Snapshots of a day of terror, tragedy in Asia

AMBLANGODA, Sri Lanka: The twisted limbs of the frail-bodied girl were caught in a garden fence near the sea. She may have died, but no one stopped — there was already too much tragedy around her to check. I had gone to the Amblamgoda to drop off my parents for a Buddhist ceremony, and was driving back to Colombo, the capital, when I got a message that flooding had been caused by a huge tidal wave. Then I noticed people running, and the first waves hit the road. They were less powerful than the waves that were reported up north. The waves brought fish to the shore, and some young boys rushed to catch them.

But soon afterwards, the devastating second series of waves came. Water started climbing. I scrambled to the roof of my Pajero 4X4, expecting to be safe. The water kept coming. In a few minutes my jeep was under water. The roof collapsed. I joined masses of people in escaping to high land. Some carried their dead and injured loved ones. Some of the dead were eventually placed at roadsides, and covered with sarongs. Others walked passed dazed, asking if anyone had seen their family members. Then, after 15 minutes, the water level started coming down and I walked out of the area.
     
MANGINAPUDI BEACH, India: The women and children had ritual baths in the sea on the occasion of the Full Moon Day, an auspicious day for Hindus. Then, the tsunami struck, sweeping 35 of them out to sea and then throwing their lifeless bodies back on shore. Residents rushed in vain to save the women and children, giving them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, pumping sea water from their bellies. “It is such a tragedy,” said Venkaratnam, a villager. He was clad only in a sarong and drenched in sea water. “We tried to our best to save these people, but could not do anything for them.” Some rescuers even tried to run for medical help while carrying the victims before realising they were dead. There were similar scenes of devastation along the southeastern Indian coast. In Narsapuram, a small coastal town, tidal waves as high as coconut trees washed away hundreds of small fishing boats. In Prakasam, a pleasant, sunny Sunday morning turned into the most frightening day of 45-year-old Giri Prasad’s life.

“The sea suddenly turned furious, and within no time it was upon us,” he said. Tidal waves several metres high “were heading towards the village like an army of wild elephants,” causing extensive damage and killing seven people. And in the village of Mypadu, people were furious with the top administrator in their region when he came to visit a few hours after the disaster to check on their well-being and the fate of 200 fishermen still missing at sea. The villagers had apparently told him by telephone as the waves struck that seawater was entering their village and the embankment had been breached. “You must be joking,” he reportedly replied.
     
PHUKET, Thailand: Cars, window panes and chairs littered the sea. Pickup trucks were on top of walls. People in shock, some blood-covered, were evacuated into the hills or packed the hospital wards of a popular southern Thai resort. For Ann Sophie Spetz, a holiday dream of white, sandy beaches and turquoise waters had turned into a “nightmare.” “It was horrible,” said Spetz, of Uppsala, Sweden, who was having breakfast on Kamala beach with her husband when one of her three children raced over, crying out before the waves touched down. “People had blood all over them and they screamed and screamed.” The family followed other foreign tourists who were evacuated to the hills, staying for hours without food. Locals brought them water, and finally they returned to the seaside to eat, but their relief was short-lived. “The Thai people came again and shouted, ‘The waves are coming, the waves are coming,’ and we threw down our food and ran into the hills again,” said Spetz.

Trond Schistad, 38, of Rognan, Norway, said he did not know that tidal waves were pounding Kamala beach while he and his relatives were swimming in the waters off Phi Phi Island, where hundreds of boats sank and some 200 seriously injured people were evacuated. Schistad said the waters were calm. The only giveaway was the window panes and chairs floating in the waters. “We were wondering why there was so much trash in the sea,” he said.
 
JAKARTA, Indonesia: The most powerful earthquake in the last 40 years was felt first in Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra Island, the Indonesian province closest to the undersea epicentre. The shaking lasted for about four minutes. But what felt like mild swaying in further-flung cities across Southeast Asia was violent in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, collapsing buildings and toppling the minaret on the centuries-old mosque that dominates the skyline. Soon after, rumours began spreading that water levels in the river that cuts through Banda Aceh’s heart were rising, an aid worker in the city told his colleague in Jakarta, the capital. Flooding and quake damage then cut all links to the city.

Twelve hours later, at least 1,400 people had died in and around the stricken city, the health ministry said, basing the figure on short-wave radio reports received from officials on the scene. Banda Aceh, a city of about 400,000 people, was unusual in that in yesterday’s disaster the quake caused many of the deaths. Elsewhere, thousands died from flooding caused by huge tsunami waves. “People are fleeing their houses in panic, and the talk is that the river is rising,” said Arista Idris, an official with the international organisation of migration, quoting a colleague in Banda Aceh. By late yesterday, they hadn’t heard from the colleague again.
     
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: Tidal waves that struck villages on Malaysia’s northwestern coast were a terrifying experience for many people, even hardy fishermen and other residents who are accustomed to tropical downpours and regular monsoon flooding. A wedding ceremony turned into bedlam when the reception became the site of a flash flood. A government health inspector lost his wife and four siblings when they were swallowed up by the sea during a beach picnic. Residents who parked their cars near river banks returned to learn their vehicles were swept away. Preschool children enjoying an afternoon dip in usually placid waters ended up drowning.

“When I saw the waves that were even taller than a big man, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” said boat-maker Karim Aman, 45. “This is what you see on TV happening in other places, but it’s not supposed to happen in Malaysia.” The scenes of destruction sparked by the tidal waves shocked a country that — because of its geographical location — has no experience with earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes or other natural disasters that plague its neighbours.

Tidal wave chain reaction began beneath Indian Ocean

 
LONDON: The chain reaction that set off enormous, deadly tidal waves that struck six Asian nations yesterday started kilometres beneath the ocean floor off the tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Geologic plates pressing against each other slipped violently, creating a bulge on the sea bottom that could be as high as 10 metres and as long as 1,200 kilometres, one scientist said. “It’s just like moving an enormous paddle at the bottom of the sea,” said David Booth, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey, Britain’s geoscience agency. “A big column of water has moved, we’re talking about billions of tons. This is an enormous disturbance.” Moving at about 800 kilometres per hour, the waves probably took about two hours to reach Sri Lanka, where the human toll has been horrific, Booth said. But because the tidal waves known as tsunamis rarely occur in the Indian Ocean, there is no system in place to warn countries about to be hit as for nations in the Pacific, Booth said. “With 20-20 vision of hindsight, that’ll be reconsidered,” he said. An Australian scientist suggested in September that an Indian Ocean warning system be set up, but it takes a year to create one, Booth said.

He added that those living on the Indian Ocean were less likely than Pacific coastal dwellers to know the warning signs of a tidal wave about to hit — water receding unusually fast and far from the shore. Thousands died in the tidal waves in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh. The underwater earthquake, which the US Geological Survey put at magnitude 8.9, is the biggest since 1964, when a 9.2-magnitude temblor struck Alaska. “All the planet is vibrating” from the quake, Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy’s National Geophysics Institute, told Italian state radio. He likened its power to a million atomic bombs the size of those dropped on Japan in World War II, and said the shaking was so powerful it even disturbed the Earth’s rotation. Alessandro Amato, director of Italy’s national earthquake centre, said an effect on the rotation was possible but he did not know whether it had yet been established by the most sensitive instruments.

There were at least a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, one of magnitude 7.3. The quake occurred at a spot where two massive geological plates press against one another with enormous force, Booth said. The Indian Ocean plate is gradually being forced underneath Sumatra, which is part of the Eurasian plate, at approximately the speed at which a human fingernail grows, he explained. “This slipping doesn’t occur smoothly,” he said. Rocks along the edge stick against one another and pent-up energy builds over hundreds of years. It’s “almost like stretching an elastic band, and then when the strength of the rock isn’t sufficient to withstand the stress, then all along the fault line the rocks will move,” he said.

The quake probably occurred about 10 kilometres beneath the ocean floor, Booth said, causing the huge, step-like protrusion on the sea bed and the resulting tsunami. As the waves move across deep areas of the ocean, they may be almost undetectable on the surface, swells of about a metre or less. But when they near land, and the sea grows more shallow, the huge volumes of water are forced to the surface and the waves get higher and higher. “On the beach itself, the wave can be as much as 10 metres high,” Booth said. Indonesia is well-known as a major quake centre, sitting along a series of fault lines dubbed the “Ring of Fire.” But scientists are unable to predict where and when quakes will strike with any precision. The Sumatran temblor hit at 0059 GMT yesterday, Booth said. British detectors puts its magnitude at 8.6, compared to the 8.9 measured by US scientists. He said earthquakes resonate differently around the world and that it often takes time to calculate their true power. The force of the earthquake shook unusually far afield, causing buildings to sway hundreds kilometres from the epicentre, from Singapore to the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and in Bangladesh. Booth said instruments at his lab in Edinburgh, Scotland, detected tiny tremors resulting from the quake, although they were far too small for anyone in Britain to feel. He said it was not unusual for seismologists to pick up readings from large quakes that happen very far away.

Great earthquakes of the past

THE Wikipedia web site says great earthquakes occur once a year, on average. The largest recorded earthquake was the Great Chilean Earthquake of May 22, 1960 which had a magnitude of 9.5 on the Richter Scale. Between 490 to 2,290 were injured, 5,700 were killed and over half a billion dollars in damages resulted. Earthquakes measuring a magnitude of one to three are generally not felt; those between three to four are often felt but no damage results; a five magnitude is felt widely, with slight damage near the epicentre; damage to poorly constructed buildings and other structures usually occurs following an earthquake measuring a magnitude of six.

Major earthquakes are those with magnitudes of seven and above. The sevens cause serious damage up to 100 km; the eights are great earthquakes causing great destruction and loss of life over several 100 km, example the 1906 San Francisco and the 1949 on Queen Charlotte Islands. And the nines are very rare, great earthquakes resulting in major damage over a large region over 1000 km, example the 1960 Chilean earthquake, Alaska 1964 and on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada and Washington and Oregon, USA  in 1700. Earthquakes with magnitudes of 8.0 or greater occur at least once on average annually. Since the 1900s there have been 22 earthquakes measuring a magnitude of 8 and above. However in 1976, on July 27 in Tangshan, China an earthquake measuring 7.5 killed 255,000 and there were reports that the fatalities were estimated as high at 655,000. There were two other earthquakes which claimed a similar number of lives, that is 200,000. They were also in China, on December 16, 1920 in Ningxia-Kansu measuring 8.6, and May 22, 1927 in Tsinghai which measured 7.9.

The earthquake which came closest to yesterday’s 8.9 Asian quake, occurred on January 31, 1906 in Colombia, Ecuador. It measured 8.8 and claimed 1,000 lives. The Richter Scale was developed in 1935 by Charles Richter in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg, both of the California Institute of Technology. It was originally intended to be used only in a particular study area in California, and on seismograms recorded on a particular instrument, the Wood-Anderson torsion seismometre. Richter originally reported values to the nearest quarter of a unit, but later, decimal numbers were used. Richter’s motivation for creating the local magnitude scale was to separate the vastly larger number of smaller earthquakes from the relatively fewer larger earthquakes observed in California at the time. His inspiration for the technique was the stellar magnitude scale used in astronomy to describe the brightness of stars and other celestial objects. The Richter scale has no upper or lower limits, and magnitude should not be confused with intensity.

What is a tsunami?

A TSUNAMI is a sea wave of local or distant origin, that results from large scale seafloor displacements associated with large earthquakes, major submarine slides or exploding volcanic islands. One web site says tsunamis may travel unnoticed across the ocean for thousands of miles from their points of origin and build up to great heights over shallower water. Tsunamis are also called seismic sea waves and incorrectly, tidal waves.

Tsunami warnings are issued after earthquakes of 6.8 on the Richter Scale off shore Alaska or 5.7 on the Richter Scale offshore Western United States or British Columbia,  Canada. When such a warning is issued, it means persons must immediately evacuate low lying areas. Some of the Tsunamis recorded in recent years include: June 3, 1994 in East Java after a 7.2 earthquake killing 200 and November 15, 1994 in Mindoro after a 7.1 earthquake destroying 1530 homes and killing 41.