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Author Topic: Earthquake & Killer Tsunamis, Christmas 2004 Mark J. Marshall Film God Posts: 3188 From: New Castle, DE, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 12-27-2004 03:37 PM                    Holy Cow! Did you see the video of the waves coming in and just ripping through the towns? God, that must have been freaky. One geologist said that the earthquake actually affected the Earth's rotation. Health experts said that the diseases that will undoubtedly come about in Asia as a part of this will probably include things like polio, cholera, the avian flu, etc, and will likely be carried all over the world as a result of people coming to help and other people leaving to get away. Crazy crazy crazy stuff. My thoughts and prayers go out to the (at last count) 24,000+ victims and their families. Unbelieveable.  |  IP: Logged Paul Mayer Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under! Posts: 3836 From: Albuquerque, NM Registered: Feb 2000 posted 12-27-2004 04:50 PM                        Scary stuff ain't it? My brother and his wife bought a fixer-upper on the coast of Thailand last year. Fortunately their house is in Pattiya (her home town, about a 2-hour drive SE from Bangkok) and thus was shielded from these tsunamis by the Malay peninsula.  |  IP: Logged Randy Stankey Film God Posts: 6539 From: Erie, Pennsylvania Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-27-2004 05:23 PM                     Yeah, that was some pretty freaky stuff! I think George Bush ought to be the first guy to stand up and send some aid... Even if it means he sends only a couple of planes full of emergency relief supplies and a couple-few hundred troops for support. If he wants to claim ANY legitimacy for the things he's doing with the U.S. Armed Forces in other parts of the world he'd better be the first one to get some planes full of supplies on the ground. I don't care what you think about the things Bush is doing in other parts of the world. Right now, the priority is Indonesia (and surrounding) That's where *I* want my tax money spent.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-27-2004 07:08 PM                        Yeah, maybe other countries won't "hate us" so bad once they see the outpouring of help that's sure to shower that area in the next weeks. The Montana Red Cross is already collecting cash donations to send.  |  IP: Logged Phil Hill I love my cootie bug Posts: 7595 From: Hollywood, CA USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 12-27-2004 07:12 PM                  Nah, they'll "hate" us no matter what. We just need to unconditionally help those in need without worrying about what those assholes that hate us think. Fuck 'em! They being assholes should NOT dissuade us from helping people that are in need.  |  IP: Logged Randy Stankey Film God Posts: 6539 From: Erie, Pennsylvania Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-27-2004 07:50 PM                     I have no illusions about people in other countries hating the USA. People will either hate us or not. There's really nothing anybody can do to change that. It's called the "80-20 Rule". 20% of the people in the world will either love you or hate you no matter what. 10% will always hate you no matter how good you act. 10% will love you no matter how bad you are. 80% of the people in the world couldn't give a flyin' fuck one way or another! (Okay, I dramatize. But you get the point.) No, this isn't about "Image" or "Public Relations". It's about doing what's right and keeping a consistent message. If you go around saying that one thing you are doing is "The right thing to do" but, when there's obvious need in another area, you DON'T step up to the plate then there is no way you can claim legitimacy in any action you take from then on. I'm NOT trying to say that doing a good deed makes up for a bad one. In words that George Bush might use... This is more of a question of: * Don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash. * Put your money where your mouth is. * Put up or shut up. * Vote with your feet. And, in the words of Wilford Brimley, "It's the right thing to do!".  |  IP: Logged Mark J. Marshall Film God Posts: 3188 From: New Castle, DE, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 12-27-2004 09:47 PM                    You can rest assured that the US will spend probably ten times what everyone else will spend in aid between the government and private donations. We always do. Americans have a way of stepping up during crisis moments, even though just about everyone we've ever helped tends to forget about it in about six months and then demand that we spend more. No need to turn this into a political thread and get it locked. Help is on the way, I'm sure.  |  IP: Logged Randy Stankey Film God Posts: 6539 From: Erie, Pennsylvania Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-27-2004 10:48 PM                     I've got another question. Why was there no warning? The sea quake that hit off the coast of Indonesia caused a gigantic displacement of millions and millions and millions of tons of sea water which rippled through the ocean until it came ashore in places like Sri Lanka... One of the places in the world that can least afford a catastrophe like this. SURELY they could have had an early warning system of SOME KIND in place! It only took 2-3 hours for the shock waves to travel from the point of origin to the point of impact. That's not a lot of time, for sure, but in three hours, MANY lives could have been saved! No? I don't want to hear about how difficult it is to detect tsunamis! For $50 I could build you a tsunami detector out of materials you can find in your basement! Check out this article in Scientific American That article was published in 1998. Then, again, Sci Am published a FEATURE ARTICLE on tsunames in May 1999. Then, yet AGAIN, the SAME magazine published a 6 page article about undersea earthquakes and the tsunamis they can casue... IN MARCH, 2004... only 9 months ago! For sure, there's no way to know what Mother Nature will do next. But, for CRYIN' OUT LOUD! We DO know how to tell what happened, when it happened and we DO know what to do when it does happen! Y'Know... We've got people in one place fighting over a strip of land, 24 miles long, in the middle of a desert. (Gaza Strip) In another place, in the middle of the desert, there are bombs being dropped, day and night. (Iraq) But, for the lack of $50 worth of junk from some guy's basement and about an hour, sitting on the toilet, reading a magazine 15,000 people died because they couldn't tell whether or not there was a WAVE? "Bullshit!", I say!  |  IP: Logged William Hooper Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1879 From: Mobile, AL USA Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-28-2004 12:10 AM                        quote: Randy Stankey I've got another question. Why was there no warning? Because the tsunami warning systems don't include the Indian Ocean. There has never before been a recorded tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The NWS code for a tsunami watrning is TSW. If you see 6 letters coming across the teletype & the middle three are TSW, bring in the crab traps!  |  IP: Logged Paul Mayer Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under! Posts: 3836 From: Albuquerque, NM Registered: Feb 2000 posted 12-28-2004 12:14 AM                        Tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean so a warning network was never set up along the coasts there. Thailand for instance has a warning system in place, but only on the Pacific side. So Phuket, on the Indian Ocean side of the Malay Peninsula, got clobbered with no warning. Using 20/20 hindsight they'll probably get an Indian Ocean network installed now, especially since so many tourist spots have developed along that coast. Civil defense communications systems are essentially non-existant in any of the poor countries that line the Indian Ocean. So even if a tsunami were detected and a warning issued, there's no infrastructure in place to get the warning out to all those low-income, rural, fishing villages that line the coast. They'd still get clobbered without much warning. Communications could be improved, but the cost would be beyond what these countries can afford. Which means in the end the UN and the USA may get to pay for it. In the end it's cheaper to just lose 20,000+ mostly poor people to a tsunami once every hundred years or so. That's what the actuaries would say. BTW the east coast of the US faces a statistically similar tsunami threat. Guess what, there's no Atlantic tsunami warning network, even with such a huge population exposure. Imagine what that'll look like after a big seismic event off the coast of Africa someday.  |  IP: Logged Jeffrey Korns Film Handler Posts: 22 From: marion, ia, usa Registered: Oct 2004 posted 12-28-2004 12:22 AM                        The reason they did not detect the Tsunami is because they do not have detectors in the Indian Ocean. The Pacific is monitored by the US and Japan. The countries in the Indian ocean would rather spend money on arms or attempting to aquire nuclear weapons, or otherwise screwing the poor in their country. As for countries hating the US, well that's life. Some putz from the UN was already on the news complaining that the US isn't doing enough right now. Quite honestly, if the US told the UN most Americans wouldn't be too upset and would probably go to the pier at NY harbor and waive goodbye to the UN. Of course it's not in our country's best interest to do this (nothing altruistic or noble about it, it's just in our interest to aid other countries and maintain alliances).  |  IP: Logged Thomas Procyk Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1842 From: Royal Palm Beach, FL, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 12-28-2004 12:45 AM                     Four hurricanes hit Florida. Red Socks win the World Series. Mt. St. Helens goes apeshit. And now Tsunami-causing earthquakes. Methinks one of these "God" people everyone is talking about is mad. And not just mad, but really really pissed off at people. =TMP=  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 12-28-2004 12:49 AM                        What is "avian flu"? Is that the high-priced bottled flu? I want some! Sounds delicious! Oh yeah, next political comment gets this thread locked.  |  IP: Logged David Yauch Expert Film Handler Posts: 206 From: Mesa, AZ, USA Registered: Oct 2004 posted 12-28-2004 06:18 AM                     First off, my best wishes to all the family of the dead and those displaced by the disaster. But that's a little too mature to leave it, so I'll ask if you could write this phoenetically for me: quote: Paul Mayer Phuket  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 12-28-2004 10:29 AM                     Here's a major reason why there are no tsunami detection buoys in the Indian Ocean: things like safety regulations and warning systems are not important in third world countries. Few people over there want to spend any money for that kind of stuff. With little being spent on basic things like water and sewage infrastructure the cost of doing business is dirt cheap. Here in the United States we have all sorts of weather and marine warning systems, and lots of money is spent on continued improvements. We have a bunch of tornado sirens here in Lawton, but all the advanced Doppler radars and NOAA weather radios are making those sirens obsolete. The bright side is we make lots of serious efforts to try to save lives. These days if a major hurricane hits the United States we may lose a couple hundred lives (if even that) at the most. In the third world the death toll from a storm of equal strength is commonly measured in the thousands. One of the hurricanes that hit Florida this year killed nearly 4,000 people in Haiti. As of this writing, the death toll from the 9.0 earthquake and tsunamis is 33,000 and growing. It is estimated that children make up 1 out of every 3 victims. I guess the tennis shoe factories are going to have to start combing the play areas for more workers.  |  IP: Logged

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