My thoughts and condolences to those who were affested by the tsunami disaster.
On that lazy sunday afternoon, I received an SMS from a friend who was in Penang. It simply says "Sudden high tide hit penang. Beach flooded". I ignored the message thinking it was one of those end of the year torrential storm. Only later in the afternoon when I switched on the cable TV I realized what actualy happened. I tried calling my friend but the line was congested... even sms sent was not replied.
As i watched the destruction in India Sri Lanka and Phuket, I couldn't compute that a tsunami has hit our shores in Penang particularly. Infact just a week before I was storlling on Ferringhi Beach, watching the Penang International Jetski Competition. In fact I had fun jetsking in penang . Had the earthquake struck one week earlier, i would have had myself with the jetski landed in starbucks somewhere near Gurney Drive!
I have always been a fan of natural disaster documentaries, be it on Discovery Channel or National Geographic... volanoes, earthquake, tornadoes. Again, I tried to compute the situation... it is like your computer program was hit by a "devide-by-zero" error. It just doesnt make sense at all.
The report on Malaysia came only on National News at 8pm. A politician came out with a statement saying that the government should have installed an early warning system. Utter bullshit. No one, even the experts have forecasted this event.. at least not in Malaysia. Had someone proposed such system a year ago, the proposal would be the first to be in the thrash can. The same would happen if I were to propose a near earth asteroid monitoring system. The authorities would probably say I have been watching Frodo saving earth from Deep Impact and and Bruce Willis dying harder to bring Armageddon to a meteor too many times. But still, the threat is still there... are we going to wait for another Tunguska to happen in our backyard before we take action?
Im not against the creation of the ealy warning system. Infact I do hope ASEAN would work together with geology experts from Japan, United States, Indonesia and Philippines to establish a regional seismology center. As the debate on the early warning system wages on, other camps debate on why the disaster happen. Religious scholars said it was the wrath of God while others dismissed it as natural disaster. After all, earthquakes have been happening all this while and it is part of living earth's evolution. Each and every day thousands of seismic activity occour. In 1883 it was the Krakatoa, 2004 its the deadly Sumatra tsunami. In fact two days before the Boxing day tragedy, an 8.1 under water earthquake occured south of the Australian island of Tasmania. No casualties was recorded in that incident.
I wonder if the incident have any connection with the tsunami disaster. Afterall they are conected on the same ring of fire. Who knows what would happen next?
What happened to my friend you might ask? He's alive and kicking, back in town with first hand account of the incident coupled with a few photos and video clips.
It has many moons I have not come to your blog.
I read that one Indonesian officer had already proposed to get Japanese Aid to set tsunami alert system for Indonesia in 1992.It cost only USD 2m but the proposal got drown in government bureaucracy:-(
I agree that nobody could have predicted that tsunami will attack Malaysia. A Thai officer said the last tsunami in Thailand happened 300 years ago.
Posted by: Abedib | Saturday, January 15, 2005 at 13:19