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[SBD]

Indonesia Earthquake Sparks Tidal Waves Across Asia, Killing More Than 2,200 People in 5 Nations
The Associated Press

Dec. 26, 2004 - The world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years triggered massive tidal waves that slammed into villages and seaside resorts across Asia on Sunday, killing more than 2,200 people in five countries.

Tourists, fishermen, homes and cars were swept away by walls of water unleashed by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake, centered off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Government and hospital officials both in Sri Lanka and India said 1,000 people had been killed in each of those countries. More than 200 were reported killed in Indonesia, 61 in Thailand and 10 in Malaysia. Hundreds were reported missing, and the death toll was expected to rise.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was a magnitude-8.9. Geophysicist Julie Martinez said it was the world's fifth-largest since 1900 and the largest since a 9.2 quake hit Prince William Sound Alaska in 1964.

The effects of the quake reverberated throughout the region, as waves as high as 20 feet crashed into coastal villages over a wide area.

In Sri Lanka some 1,000 miles west of the quake's epicenter officials and hospital doctors said 1,000 people had died. They warned that the death toll was likely to rise. Military spokesman Brig. Daya Ratnayake confirmed up to 500 had died. He said a higher toll would not surprise him.

A wall of water slammed into southern India, killing about 1,000 people, mostly in Tamil Nadu state, Home Minister Shivraj Patil said.

Hospital and local officials said the death toll on Indonesia's Sumatra island was 201 people.

Communications were down in several coastal towns facing the epicenter of the undersea quake off the western coast of the island's Aceh Province, raising fears of widespread and as yet unreported damage on the island.

Martinez blamed the tidal waves on the quake.

"This is not unusual occurrence for an earthquake this size and where it's located," said geophysicist Julie Martinez.


Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2004 ABC News Internet Ventures


SBD

[happyday]

Just an update, the last numbers I saw on the toll had become 10 times the one you reported, and is expected to climb as more information comes in.

The people affected have my prayers.
_________________
God Bless America, and God Bless the Swiftees!

[noc]

Bodies Piled on Asian Coasts After Tsunami Kills 22,700

Mon Dec 27, 2004 01:22 PM ET

By Chamintha Thilakarathna

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7186226

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - Rescuers scoured the sea for missing tourists and fishermen in Asia Monday and fears of disease grew as emergency services struggled with rotting bodies from a devastating tsunami that killed more than 22,700 people.

The disaster spared no one. Western tourists were killed sunbathing on beaches, poor villagers drowned in homes by the sea and fishermen died in flimsy boats. The 21-year-old grandson of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej was killed on a jet-ski.

"We have a long way to go in collecting bodies," said Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who expected the 866 death toll in his country to go much higher. One Thai official estimated up to 30 percent of the dead were foreigners.

Hundreds were buried in mass graves in India while hospitals and morgues in Sri Lanka and Indonesia struggled to cope with injured and bewildered victims and bloated corpses.

"It smells so bad ... The human bodies are mixed in with dead animals like dogs, fish, cats and goats," said Marine Colonel Buyung Lelana, head of an evacuation team in Indonesia's Aceh province on the island of Sumatra.

Sri Lanka was hardest hit by the tsunami -- a wall of water triggered by the world's biggest earthquake in 40 years with a magnitude of 9.0 that erupted off the northern Indonesian coast.

...cont.

[blue9t3]

I'm taking bets on how long it will be before GWB,US,and global warming will be the cause of this act of nature, and how much aid will France be offering since they are fond of muslims? May God help those poor souls.
_________________
MOPAR-BUYER

[Doc Farmer]

[chemical_boy]

http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewNation.asp?Page=\Nation\archive\200412\NAT20041228a.html

[scotty61]

U.N. official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid


By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


The Bush administration yesterday pledged $15 million to Asian nations hit by a tsunami that has killed more than 22,500 people, although the United Nations' humanitarian-aid chief called the donation "stingy."
"The United States, at the president's direction, will be a leading partner in one of the most significant relief, rescue and recovery challenges that the world has ever known," said White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy.
But U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.






"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become."
"There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy," he said, adding that politicians in the United States and Europe "believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It's not true. They want to give more." In response to Mr. Egeland's comments, Mr. Duffy pointed out that the United States is "the largest contributor to international relief and aid efforts, not only through the government, but through charitable organizations. The American people are very giving."
Offers of aid have poured in from around the world in the past two days, with the European Union's executive arm releasing $4 million in emergency aid and pledging an additional $27 million. Canada and several European nations — including Spain, Germany, Ireland and Belgium — each pledged about $1 million yesterday. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell hinted that the $15 million U.S. offer was only the first installment of a larger aid package to those countries devastated by 30-foot waves triggered by a massive underwater earthquake.
"We also have to see this not just as a one-time thing," he said. "Some 20-plus thousand lives have been lost in a few moments, but the lingering effects will be there for years.
"The damage that was caused, the rebuilding of schools and other facilities will take time," he added. "So you need a quick infusion to stabilize the situation, take care of those who have been injured, get immediate relief supplies in, and then you begin planning for the longer haul."
If that planning calls for significant food aid, the United States might have to scramble.
"Even before the crisis in the Asia-Pacific region and the Indian Ocean, the demands for food aid were stretching capacity: demands in Sudan, demands in West Africa, demands in other areas hit by drought and fighting," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said.
"So even though we're giving a lot, the demand is very high," he added. "We're going to have to look at, as we move forward, what we can do to meet that demand."
Money and food are not the only types of aid being sent by the Bush administration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) also is sending a 21-member disaster-relief team to the region.
Also, the Pentagon has dispatched military patrol planes from the Pacific Fleet. President Bush has written letters of condolence to seven of the affected nations — Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, the Maldives and Malaysia.
Besides the United States, the largest single national donor was neighboring Australia, which offered $10 million and transportation aid.
"Australia will and should give more," Prime Minister John Howard said.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies made an initial appeal of $6.7 million, which the federation says it will probably increase.
Officials from relief agencies, including the Red Cross and other nongovernmental organizations, met yesterday in Geneva to coordinate their efforts. In New York, diplomats from six of the affected nations met with U.N. officials.
The United Nations and other aid organizations have deployed hundreds of disaster-recovery and humanitarian-response teams to the region, and officials warn that the cost of the disaster could quickly reach "many billions of dollars."
"We may only know the full effect of this emergency weeks from now," Mr. Egeland told reporters yesterday at the United Nations in New York. "The disaster affecting Southeast Asia is not the biggest in recorded history, but the effects could be the biggest because more people live in exposed areas than ever before."
The tsunami-ravaged nations are particularly susceptible to epidemics as authorities struggle with thousands of corpses in unsanitary conditions. International organizations and nations including France, Japan, Israel, Kuwait, Hungary and others are sending medical personnel to some or all of the affected countries.
"The principal danger is that of diseases transmitted through water, especially malaria and diarrhea, and infections caught through respiration," said Hakan Sandbladh, a Red Cross official in Geneva.
Groups such as Doctors Without Borders warned that catastrophes tend to help localized illnesses turn into full-blown epidemics.
The destruction of water and sewage pipes, the disruption of vaccination programs and the lack of attention to disease-carrying pests such as rats and mosquitoes exacerbated the risk, they said.
In this situation, the stagnant pools of water created by the tsunami could boost the numbers of mosquitoes and other insects that transmit tropical maladies such as malaria and dengue fever.
"The risk of epidemics is also linked to concentrations of people whose houses have been destroyed," said Pauline Horrill of Doctors Without Borders.
Meanwhile, Agence France-Presse reported that a tsunami alert system in Hawaii that warns Pacific countries about devastating tidal waves detected the earthquake that led to the destruction across Indian Ocean nations.
But the absence of an alert system in Asia meant the information could not be sent out fast enough.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, established in 1949 after a huge wave killed more than 150 people in Hawaii, issued a bulletin at 3:14 p.m. local time or 8:14 a.m. in the affected area, when it detected an earthquake off Indonesia.
The NOAA's information bulletin said there was a possibility of a tsunami near the earthquake's epicenter, but that no destructive threat existed in the Pacific. The huge tidal waves instead swept across the Indian Ocean, killing people in 10 countries from Indonesia to Somalia.
• Betsy Pisik, reporting from the United Nations in New York, contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.

The US is "stingy" because we give 15 million. The EU gives 4 million and is not. Although the EU has pledged another 27 million or a total of 31 million, they have a population that is about double that of the US. Thus the per capita is about the same as our 15 million. This retard wants us to raise our taxes so we can give two or three times as much per person than anyone else. This does not include the millions that Americans give through independent means. This is pretty ballsy talk after the oil-for-food scandal. Yet they can't figure out why we don't trust them with our money. I think we need to send some old war horse like Al Haig to b*tch slap this guy until he comes to his senses.
_________________
John Kerry. A Neville Chamberlain for our times.

[srmorton]

On the contrary, tragic, weather-related events like this remind me
how insignificant man is compared to the power of nature. I have a
MA degree in Biology and teach Biology, among other things, at our
local community college. Naturally, I believe in conservation and in
clean air, clean water, etc., but the popular belief that the actions of
man can truly "destroy" the earth is a myth. Man can make a mess,
that's for sure, but our technology for cleaning up our messes is only
getting better and better.

In my classes, I try not to get too political (which is frowned on by
the administration), but I do emphasize the scientific method and
tell my students to always examine very carefully the data behind
any scientific claim they see advocated in print or on the air. There
is just as much evidence against the theory of global warming as
there is in support of it, but that evidence is not given a fair hearing
due to the political bias of much of the MSM. In fact, much of the
evidence in support of global warming is not true observational
evidence at all, but computer-based models that often were created
by those with an agenda. I tell them that scientific data is neutral
and that the same data can be interpreted in entirely different ways
by scientists who have different objectives in mind. It would be nice
if scientists were always completely objective in their analyses, but
they are often guided by whomever is paying for their research. The
radical environmentalists have very deep pockets and they fund
much of the research in this area. Rush has rightly termed them the
new socialists. They have managed to get away with it in the past
because politicians are reluctant to criticize those who are advocating
clean air and clean water, even if their proposals violate personal
property rights, and, in some cases, the sovereignty of the United
States.

One only has to look at the power of this earthquake and the tsunami
that followed to be reminded that man is powerless to cause or to
prevent natural disasters such as these. Man can establish an early
warning system, but there is no way to prevent these acts of nature.
Apparently, scientists in the US were able to predict the tsunami once
the earthquake occurred and they did put out a bulletin within about
20 minutes, but there is no ocean monitoring system in the Indian
Ocean. Even if there had been, the first wave hit Sumatra within
minutes after the earthquake and Thailand within an hour.

It reminds me of Psalms 8:3, "When I consider Your heavens, the
work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in
place, what is man that You are mindful of him, the son of man that
you care for him?"
_________________
Susan R. Morton