Thai Tital wave in Phuket

[Guest]

Thailand ignored disaster warning

 

BANGKOK: -- The Thai Government was officially warned seven years ago that tsunamis stemming from an earthquake on the seabed could hit southwest Thailand, but the warning was ignored for fear of frightening off tourists and investors.

 

The veteran meteorologist who issued the warning, Samith Dhamasaroj, was called "crazy" by some, and sidelined to an inactive position from which he later resigned.

 

But now, after the Boxing Day catastrophe ? which by yesterday had cost 4812 lives in Thailand, half of them foreign tourists, and huge destruction of property ? he has been vindicated, and put in charge of establishing a nationwide early-warning system for all natural disasters.

 

He said yesterday that such a system would have saved 10to 50 per cent of the lives lost. Mr Samith, the former director general of the Thai Meteorological Department, told The Australian: "Seven years ago, as chief meteorological official, I predicted the possibility of an earthquake and tsunami in the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman Sea or around Sarawak.

 

"I suggested an early-warning system be put in place for tidal waves, such as alarm sirens at beachside hotels in Phuket, Phang Nga and Krabi, the three provinces which have now been hit. I alerted senior officials in these provinces, but no one paid any attention."

 

He said some provinces had even banned him from entering their territories because "they said I was damaging their image with foreign tourists". Thai sources said some senior provincial officials had dismissed him as "crazy".

 

The sources noted Mr Samith had been sidelined after his earlier warnings, the last issued in 1998. Mr Samith had stipulated at the time no hotels should be built closer than 300m from the sea, a recommendation that would have angered powerful economic forces in the region, the sources added.

 

But last Thursday, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra put Mr Samith in charge of establishing an advanced seismic and tsunami warning system for the whole nation. The brief would also take in other calamities such as storms and floods. He was named a vice-minister reporting directly to Mr Thaksin.

 

Mr Samith said that, after he felt the tremors in Phuket on December 26, he tried to get through to his successor at the Meteorological Department, an old friend, to ask that a tsunami warning be urgently issued ? but he was unable to reach him, and other weather bureau lines were blocked.

 

He said meteorological officials would not make a decision because they were afraid that, if they made a wrong forecast, someone would blame them. He said there would have been enough time for warnings after the earthquake struck at 8am, followed by the tsunamis about 9.15am.

 

"Even half an hour should have been enough," he said.

 

"Now we have this tragedy, and I am very sad, because 50 per cent, or at least 10 per cent, of the people who died could have been saved if there had been warnings."

 

Mr Samith said he had issued his alert seven years ago after studying information on the twin dangers of earthquakes and tsunamis, after studying material published in China, Japan and the US over the previous 25 years.

 

In announcing Mr Samith's appointment, Mr Thaksin, who faces an election on February 6, said: "Some may say we are putting up fences after the cows have gone.

 

"But there are still some cows left, and more will be coming, and we need to have a strong fence."

 

--news.com.au

 

-------------------------------

 

"Some may say we are putting up fences after the cows have gone. But there are still some cows left, and more will be coming, and we need to have a strong fence."

 

HT :: WTF???

 

>>>>Mr Samith said that, after he felt the tremors in Phuket on December 26, he tried to get through to his successor at the Meteorological Department, an old friend, to ask that a tsunami warning be urgently issued ? but he was unable to reach him, and other weather bureau lines were blocked.

 

He said meteorological officials would not make a decision because they were afraid that, if they made a wrong forecast, someone would blame them. He said there would have been enough time for warnings after the earthquake struck at 8am, followed by the tsunamis about 9.15am.<<<<

 

How telling is all of that? Typical Thai, or what? I really love these people, but sometimes you just want to bang your head up against the wall. :: and

[Zaad]

A few of my girl's uni. friends (dentists) went to help last week for a few days to take teeth impressions in order to indentify those who're in such a bad state that other forms of identification are nearly impossible or highly inaccurate. 2 of her friends went to Krabi and 2 others to Phangna.

 

Needless to say that the images they faced were terrible. Since the corpses were very stiff they needed to break the jaw and/or cut the cheeks open in order to take a decent impression. Tongue, gum etc were rotting and full of worms (their words) which didn't make the job easier.

 

Btw, since most Thais don't have a dental record most of their 'patients' were from foreign origin.

 

This is definitely a tough job for 'normal' dentists who're not trained nor qualified to face such experiences and not everybody has the stomach to digest those horrible images (my girl is one of them but I don't blame her) and I thank those who did go and help out.

[Guest]

Thailand just revised figures downward from 6,500 to 4,000 now believed missing there.

 

HT

[Guest lazyphil]

My Mrs called the bar owner from Patong we met, all in order there

[Guest lazyphil]

Zaad I cant blame your mrs declining to go, could scar one for life seeing these horrors

[Zaad]

Exactly.

 

I asked my girl if she wanted to join them but she refused after thinking and listening to her friends' experiences. One of her friends signed her named but never actually went there.

 

Those who did go told me they saw corpses (mostly children) with no head attached to it. Not sure if they took impressions of a detached head, but only that sight would make her feel miserable for a few good years.

[Guest]

HT, I posted the same story. Glad to see you are starting to see what I have been saying all along.

[Flashermac]

Tsunami Warning Failed to Get Through-Thai Expert

4 Jan 2005

 

 

PHUKET, Thailand (Reuters) - A Thai expert said on Monday he tried to warn the government a deadly tsunami might be sweeping toward tourist-packed beaches, but couldn't find anyone to take his calls.

 

Samith Dhammasaroj said he was sure a tsunami was coming as soon as he heard about the massive Dec. 26 earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island that measured magnitude 9.0 -- the world's biggest in 40 years.

 

"I tried to call the director-general of the meteorological office, but his phone was always busy," Samith said as he described his desperate attempts to generate an alert which might have saved thousands of lives.

 

"I tried to phone the office, but it was a Sunday and no-one was there," said the former chief of the meteorological department now charged with setting up an early warning disaster system for Thailand.

 

"I knew that one day we would have this type of tsunami. I warned that there would be a big disaster," he told reporters.

 

"Everyone laughed at me and said I was a bad guy who wanted to ruin the tourist industry," he added.

 

The tsunami took just 75 minutes to hit the beaches and islands of Thailand's Andaman Sea coast, 375 miles from the earthquake's epicenter.

 

Now more than 5,100 people are dead, nearly half of them foreign tourists who abandoned Europe's cold, dark winter for golden sands and turquoise seas, and left 3,800 missing, nearly 1,700 of them foreigners.

 

Downstairs from where he spoke, dozens of foreigners were still scanning message boards, trying to match grisly photos of bloated, battered bodies to the smiling pictures of missing friends and relatives.

 

"I feel very sorry for the people who died," Samith said. "I will make sure this thing does not happen again."

 

The early warning system for Thailand -- which has not had a natural disaster in living memory worse than floods during the annual monsoon -- would be ready in six months, Samith promised.

 

"We will make the system very efficient," he said.

 

ROARING SEA

 

Preliminary investigations by a team of six Japanese experts showed that the wall of water hit beaches along the Thai coast at different speeds and heights, with the phenomenon exacerbated by a high tide that fed the tsunami as it neared land.

 

Khao Lak beach, lined with hotels and resorts especially popular among Scandinavians and Germans just north of Phuket, took the worst hit from waves up to 10.5 meters (34 ft) high.

 

They roared up Khao Lak's gently sloping beach at speeds of up to 8 meters a second (29 kilometers an hour), said Professor Hideo Matsutomi, who led the Japanese team.

 

"There have been six major tsunami in this region since 1797, but I think this last tsunami was the biggest," he said.

 

Tsunami are much more frequent in the Pacific Ocean and countries there have long established an early warning system to protect them from disaster.

 

Samith said countries in the Indian Ocean had to follow suit and set up a network of underwater sea monitors which might cost as little as $20 million to build.

 

Warnings of imminent inundations would be sent out automatically on television and radio and by text messages to mobile phones.

 

The system would help woo back tourists scared away by the mass loss of life, Samith said.

 

"No-one can predict an earthquake, but you can predict a tsunami," he said. "We will build a good system."

 

"We will help tourists come back to Thailand."

[Flashermac]

New York Times

January 4, 2005

 

DISASTER DONATIONS

Gulf Arabs Wonder: Are They Being Stingy With Aid?

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

 

CAIRO, Jan. 3 - The newspaper Al Qabas in Kuwait set off a debate spreading throughout the country and beyond on Monday by suggesting that Kuwait deserves its reputation for being cheap and oblivious to people who go there to work as servants, given the relatively low level of aid it has donated to the tsunami victims at a time when the state treasury is bursting with an oil bonanza.

 

Noting that the bulk of the nannies, drivers, menial laborers and other servants who keep most households running in the emirate come from Southeast Asia - imported workers easily outnumber the native population - some Kuwaitis agree that the country and its Persian Gulf neighbors need to be doing much more.

 

But the campaign to shut down Islamic charities accused of financing terrorism has left many people confused about where to turn when they do want to donate money. And a few extremist Friday Prayer leaders and other religious commentators fueled the uncertainty by suggesting that the tsunami destruction was the wrath of God.

 

Gauging the extent of private donations for the region proved difficult because nobody seems to be collecting the information.

 

Many donations are channeled through the government-backed Red Crescent societies, but senior officials either did not return phone calls or said they were too busy to make a tally. There were random charitable acts around the region.

 

In an echo of the debate about skinflints that occurred in the United States over the government's level of aid, though, a front-page editorial in Al Qabas on Sunday said gulf Arabs had an obligation to dig deeper in their pockets for the people of Southeast Asia because of the longstanding ties between the two regions.

 

"We have to give them more; we are rich," Waleed al-Nusif, the editor in chief of Al Qabas, said in a telephone interview. "The price of oil doubled, so we have no excuse."

 

After the paper's editorial appeared, the Kuwaiti cabinet raised its announced donation on Sunday to $10 million, from $2 million, having previously doubled it.

 

Kuwait is expected to run a budget surplus this year of roughly $10 billion, and Mr. Nusif noted that the government had just distributed an estimated $700 million to the Kuwaiti people themselves, the public share of the unanticipated revenue.

 

He said Kuwait should give a minimum of $100 million, not least because many of the country's 1.29 million foreigners of a total population of 2.25 million come from the devastated regions.

 

"They built Kuwait, and they raised our children," said Mr. Nusif, noting that before successive oil booms, India and other countries opened their doors to Kuwaitis, who were then relatively poor. The paper also advised Kuwaitis to check with their housemaids to see if they wanted to phone home in case family members were dead or missing.

 

It was not the kind of reminder necessary for an older generation of Kuwaitis, Mr. Nusif said. "Our fathers were more generous than we are," he said. "They had suffered more."

 

The editorial became the hot topic in diwaniyas, the nightly salons where men gather to chew over the issues of the day.

 

"We should show more sympathy, especially since we have a budget surplus and these are our neighbors in Southeast Asia," said Saad al-Ajmi, a former Kuwaiti minister of information. He believes more private donations will be coming.

 

The Qabas editorial did not cite Kuwait alone in seeking to fatten donations. It said all the Arab gulf countries benefiting from huge oil revenues should give more.

 

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have each pledged $10 million, while Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, raised his country's cash contribution tenfold, to $20 million, on Monday night.

 

Most pledges from the gulf Arab nations were made in the first hours after the earthquake, and as the scale becomes apparent, more money will be pledged, officials said.

 

The Islamic Development Bank in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, said it would distribute $10 million in emergency aid to Indonesia, the Maldives, Somalia, Thailand, India and Sri Lanka. The Thai Embassy in Kuwait said some people were dropping by to give money, with one business phoning to say it wanted to bring $14,000.

 

The Kuwaiti Embassy in Jakarta announced that it was chartering a ship to deliver aid to devastated Aceh Province in Indonesia.

 

In Riyadh, the Saudi capital, Dr. Saleh al-Tuwaijri, vice president of the Saudi Red Crescent Society, said the government's $10 million donation would go directly to sister organizations in the affected countries.

 

He said that per capita giving in the gulf was generally high, but that ordinary citizens faced obstacles to making donations because so many private charities had been closed under American pressure on suspicion of helping finance terrorism. No replacement mechanism has been established, which makes public fund-raising difficult, he said.

 

In Kuwait, some charities drew fire by advertising that they were collecting money for Muslim victims. Indonesia, the hardest-hit country, is the most populous Muslim nation.

 

"I don't know why only Muslims, when disasters do not differentiate between religions in choosing their victims," Muhammad Mousaed al-Saleh, a columnist, wrote in Al Qabas. The daily paper published a religious ruling, saying that donating to non-Muslims is also permissible.

 

The view that wanton behavior provoked the quake was the subject of Friday sermons in Saudi Arabia and of other religious commentaries.

 

"Asia's earthquake, which hit the beaches of prostitution, tourism, immorality and nudity," one commentator said on an Islamist Web site, "is a sign that God is warning mankind from persisting in injustice and immorality before he destroys the ground beneath them."

 

Walid Tabtabai, a member of the Kuwaiti Parliament, said the earthquake was a message.

 

"We believe that what occurs in terms of disasters and afflictions is a test for believers and punishment for the unjust," he wrote in a column in the newspaper Al Watan.

 

[Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting for this article.]

[Guest]

Sounds typical

 

[color:"red"] "Everyone laughed at me and said I was a bad guy who wanted to ruin the tourist industry," he added. [/color]

 

even in the falang part of the world.