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Please God, not so many reminders
Dec. 26th, 2004 07:18 pmFive hundred reported dead this morning; ten thousand by the time I type this; when the toll is finally tallied, I'd be unsurprised if it hit 50,000.
1am on the night after Christmas day, or around lunchtime local time, about two hundred exajoules of strain (an exajoule is a unit roughly equal to six times the total explosive power of the largest H-bomb ever tested) were released from the plate boundary just east of the main islands of Indonesia.
Absolute worst-case situation: largest earthquake since 1964, in shallow water, in a region surrounded by densely-populated beaches and without the infrastructure for a Japan-scale early warning system. Tsaunami on a scale not seen since Krakatoa. The sea-surge caused serious flooding in the Seychelles, and capsized fishing boats off Somalia, further from the epicenter than I am from New York. Nobody seems to have reached Aceh, yet.
On the news this evening we had interviews with half a dozen English holiday-makers (including a couple of BBC reporters who'd been holidaying in Sri Lanka and the Maldives) talking about what had happened to them. But this is not the sort of event you can report on or react to; you can't hunt down the perpetrators, nor plausibly rebuild things proof against six-storey waves, nor hold tectonic plates in place with even arbitrary refinements of engineering. I'm sending the Red Cross a cheque tomorrow.
God, we know that there are things that human power cannot avert. We've read Plato's reports from Vesuvius and the articles from Batavia when Krakatoa exploded. We remember, already. Why remind us again?
1am on the night after Christmas day, or around lunchtime local time, about two hundred exajoules of strain (an exajoule is a unit roughly equal to six times the total explosive power of the largest H-bomb ever tested) were released from the plate boundary just east of the main islands of Indonesia.
Absolute worst-case situation: largest earthquake since 1964, in shallow water, in a region surrounded by densely-populated beaches and without the infrastructure for a Japan-scale early warning system. Tsaunami on a scale not seen since Krakatoa. The sea-surge caused serious flooding in the Seychelles, and capsized fishing boats off Somalia, further from the epicenter than I am from New York. Nobody seems to have reached Aceh, yet.
On the news this evening we had interviews with half a dozen English holiday-makers (including a couple of BBC reporters who'd been holidaying in Sri Lanka and the Maldives) talking about what had happened to them. But this is not the sort of event you can report on or react to; you can't hunt down the perpetrators, nor plausibly rebuild things proof against six-storey waves, nor hold tectonic plates in place with even arbitrary refinements of engineering. I'm sending the Red Cross a cheque tomorrow.
God, we know that there are things that human power cannot avert. We've read Plato's reports from Vesuvius and the articles from Batavia when Krakatoa exploded. We remember, already. Why remind us again?
