SE Asia Earthquake/Tsunami

[minionofmidas]

Over 2500 dead in Sri Lanka.
Over 2000 dead in India, a figure that, knowing India, will be corrected upwards hugely.
That 2000 figure includes 1300 in Tamil Nadu, 300 in Andhra Pradesh, 300 in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands (where one official has already gone on record saying that the final tally will probably be over 1000), 100 in Kerala.
I've been to four different beach towns in Tamil Nadu - Mamallapuram, Pondicherry, Thiruchendur, Kannyakumari, plus Varkkela in Kerala - and obviously I have no way of knowing whether everybody I've seen and spoken to there is still alive.
ing hell.

[minionofmidas]

Yeah, just read "over 10,000 dead, thousands more missing" somewhere.
MEanwhile, on ZDF, they are talking via phone to one of their employees who happened to be vacationing at Ao Nang, Thailand, and was on the way to the beach when the wave struck.

[minionofmidas]

over 12,000 now

I agree with you Patrick. It was reported on CNN that those areas that were hit didn't have any U.S. interests that were damaged. I thought that was rather cold. I could care less if several U.S. interests over there were destroyed. It's the people, not things, that are most important!

No US interests? How about American tourists? There should have been thousands Americans on the danger, though only three have been reported dead.

Disasters are always noticed better if they hit fellow countrymen or people who are culturally close. For example a Finnish media notices fairly well all disasters, but attention is much bigger if they hit in the Western World or hurt Western people. This time the media attension is bigger than usually, because there are several thousands Finnish tourists in the area.

It think that European media notices disasters if they hurt Western people generally, but American media only if they hurt Americans.

You think our media are bad in that respect?
While I was in India there was one of those panics that sometimes happen during the Hajj, kinda like Heysel or Hillsborough but more common. The number killed was something in the nineties, IIRC.
The Deccan Herald's headline was "Two Indians amond Hajj Panic Victims".

[minionofmidas]

24,000 dead.
Strongest earthquake in forty years, btw - and it happened on the first anniversary of the Bam earthquake, which killed a similar number of people although it was much weaker - but it's epicentre was right by a major city.
I'd totally forgotten this, remembered it today out of the blue, but a friend of my parents' was in Ciudad de Mexico during the earthquake there in 1985, told us a bit about it afterwards. I was six.

[minionofmidas]

Possibly, but they are so rare there, nobody really thought about it.  It's like a hurricane hitting Cornwall.  Yes, it has happened, but exceptionally rarely.

Not the point: a destructive plate boundary borders the Indian Ocean. There have been several extremely destructive Tsunamis in that Ocean in the past, rare yes but they do happen every now and again, and the area is heavily populated and the seaboards tend to be fairly low lying.

Governments look and say, do we want to spend $5 Billion for tsunami warning, or to we wish to improve healthcare and sanitation and stop epidemics?  The choice between the two, even in terms of human like, is clear.

They look at that choice and then they say: Hmmm, I dunno. That's awfully hard.
Maybe we'll just have a few nuclear reactors and some overpriced shoddily-built privately contracted roads instead.
(ends sarcasm)
Helmut Kohl is vacationing on Sri Lanka.

[minionofmidas]

Helmut Kohl is vacationing on Sri Lanka.

No comment

I meant, like, right now.

[minionofmidas]

I've seen it said as many as 80,000 people may have been killed all in all.
Here's one for Opebo: Thanks to the Tsunami, the ban for foreigners on travelling in Aceh has been lifted.

[minionofmidas]

Also hundreds Swedes are missing.

Al, Lewis, Jens, Bono and Hugento?  Have you any numbers about your countrymen? And how about Americans and Canadians?

There were some Germans who died...I don't care about the exact number except inasmuch as its a minuscule part of the whole.

[minionofmidas]

I've seen it said as many as 80,000 people may have been killed all in all.

Looks like it could wind up being the worst earthquake caused Tsunami on record (Krackatau and Tambora caused Tsunamis killed way more)

The Krakatau Tsunami killed an estimated 36,000, I read somewhere. Obviously, that would be a higher share of the area's population, though. (And Krakatau killed more people, in other ways - by causing harvests to fail.)

[minionofmidas]

Also hundreds Swedes are missing.

Al, Lewis, Jens, Bono and Hugento?  Have you any numbers about your countrymen? And how about Americans and Canadians?

There were some Germans who died...I don't care about the exact number except inasmuch as its a minuscule part of the whole.

Well I think it's natural to be worried for fellow countrymen.  This could be worst disaster to my country since WWII.

It's probably different from a smaller country's perspective. I don't feel I have that much more in common with most Germans than with people all around the world. Plus, there have been disasters (and a terrorist attack, on Djerba) in recent years where Germans made up a disproportionate share of the victims - Airplane crashes, mostly. It's not the case now, and although you do see "European tourists among the dead", "including four Germans" (in Sri Lanka alone) etc, it's not the media's main selling angle.

[minionofmidas]

It probably depends on who does the estimate - since historical estimates of population outside Europe and a few other regions such as China vary extremely widely.

[minionofmidas]

Just watched quite a bit of news, and they're talking more about German victims now than they were yesterday. Seems that, of the ca.1500 people killed in Thailand, as many as two thirds were Western tourists...for example, there's this one resort hotel with about four hundred guests, about half of them German (the owner - they had him on TV - is a Germany-raised Turk) that got pretty much destroyed, with over a hundred of the guests dead.

[minionofmidas]

There were fairly large after shocks today between 4.0 and 5.5.

One of them right in the Andaman Islands.

[minionofmidas]

Myanmar aka Burma has reported only 36 dead. The country is damn dictatorship. I'm sure that there are much more casualties, but they simply don't care.

Not sure...Bangladesh had only three. The Northern part of the Bay of Bengal was obviously not very hard hit by the wave.
Still, I wouldn't rule it out. That strip down in the Sutheast (which is also home to an ethnic and religious minority, the Muslim Arakan.) should have seen quite some damage.

[minionofmidas]

114,000 and rising (80,000 in Aceh).

Oh and guess what? A volcano in the Andaman islands (est. 10,000 killed by Tsunami) has just started to erupt...

I knew quite a few people in Bangalore who had family in the Andamans...
Also quite a few travellers who had gone there or intended to (not that any of these would still be there now)...
They wee seen by many middle-class SOuth Indians as something of the Next Big Thing in Asian mass tourism. Wonder what's going to happen to those dreams...
While the Nicobars were apparently truly wild country...with that one island there, Sentinel, that has never established relations with the British or the Indian authorities...