This tragedy is really numbing me and a similiar reaction came from passengers last night. Most everyone was subdued and unable to describe their feelings nor comprehend the scale of the thing.
Including a sombre American Express employee. He told me he'd spent the last 2 days attempting to contact their members travelling in Asia with offers of assistance. The only success he was having was with some members who had 'roaming' on their mobiles. And no contact at all from the Maldives travellers.
Overall, he was getting a low contact rate and was obviously troubled by this. As Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer has warned, be prepared for more bad news.
That's pretty ominous news about the AmEx employees. The damage only extended a mile or two in-land. As a result, communications out have probably been re-established in places like Thailand and Sri Lanka. It's not like an earthquake that would've brought down cell-phone towers, and would've flatten everything in a town. It is so disheartening and soul-wearying to see the number of dead rise everyday by the amounts that they do.
It's funny which stories will strike a chord in a person. For me, one of those was about the 3 US government employees who were at work on Christmas day at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Their monitors picked up the massive quake, and they knew exactly what was to follow. They'd called anyone in the area that they could think of. However, none of those countries had that ONE telephone number to call. You just know that, in the futrue, each of these three will ask themselves if they did all that they could that day.
Source link...
Posted by: David Crawford | December 30, 2004 at 03:28 PM
David, this bloke was attempting to contact card holders, not employees, which is even more ominous.
Whilst transmission towers on prominent hills may remain intact, it's their underground cable links and exchanges which are destroyed in low lying areas. Plus I suspect fibre-optic cable rollout in these areas has not been done. Though I'm unsure if even they are fully resistant to water damage. Hence, only phones utilising full radio-telephone or satellite links are operational.
Regarding the abject lack of early-warning communications in the region, this is just as much a tragedy as the event itself. To think of the life-saving, time delay involved between the quake and the approaching waves...yet they never knew it was coming ! Why couldn't CNN or BBC World News have been coopted ?
Speaking of which, the first early warning was last week with the quake in the Southern Ocean, off Maquarie Island. So the world quake monitoring system at large, if indeed one even exists, could be considered cupable of a gross miscalculation. Don't they talk to each other ?
Posted by: adrian | December 30, 2004 at 05:02 PM
Adrian, the saddest, most infuriating aspect of an early-warning system hinges on one simple point. The effected areas didn't require a massive evacuation. All they required was people moving a mile or two in-land. A lousy one mile walk, that's all. It takes 10 to 20 minutes to walk that distance.
In Japan, they are taught from an early age that, if they feel an earthquake, then they need to walk away from the coast.
Would an early warning system have helped in Sumatra or Aceh? No, I doubt it, the tsunami was on them in less than an hour. In Thailand, Sri Lanka, or India? Yes, of course it would've.
I don't know. I'm so sad, and angry, that three guys sitting in Hawaii knew exactly what was coming and could find no one to warn in those contries, although they tried very hard to.
Posted by: David Crawford | December 30, 2004 at 09:46 PM