > Asia Pacific
from the December 28, 2004 edition

Thailand tourism assessing the impact of tidal wave flooding

By Simon Montlake | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

BANGKOK, THAILAND – Thailand's tourist industry is braced for a short-term
drop in business along its popular Andaman coastline where Sunday's tsunami
struck. The island of Phuket was among the top draws for the 10 million
foreigners who visited Thailand in 2003.
But as workers began clearing debris from Phuket's beachfront streets
Monday, analysts predicted that tourism would bounce back in a few months.
The beachfront hotels hit are only 5-10 percent of Thailand's total number
of hotels.

"The reality is just a few of the island resorts took the full brunt of
[the waves], but in others the impact was zero," says John Kodowski of the
Pacific-Asia Travel Association in Bangkok. But, he adds, "it will be a
huge cleanup operation."

Analysts agree that the economic cost to Thailand and the other nations
will be much smaller than the human toll. "I do see some near-term impact
from the unfortunate event but we're not about to cut growth rates in
response to it," Lian Chia Liang, an economist at JP Morgan Chase in
Singapore, told Reuters.

In Thailand, much still depends on how quickly infrastructure can be
restored in resorts inundated with sea water and debris. Hotel owners are
just beginning to assess the damage to their properties and figure out how
long repairs will take to complete, says Suparerk Soorangura, president of
the Association of Thai Travel Agents. "You're talking at least this season
before [affected] hotels and resorts can bring back customers," he says.
Thailand's tourist season runs November-March.

Tourists who returned to their hotels after the flood waters receded say
the wreckage was hard to comprehend. "It was dirty and nothing was working.
No water, nothing," says Peter Remschneg, an Austrian on vacation in Phuket
with his wife.

Mr. Suparerk says travel agents were diverting thousands of inbound
tourists to resorts on Thailand's eastern coastline that were unaffected by
the tsunamis. He says the tourist industry should unite to persuade
travelers not to cancel their visits to Thailand. But Thai Airways has
offered to refund tickets without penalties to foreign tourists.

Tourism accounts for 6 percent of Thailand's economy, says Andrew Stotz at
Macquarie Securities in Bangkok.

"Is this a recurrent risk? No, my guess is that people will see this as a
one-off, a freak event. They will be back," he says.
================================
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1227/p01s02-woap.html

World > Asia Pacific
from the December 27, 2004 edition

More photos
AFTERMATH: A street in Phuket, Thailand, is littered with damaged vehicles
and debris after a tidal wave caused by a massive earthquake hit the resort
area Sunday.
KARIM KHAMZIN/AP

Major tsunami thrashes SE Asia