JESUS SAID THERE WOULD BE "GREAT EARTHQUAKES" IN OUR DAY!
This week, in our bible reading program, we are concluding our reading of the book of Matthew. Curiously, Jesus said concerning the time of the end for our day, the following:
"For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be food shortages and earthquakes in one place after another. All these things are a beginning of pangs of distress." -- Matthew 24:7, 8
The bible account of Luke 21:11 renders this same thought, this way by saying,
"...and there will be GREAT EARTHQUAKES, and in one place after another pestilences and food shortages..."
Yes, "Great Earthquakes," Jesus said would come to pass in our day and time. With that thought in mind, let's pay attention to the following news headline which just occurred, on this very subject.
Source of Article
ASIAN QUAKES' TSUNAMI KILL MORE THAN 7,000
By LELY T. DJUHARI
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - The world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years triggered massive tidal waves that slammed into villages and seaside resorts across southern and southeast Asia on Sunday, killing more than 7,000 people in six countries.
Tourists, fishermen, homes and cars were swept away by walls of water up to 20 feet high that swept across the Bay of Bengal, unleashed by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake centered off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
In Sri Lanka, 1,000 miles west of the epicenter, more than 3,000 people were killed, the country's top police official said. At least 1,870 died in Indonesia, and 1,900 along the southern coasts of India. At least 198 were confirmed dead in Thailand, 42 in Malaysia and 2 in Bangladesh.
But officials expected the death toll to rise dramatically, with hundreds reported missing and all communications cut off to Sumatran towns closest to the epicenter. Hundreds of bodies were found on various beaches along India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, and more were expected to be washed in by the sea, officials said.
The rush of waves brought to sudden disaster to people carrying out their daily activities on the ocean's edge: Sunbathers on the beaches of the Thai resort of Phuket were washed away; a group of 32 Indians - including 15 children - were killed while taking a ritual Hindu bath to mark the full moon day; fishing boats, with their owners clinging to their sides, were picked up by the waves and tossed away.
``All the planet is vibrating'' from the quake, said Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute. Speaking on SKY TG24 TV, Boschi said the quake even disturbed the Earth's rotation.
The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at a magnitude of 8.9. Geophysicist Julie Martinez said it was the world's fifth-largest since 1900 and the largest since a 9.2 temblor hit Prince William Sound Alaska in 1964.
On Sumatra, the quake destroyed dozens of buildings - but as elsewhere, it was the wall of water that followed that caused the most deaths and devastation.
Tidal waves leveled towns in the province of Aceh on Sumatra's northern tip, the region closest to the epicenter. An Associated Press reporter saw bodies wedged in trees as the waters receded. More bodies littered the beaches.
Health ministry official Els Mangundap said 1,876 people had died across the region, including some 1,400 in the Aceh provincial capital, Banda Aceh. Communications to the town had been cut.
Relatives went through lines of bodies wrapped in blankets and sheets, searching for dead loved ones. Aceh province has long been the center of a violent insurgency against the government.
The worst known death toll so far was in Sri Lanka, where a million people were displaced from wrecked villages. Some 20,000 soldiers were deployed in relief and rescue and to help police maintain law and order. Police chief, Chandra Fernando said at least 3,000 people were dead in areas under government control.
``It is a huge tragedy,'' said Lalith Weerathunga, secretary to the Sri Lankan prime minister. ``The death toll is going up all the time.'' He said the government did not know what was happening in areas of the northeast controlled by Tamil Tiger rebels.
An AP photographer saw two dozen bodies along a four-mile stretch of beach, some of children entangled in the wire mesh used to barricade seaside homes. Other bodies were brought up from the beach, wrapped in sarongs and laid on the road, while rows of men and women lined the roads asking if anyone had seen their relatives.
Around one million people were displaced from their homes, Weerathunga said.
In India, beaches were turned into virtual open-air mortuaries, with bodies of people caught in the tidal wave being washed ashore.
In Tamil Nadu state, just across the straits from Sri Lanka, 1,567 people were killed, said the state's top elected official, Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa.
Another 200 died in neighboring Andhra Pradesh state, 102 in Pondicherry and 28 others in Kerala and elsewhere, according to the governments in each state.
``I was shocked to see innumerable fishing boats flying on the shoulder of the waves, going back and forth into the sea, as if made of paper,'' said P. Ramanamurthy, 40, who lives in Andra Pradesh's Kakinada town. ``I had never imagined anything like this could happen.''
The huge waves struck around breakfast time on the beaches of Thailand's beach resorts - probably Asia's most popular holiday destination at this time of year, particularly for Europeans fleeing the winter cold - wiping out bungalows, boats and cars, sweeping away sunbathers and snorkelers, witnesses said.
``Initially we just heard a bang, a really loud bang,'' Gerrard Donnelly of Britain, a guest at Phuket island's Holiday Inn, told Britain's Sky News. ``We initially thought it was a terrorist attack, then the wave came and we just kept running upstairs to get on as high ground as we could.''
``People that were snorkeling were dragged along the coral and washed up on the beach, and people that were sunbathing got washed into the sea,'' said Simon Clark, 29, a photographer from London vacationing on Ngai island.
On Phi Phi island - where ``The Beach'' starring Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed - 200 bungalows at two resorts were swept out to sea.
``I am afraid that there will be a high figure of foreigners missing in the sea and also my staff,'' said Chan Marongtaechar, owner of the PP Princess Resort and PP Charlie Beach Resort.
Indonesia, a country of 17,000 islands, is prone to seismic upheaval because of its location on the margins of tectonic plates that make up the so-called the ``Ring of Fire'' around the Pacific Ocean basin.
The Indonesian quake struck just three days after an 8.1 quake struck the ocean floor between Australia and Antarctica, causing buildings to shake hundreds of miles away but no serious damage or injury.
Quakes reaching a magnitude 8 are very rare. A quake registering magnitude 8 rocked Japan's northern island of Hokkaido on Sept. 25, 2003, injuring nearly 600 people. An 8.4 magnitude tremor that stuck off the coast of Peru on June 23, 2001, killed 74.
Associated Press reporters Dilip Ganguly and Gemunu Amarasinghe in Colombo, Sri Lanka, K.N. Arun in Madras, India, and Sutin Wannabovorn in Phuket, Thailand, contributed to this report.
12/26/04 10:12
Jesus Said There Would Be "Great Earthquakes"!
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Jesus Said There Would Be "Great Earthquakes"!
"He that is from God listens to the sayings of God..." -- John 8:47
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Jesus said there will be GREAT EARTHQUAKES!
Scientists: Asia Earthquake Disturbed Earth's Rotation
Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute, said the quake's power was equal to a million atomic bombs.
TIDAL WAVE BEGAN BENEATH INDIAN OCEAN
Source of Article
By BETH GARDINER
LONDON (AP) - The chain reaction that sent enormous, deadly tidal waves crashing into the coasts of Asia and Africa on Sunday started more than six miles beneath the ocean floor off the tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Geologic plates pressing against each other slipped violently, creating a bulge on the sea bottom that could be as high as 10 yards and hundreds of miles long, one scientist said.
``It's just like moving an enormous paddle at the bottom of the sea,'' said David Booth, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey. ``A big column of water has moved, we're talking about billions of tons. This is an enormous disturbance.''
Moving at about 500 mph, the waves took more than two hours to reach Sri Lanka, where the human toll has been horrific, and longer to spread to India and the east coast of Africa.
And because such tidal waves rarely occur in the Indian Ocean, there is no system in place to warn coastal communities they are about to be hit, such as exists in the Pacific, Booth said.
``With 20-20 vision of hindsight, that'll be reconsidered,'' he said.
An Australian scientist had suggested in September that an Indian Ocean warning system be set up, but it takes a year to create one. Also, those living along the Indian Ocean's shores were less likely than Pacific coastal dwellers to know the warning signs of an impending tidal wave - water receding unusually fast and far from the shore, Booth said.
Thousands were killed in countries from Indonesia to Somalia.
The underwater quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey put at magnitude 9.0, was the biggest since 1964, when a 9.2-magnitude temblor struck Alaska, also touching off tsunami waves. There were at least a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, one of magnitude 7.3.
Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute, likened the quake's power to detonating a million atomic bombs the size of those dropped on Japan during World War II, and said the shaking was so powerful it even disturbed the Earth's rotation.
``All the planet is vibrating'' from the quake, he told Italian state radio. Other scientists said it was early too say whether the rotation was affected by the quake.
The earthquake occurred at a spot where the Indian Ocean plate is gradually being forced underneath Sumatra, which is part of the Eurasian plate, at about the speed at which a human fingernail grows, Booth explained.
``This slipping doesn't occur smoothly,'' he said. Rocks along the edge stick against one another and pent-up energy builds over hundreds of years.
It's ``almost like stretching an elastic band, and then when the strength of the rock isn't sufficient to withstand the stress, then all along the fault line the rocks will move,'' he said.
Indonesia is well-known as a major quake center, sitting along a series of fault lines dubbed the ``Ring of Fire.'' But scientists are unable to predict where and when quakes will strike with any precision.
The force of Sunday's earthquake shook unusually far afield, causing buildings to sway hundreds of miles from the epicenter, from Singapore to the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and in Bangladesh.
The quake probably occurred about 6.2 miles beneath the ocean floor, causing the huge, step-like protrusion on the sea bed and the resulting tidal waves.
As the waves moved across deep areas of the ocean in the early morning, they may have been almost undetectable on the surface, with swells of about a yard or less. But when they approached land the huge volumes of water were forced to the surface and the waves grew higher, swamping coastal communities and causing massive casualties.
Associated Press writer Frances D'Emilio contributed to this report from Rome.
12/27/04 07:13
Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute, said the quake's power was equal to a million atomic bombs.
TIDAL WAVE BEGAN BENEATH INDIAN OCEAN
Source of Article
By BETH GARDINER
LONDON (AP) - The chain reaction that sent enormous, deadly tidal waves crashing into the coasts of Asia and Africa on Sunday started more than six miles beneath the ocean floor off the tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
Geologic plates pressing against each other slipped violently, creating a bulge on the sea bottom that could be as high as 10 yards and hundreds of miles long, one scientist said.
``It's just like moving an enormous paddle at the bottom of the sea,'' said David Booth, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey. ``A big column of water has moved, we're talking about billions of tons. This is an enormous disturbance.''
Moving at about 500 mph, the waves took more than two hours to reach Sri Lanka, where the human toll has been horrific, and longer to spread to India and the east coast of Africa.
And because such tidal waves rarely occur in the Indian Ocean, there is no system in place to warn coastal communities they are about to be hit, such as exists in the Pacific, Booth said.
``With 20-20 vision of hindsight, that'll be reconsidered,'' he said.
An Australian scientist had suggested in September that an Indian Ocean warning system be set up, but it takes a year to create one. Also, those living along the Indian Ocean's shores were less likely than Pacific coastal dwellers to know the warning signs of an impending tidal wave - water receding unusually fast and far from the shore, Booth said.
Thousands were killed in countries from Indonesia to Somalia.
The underwater quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey put at magnitude 9.0, was the biggest since 1964, when a 9.2-magnitude temblor struck Alaska, also touching off tsunami waves. There were at least a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, one of magnitude 7.3.
Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute, likened the quake's power to detonating a million atomic bombs the size of those dropped on Japan during World War II, and said the shaking was so powerful it even disturbed the Earth's rotation.
``All the planet is vibrating'' from the quake, he told Italian state radio. Other scientists said it was early too say whether the rotation was affected by the quake.
The earthquake occurred at a spot where the Indian Ocean plate is gradually being forced underneath Sumatra, which is part of the Eurasian plate, at about the speed at which a human fingernail grows, Booth explained.
``This slipping doesn't occur smoothly,'' he said. Rocks along the edge stick against one another and pent-up energy builds over hundreds of years.
It's ``almost like stretching an elastic band, and then when the strength of the rock isn't sufficient to withstand the stress, then all along the fault line the rocks will move,'' he said.
Indonesia is well-known as a major quake center, sitting along a series of fault lines dubbed the ``Ring of Fire.'' But scientists are unable to predict where and when quakes will strike with any precision.
The force of Sunday's earthquake shook unusually far afield, causing buildings to sway hundreds of miles from the epicenter, from Singapore to the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and in Bangladesh.
The quake probably occurred about 6.2 miles beneath the ocean floor, causing the huge, step-like protrusion on the sea bed and the resulting tidal waves.
As the waves moved across deep areas of the ocean in the early morning, they may have been almost undetectable on the surface, with swells of about a yard or less. But when they approached land the huge volumes of water were forced to the surface and the waves grew higher, swamping coastal communities and causing massive casualties.
Associated Press writer Frances D'Emilio contributed to this report from Rome.
12/27/04 07:13
"He that is from God listens to the sayings of God..." -- John 8:47
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Scapegoat (Leviticus 16:10)
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Jesus said there will be GREAT EARTHQUAKES!
22,000 DEAD, MILLIONS HOMELESS IN ASIA
By DILIP GANGULY
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - Rescuers piled up bodies Monday along southern Asian coastlines devastated by tidal waves that obliterated seaside towns and killed more than 22,000 people in 10 countries. With thousands missing and the death toll expected to climb far higher, aid agencies and nations rushed to help millions of people left homeless or without clean water.
Hundreds of children were buried in mass graves in India, and morgues and hospitals struggled to cope with the catastrophe. Somalia reported hundreds of deaths, some 3,000 miles away from the earthquake off Indonesia that sent tsunamis raging across the Indian Ocean.
The International Red Cross reported 23,700 deaths and expressed concern about waterborne diseases like malaria and cholera. Jan Egeland, the U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator, said millions of people were affected - by lost homes, polluted drinking water, destroyed sanitation - and that the cost of the damage would ``probably be many billions of dollars.''
``We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages and so on that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone,'' he told reporters.
The United States dispatched disaster teams Monday and prepared a $15 million aid package to the Asian countries hit by a massive earthquake and tsunamis. Eight Americans were killed, and U.S. officials were seeking to contact hundreds of Americans who remain unaccounted for in the region, Secretary of State Colin Powell said. ``We will do everything we can to immediately help,'' Powell said.
The count of the dead rose sharply a day after the magnitude 9 quake struck beneath the Indian Ocean off Indonesia's island of Sumatra - the most powerful earthquake in the world in four decades. Government and aid officials suggested the toll could jump even further, citing unconfirmed reports of thousands more deaths on Sumatra and on India's Andaman and Nicobar islands, areas closest to the quake's epicenter.
Walls of water sped away from the quake's epicenter at more than 500 mph before crashing into the region's shorelines, sweeping people and fishing villages out to sea.
The governments of Indonesia and Thailand conceded that public warnings came too late or not at all. But officials insisted they could not know the seriousness of the threat because no tsunami warning system exists for the Indian Ocean.
Rescuers converged on beaches and islands throughout the region to search for survivors, and offers of aid poured in from around the globe, as troops in the region struggled to deliver urgently needed aid. Pakistan, India's nuclear-armed rival, offered assistance.
Chaos erupted at the airport in Phuket, Thailand, as hundreds of tourists, many wounded and weeping, tried to board planes.
Sri Lanka said more than 10,000 people were killed along its coastlines, and Tamil rebels said 2,000 people died in its territory, raising that country's toll to more than 12,000.
Indonesia reported about 5,000 deaths and India 4,000. Thailand - a Western tourist hotspot - said hundreds of people were dead and thousands more were missing. Deaths also were reported in Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Somalia. The Red Cross reported 6,000 deaths in India and three deaths in the Seychelles, part of its total of 23,700.
With communications still difficult with the areas closest to the epicenter, officials predicted more deaths there. Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the death toll on the island of Sumatra could climb to 10,000.
On the remote Car Nicobar island, an Indian territory 150 miles northwest of Sumatra, Police Chief S.B. Deol told New Delhi Television he had reports another 3,000 people may have died. If confirmed, that would raise India's toll to 7,000 and the overall number to 25,000.
``The Andaman and Nicobar islands have been really badly hit,'' said Hakan Sandbladh, senior health officer at the Geneva headquarters of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, noting that unconfirmed reports put the death toll at 13,000 on the islands.
A Somali presidential spokesman said an unknown number of people - but in the hundreds - died and entire villages disappeared on the African country's coastline. ``All of the fishermen who went to sea (Sunday) haven't come back,'' Yusuf Ismail said.
In Bandah Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, 150 miles from the quake's epicenter, dozens of bloated bodies littered the streets as soldiers and desperate relatives searched for survivors. Some 500 bodies collected by emergency workers lay under plastic tents, rotting in the tropical heat.
``We have ordered 15,000 troops into the field to search for survivors,'' Indonesian military spokesman Edy Sulistiadi said. ``They are mostly retrieving corpses.''
Unlike other areas, Bandah Aceh also suffered from the quake itself. The city's mall was reduced to a pile of rubble and its mosque was leaning precariously.
Refugees in nearby Lhokseumawe complained that little or no aid had reached them. The city's hospital said it was running out of medicine. Villagers near the town picked through the debris of their ruined houses amid the smell of decomposing bodies.
One man, Rajali, said his wife and two children were killed and he could not find dry ground to bury them to follow Islamic tradition. ``What shall I do?'' said the 55-year-old man, who, like many Indonesians, goes by a single name. ``I don't know where to bury my wife and children.''
The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu reported thousands of deaths. Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa called the scene ``an extraordinary calamity of such colossal proportions that the damage has been unprecedented.''
Nearby beaches resembled open-air mortuaries. In Cuddalore, red-eyed parents buried more than 150 children in a mass grave covered over by a bulldozer.
The tsunamis came without warning. Witnesses said sea waters at first retreated far out into the ocean, only to return at a vicious pace. Some regions reported a crashing wall of water 20 feet high.
``The water went back, back, back, so far away, and everyone wondered what it was - a full moon or what? Then we saw the wave come, and we ran,'' said Katri Seppanen, who was in Thailand, on Phuket island's popular Patong beach.
Sri Lanka and Indonesia said at least 1 million people were driven from their homes in each country. Warships in Thailand steamed to remote tropical island resorts to search for survivors as air force helicopters in Sri Lanka and India rushed food and medicine to stricken areas.
In Sri Lanka - an island nation some 1,000 miles west of the epicenter - about 25,000 troops were deployed to crack down on sporadic, small-scale looting and to help in rescue efforts. About 200 inmates escaped from a prison in coastal Matara.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake's magnitude was 9.0 - the strongest since a 9.2-magnitude temblor in Alaska in 1964 and the fourth-largest in a century.
The quake occurred more than 6 miles deep and has been followed by powerful aftershocks. A 620-mile section of a geological plate shifted, triggering the tsunamis.
Countries around the world had people among the dead. Britain reported 11 of its citizens had died; Norway 10; Sweden 9; Japan 9; Germany four; Denmark three.
Those numbers likely would rise. Sri Lanka said 72 foreign tourists were killed, and Thailand said 35 of the dead were foreigners.
President Bush expressed his condolences over the ``terrible loss of life and suffering.'' From the Vatican, Pope John Paul II led appeals for aid.
Aid agencies and governments around the world began pouring relief supplies into the region Monday. Japan, China, Russia and Israel were among the countries sending teams of experts.
Jasmine Whitbread, international director of the aid group Oxfam, warned that without swift action more people would die from contaminated drinking water.
In Thailand, Gen. Chaisit Shinawatra, the army chief, said the United States has offered to send troops stationed on Japan's Okinawa island. Thailand was considering the offer.
Tsunamis as large as Sunday's happen only a few times a century. A tsunami is a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near the ocean floor. With nothing to stop them, the waves can race across the ocean like the crack of a bullwhip, gaining momentum over thousands of miles.
An international tsunami warning system was started in 1965, after the Alaska quake, to advise coastal communities of a potentially killer wave.
Member states include the major Pacific rim nations in North America, Asia and South America. But because tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean, no system exists there.
Associated Press reporters Lely T. Djuhari in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, Sutin Wannabovorn and Alisa Tan in Phuket, Thailand, and S. Srinivasan in Cuddalore, India, contributed to this report.
12/27/04 14:13
By DILIP GANGULY
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - Rescuers piled up bodies Monday along southern Asian coastlines devastated by tidal waves that obliterated seaside towns and killed more than 22,000 people in 10 countries. With thousands missing and the death toll expected to climb far higher, aid agencies and nations rushed to help millions of people left homeless or without clean water.
Hundreds of children were buried in mass graves in India, and morgues and hospitals struggled to cope with the catastrophe. Somalia reported hundreds of deaths, some 3,000 miles away from the earthquake off Indonesia that sent tsunamis raging across the Indian Ocean.
The International Red Cross reported 23,700 deaths and expressed concern about waterborne diseases like malaria and cholera. Jan Egeland, the U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator, said millions of people were affected - by lost homes, polluted drinking water, destroyed sanitation - and that the cost of the damage would ``probably be many billions of dollars.''
``We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages and so on that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone,'' he told reporters.
The United States dispatched disaster teams Monday and prepared a $15 million aid package to the Asian countries hit by a massive earthquake and tsunamis. Eight Americans were killed, and U.S. officials were seeking to contact hundreds of Americans who remain unaccounted for in the region, Secretary of State Colin Powell said. ``We will do everything we can to immediately help,'' Powell said.
The count of the dead rose sharply a day after the magnitude 9 quake struck beneath the Indian Ocean off Indonesia's island of Sumatra - the most powerful earthquake in the world in four decades. Government and aid officials suggested the toll could jump even further, citing unconfirmed reports of thousands more deaths on Sumatra and on India's Andaman and Nicobar islands, areas closest to the quake's epicenter.
Walls of water sped away from the quake's epicenter at more than 500 mph before crashing into the region's shorelines, sweeping people and fishing villages out to sea.
The governments of Indonesia and Thailand conceded that public warnings came too late or not at all. But officials insisted they could not know the seriousness of the threat because no tsunami warning system exists for the Indian Ocean.
Rescuers converged on beaches and islands throughout the region to search for survivors, and offers of aid poured in from around the globe, as troops in the region struggled to deliver urgently needed aid. Pakistan, India's nuclear-armed rival, offered assistance.
Chaos erupted at the airport in Phuket, Thailand, as hundreds of tourists, many wounded and weeping, tried to board planes.
Sri Lanka said more than 10,000 people were killed along its coastlines, and Tamil rebels said 2,000 people died in its territory, raising that country's toll to more than 12,000.
Indonesia reported about 5,000 deaths and India 4,000. Thailand - a Western tourist hotspot - said hundreds of people were dead and thousands more were missing. Deaths also were reported in Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Somalia. The Red Cross reported 6,000 deaths in India and three deaths in the Seychelles, part of its total of 23,700.
With communications still difficult with the areas closest to the epicenter, officials predicted more deaths there. Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the death toll on the island of Sumatra could climb to 10,000.
On the remote Car Nicobar island, an Indian territory 150 miles northwest of Sumatra, Police Chief S.B. Deol told New Delhi Television he had reports another 3,000 people may have died. If confirmed, that would raise India's toll to 7,000 and the overall number to 25,000.
``The Andaman and Nicobar islands have been really badly hit,'' said Hakan Sandbladh, senior health officer at the Geneva headquarters of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, noting that unconfirmed reports put the death toll at 13,000 on the islands.
A Somali presidential spokesman said an unknown number of people - but in the hundreds - died and entire villages disappeared on the African country's coastline. ``All of the fishermen who went to sea (Sunday) haven't come back,'' Yusuf Ismail said.
In Bandah Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, 150 miles from the quake's epicenter, dozens of bloated bodies littered the streets as soldiers and desperate relatives searched for survivors. Some 500 bodies collected by emergency workers lay under plastic tents, rotting in the tropical heat.
``We have ordered 15,000 troops into the field to search for survivors,'' Indonesian military spokesman Edy Sulistiadi said. ``They are mostly retrieving corpses.''
Unlike other areas, Bandah Aceh also suffered from the quake itself. The city's mall was reduced to a pile of rubble and its mosque was leaning precariously.
Refugees in nearby Lhokseumawe complained that little or no aid had reached them. The city's hospital said it was running out of medicine. Villagers near the town picked through the debris of their ruined houses amid the smell of decomposing bodies.
One man, Rajali, said his wife and two children were killed and he could not find dry ground to bury them to follow Islamic tradition. ``What shall I do?'' said the 55-year-old man, who, like many Indonesians, goes by a single name. ``I don't know where to bury my wife and children.''
The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu reported thousands of deaths. Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa called the scene ``an extraordinary calamity of such colossal proportions that the damage has been unprecedented.''
Nearby beaches resembled open-air mortuaries. In Cuddalore, red-eyed parents buried more than 150 children in a mass grave covered over by a bulldozer.
The tsunamis came without warning. Witnesses said sea waters at first retreated far out into the ocean, only to return at a vicious pace. Some regions reported a crashing wall of water 20 feet high.
``The water went back, back, back, so far away, and everyone wondered what it was - a full moon or what? Then we saw the wave come, and we ran,'' said Katri Seppanen, who was in Thailand, on Phuket island's popular Patong beach.
Sri Lanka and Indonesia said at least 1 million people were driven from their homes in each country. Warships in Thailand steamed to remote tropical island resorts to search for survivors as air force helicopters in Sri Lanka and India rushed food and medicine to stricken areas.
In Sri Lanka - an island nation some 1,000 miles west of the epicenter - about 25,000 troops were deployed to crack down on sporadic, small-scale looting and to help in rescue efforts. About 200 inmates escaped from a prison in coastal Matara.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake's magnitude was 9.0 - the strongest since a 9.2-magnitude temblor in Alaska in 1964 and the fourth-largest in a century.
The quake occurred more than 6 miles deep and has been followed by powerful aftershocks. A 620-mile section of a geological plate shifted, triggering the tsunamis.
Countries around the world had people among the dead. Britain reported 11 of its citizens had died; Norway 10; Sweden 9; Japan 9; Germany four; Denmark three.
Those numbers likely would rise. Sri Lanka said 72 foreign tourists were killed, and Thailand said 35 of the dead were foreigners.
President Bush expressed his condolences over the ``terrible loss of life and suffering.'' From the Vatican, Pope John Paul II led appeals for aid.
Aid agencies and governments around the world began pouring relief supplies into the region Monday. Japan, China, Russia and Israel were among the countries sending teams of experts.
Jasmine Whitbread, international director of the aid group Oxfam, warned that without swift action more people would die from contaminated drinking water.
In Thailand, Gen. Chaisit Shinawatra, the army chief, said the United States has offered to send troops stationed on Japan's Okinawa island. Thailand was considering the offer.
Tsunamis as large as Sunday's happen only a few times a century. A tsunami is a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near the ocean floor. With nothing to stop them, the waves can race across the ocean like the crack of a bullwhip, gaining momentum over thousands of miles.
An international tsunami warning system was started in 1965, after the Alaska quake, to advise coastal communities of a potentially killer wave.
Member states include the major Pacific rim nations in North America, Asia and South America. But because tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean, no system exists there.
Associated Press reporters Lely T. Djuhari in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, Sutin Wannabovorn and Alisa Tan in Phuket, Thailand, and S. Srinivasan in Cuddalore, India, contributed to this report.
12/27/04 14:13
"He that is from God listens to the sayings of God..." -- John 8:47
-
Patrick
Jesus said that there would be earthquakes!--Quake Upgraded!
QUAKE UPGRADED TO 9.2 - BIGGEST IN MODERN TIMES
By Balaji Reddy
Special Correspondent - India Daily
12-27-4
Source of Article
It is the largest earthquake known to modern civilization with a reading of close to 9.2 in Richter scale. It started with a precursor near the coastline of Sumatra, a series of shocks happened one after the other and before all was done, 625 miles (1000 Kilometers) of Andaman thrust or fault line broke. The result was devastation never seen before in modern times. 45 feet tall Tsunamis (coastal tidal waves) originating from the epicenter of the earthquakes, crushed onto the shores of Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and other countries in the region.
According to reports we are receiving, this is not a simple earthquake, it is the mega quake that happens once every thousand years. No one knows how much after shock will devastate the area. Never ever in the known human history in modern times, an earthquake happened that broke 1000 miles of fault line.
More than 25,000 people are dead or missing. The death toll eventually can rise to 100,000. The damage to economy and crops can be staggering.
No one is getting any information from Andaman Nicobar Islands, which is affected the most. Indian Air Force is flying sorties to help the affected in the region.
In addition, there is no information from many of the ships in the region at the time.
The survey now says the quake centered off the west coast of northern Sumatra, has been upgraded to a 9.2 magnitude, making it the one of the largest earthquake since 1899 and may be the largest since 1600.
It was the largest quake in the world since 1964, Reuters reports Julie Martinez, geophysicist for the U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Hazards Program in Golden, Colorado, as saying.
That year, an earthquake struck Alaska's Prince William Sound.
Sunday's quake, first struck at 7:59 a.m (0059 GMT) off the coast of Aceh province on the northern Indonesian island of Sumatra and appeared to swing north into the Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean. It triggered a tsunami that killed hundreds in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India.
"About 1,000 kilometers of the Andaman thrust (or faultline) broke, which is a huge area," Martinez said. "This doesn't occur that often. To have a break along that long of a faultline, that is more unusual."
As the Earth moves and its plates hit each other, the Earth breaks in one area and pressure is built up in a different area, Martinez said. When that pressure builds up, another earthquake occurs, she said.
The quakes that follow, or aftershocks, are minor readjustments along the fault after the main shock or quake occurs, Martinez explained.
"Usually, aftershocks are in more or less the same area," she said. "Because of the size of this quake, you will see more quakes in a larger area because the break or the faultline is larger."
By Balaji Reddy
Special Correspondent - India Daily
12-27-4
Source of Article
It is the largest earthquake known to modern civilization with a reading of close to 9.2 in Richter scale. It started with a precursor near the coastline of Sumatra, a series of shocks happened one after the other and before all was done, 625 miles (1000 Kilometers) of Andaman thrust or fault line broke. The result was devastation never seen before in modern times. 45 feet tall Tsunamis (coastal tidal waves) originating from the epicenter of the earthquakes, crushed onto the shores of Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and other countries in the region.
According to reports we are receiving, this is not a simple earthquake, it is the mega quake that happens once every thousand years. No one knows how much after shock will devastate the area. Never ever in the known human history in modern times, an earthquake happened that broke 1000 miles of fault line.
More than 25,000 people are dead or missing. The death toll eventually can rise to 100,000. The damage to economy and crops can be staggering.
No one is getting any information from Andaman Nicobar Islands, which is affected the most. Indian Air Force is flying sorties to help the affected in the region.
In addition, there is no information from many of the ships in the region at the time.
The survey now says the quake centered off the west coast of northern Sumatra, has been upgraded to a 9.2 magnitude, making it the one of the largest earthquake since 1899 and may be the largest since 1600.
It was the largest quake in the world since 1964, Reuters reports Julie Martinez, geophysicist for the U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Hazards Program in Golden, Colorado, as saying.
That year, an earthquake struck Alaska's Prince William Sound.
Sunday's quake, first struck at 7:59 a.m (0059 GMT) off the coast of Aceh province on the northern Indonesian island of Sumatra and appeared to swing north into the Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean. It triggered a tsunami that killed hundreds in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India.
"About 1,000 kilometers of the Andaman thrust (or faultline) broke, which is a huge area," Martinez said. "This doesn't occur that often. To have a break along that long of a faultline, that is more unusual."
As the Earth moves and its plates hit each other, the Earth breaks in one area and pressure is built up in a different area, Martinez said. When that pressure builds up, another earthquake occurs, she said.
The quakes that follow, or aftershocks, are minor readjustments along the fault after the main shock or quake occurs, Martinez explained.
"Usually, aftershocks are in more or less the same area," she said. "Because of the size of this quake, you will see more quakes in a larger area because the break or the faultline is larger."
-
Scapegoat (Leviticus 16:10)
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TSUNAMIS KILL TENS OF THOUSANDS IN 10 COUNTRIES
Monday, December 27, 2004
Source of Article
GALLE, Sri Lanka — Bodies washed up on tropical beaches and piled up in hospitals Monday, raising fears of disease across a 10-nation arc of destruction left by a monster earthquake (search) and walls of water that killed more than 22,000 people. Thousands were missing and millions homeless.
Humanitarian agencies began what the United Nations (search) said would become the biggest relief effort the world has ever seen.
The disaster could be the costliest in history as well, with "many billions of dollars" of damage, said U.N. Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination. Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water, a lack of sanitation and no health services, he said.
More than 12,000 people died in Sri Lanka (search), nearly 5,000 in Indonesia, and 4,000 in India. The International Red Cross, which reported 23,700 deaths, said it was concerned that waterborne diseases like malaria (search) and cholera (search) could add to the toll.
Dazed tourists evacuated the popular island resorts of southern Thailand, where the Thai-American grandson of revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej was listed as one of more than 900 people dead. Scores more died in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives. The waves raced 2,800 miles across the Indian Ocean to Africa, killing hundreds of people in Somalia and three in the Seychelles.
Eight Americans were among the dead, and U.S. embassies in the region were trying to track down hundreds more who were unaccounted for.
U.S. citizens were urged to call (888) 407-4747 to check on travel conditions, or to go to the State Department's Crisis Awareness and Preparedness Web page.
Sunday's massive quake of 9.0 magnitude off the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent 500-mph waves surging across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal in the deadliest known tsunami since the one that devastated the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1755 and killed an estimated 60,000 people.
A large proportion of southern Asia's dead were children — as many as half the victims in Sri Lanka, according to officials there. A bulldozer dug a mass grave in southern India for 150 young boys and girls, as their weeping parents looked on.
"Where are my children?" said 41-year-old Absah, as she searched for her 11 youngsters in Banda Aceh, the Indonesian city closest to Sunday's epicenter. "Where are they? Why did this happen to me? I've lost everything."
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia officials conceded that immediate public warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives. The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours after the quake.
But governments insisted they couldn't have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he would investigate what role his country could play in setting up an Indian Ocean warning system. The head of the British Commonwealth bloc of Britain and its former colonies called for talks on creating a global early warning system for tsunamis.
Egeland said the issue of creating a tsunami warning system would be taken up at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan from Jan. 18-22.
For most people around the shores across the region, the only warning Sunday of the disaster came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, sucked away by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a massive wall of water. The waves wiped out villages, lifted cars and boats, yanked children from the arms of parents and swept away beachgoers, scuba divers and fishermen.
In a scene repeated across the region Monday, relatives wandered hallways lined with bodies, searching for loved ones at the hospital in Sri Lanka's southern town of Galle — one of the worst-affected areas of the hardest-hit nation. People lifted blankets and soaked clothes to look at faces in a stunned hush, broken only occasionally by wails of mourning.
A tractor brought in about 15 corpses of mostly women and children, some wrapped in white plastic sheets, while a Buddhist temple across the street tried to help people find their missing.
"The toll is increasing," said Brig. Daya Ratnayake, a military spokesman. "We are finding more bodies."
Indonesia and Sri Lanka had at least a million people each driven from their homes. Helicopters in India rushed medicine to stricken areas, while warships in Thailand steamed to island resorts to rescue survivors.
In Banda Aceh, capital of Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra, the streets were filled with overturned cars and the rotting corpses of adults and children. Shopping malls and office buildings lay in rubble, and thousands of homeless families huddled together in mosques and schools. The minaret of the city's 125-year-old mosque leaned precariously.
At least 3,000 people died in the city of 400,000, which was virtually unique in the region in that Banda Aceh was destroyed by the temblor rather than the floodwaters. Officials said Indonesia's death toll could double to 10,000 when the full devastation in Aceh province becomes known.
In Thailand, the government offered free flights for thousands of Western tourists desperate to leave the southern resorts ravaged by the tsunami. Chaos erupted at Phuket airport as hundreds of tourists, many bandaged and brought to the airport in ambulances, tried to board planes for Bangkok.
Bodies were pulled from roadsides, orchards and beaches as Khao Lak resort, where the Swedish tour operator Fritidsresor said 600 Swedes had not been accounted for.
Jimmy Gorman, 30, of Manchester, England, said he saw 15 bodies, including up to five children and a pregnant woman, on Phi Phi island, one of Thailand's most popular destinations for Westerners,
"Disaster. Flattened everything," Gorman said. "There's nothing left of it."
The United States dispatched disaster teams and prepared a $15 million aid package to the Asian countries, and the 25-nation European Union promised to quickly deliver $4 million. Japan, China and Russia were sending teams of experts.
Egeland said he expected hundreds of relief airplanes from two dozen countries within the next 48 hours
Monday, December 27, 2004
Source of Article
GALLE, Sri Lanka — Bodies washed up on tropical beaches and piled up in hospitals Monday, raising fears of disease across a 10-nation arc of destruction left by a monster earthquake (search) and walls of water that killed more than 22,000 people. Thousands were missing and millions homeless.
Humanitarian agencies began what the United Nations (search) said would become the biggest relief effort the world has ever seen.
The disaster could be the costliest in history as well, with "many billions of dollars" of damage, said U.N. Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination. Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water, a lack of sanitation and no health services, he said.
More than 12,000 people died in Sri Lanka (search), nearly 5,000 in Indonesia, and 4,000 in India. The International Red Cross, which reported 23,700 deaths, said it was concerned that waterborne diseases like malaria (search) and cholera (search) could add to the toll.
Dazed tourists evacuated the popular island resorts of southern Thailand, where the Thai-American grandson of revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej was listed as one of more than 900 people dead. Scores more died in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Maldives. The waves raced 2,800 miles across the Indian Ocean to Africa, killing hundreds of people in Somalia and three in the Seychelles.
Eight Americans were among the dead, and U.S. embassies in the region were trying to track down hundreds more who were unaccounted for.
U.S. citizens were urged to call (888) 407-4747 to check on travel conditions, or to go to the State Department's Crisis Awareness and Preparedness Web page.
Sunday's massive quake of 9.0 magnitude off the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent 500-mph waves surging across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal in the deadliest known tsunami since the one that devastated the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 1755 and killed an estimated 60,000 people.
A large proportion of southern Asia's dead were children — as many as half the victims in Sri Lanka, according to officials there. A bulldozer dug a mass grave in southern India for 150 young boys and girls, as their weeping parents looked on.
"Where are my children?" said 41-year-old Absah, as she searched for her 11 youngsters in Banda Aceh, the Indonesian city closest to Sunday's epicenter. "Where are they? Why did this happen to me? I've lost everything."
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia officials conceded that immediate public warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives. The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours after the quake.
But governments insisted they couldn't have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he would investigate what role his country could play in setting up an Indian Ocean warning system. The head of the British Commonwealth bloc of Britain and its former colonies called for talks on creating a global early warning system for tsunamis.
Egeland said the issue of creating a tsunami warning system would be taken up at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan from Jan. 18-22.
For most people around the shores across the region, the only warning Sunday of the disaster came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, sucked away by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a massive wall of water. The waves wiped out villages, lifted cars and boats, yanked children from the arms of parents and swept away beachgoers, scuba divers and fishermen.
In a scene repeated across the region Monday, relatives wandered hallways lined with bodies, searching for loved ones at the hospital in Sri Lanka's southern town of Galle — one of the worst-affected areas of the hardest-hit nation. People lifted blankets and soaked clothes to look at faces in a stunned hush, broken only occasionally by wails of mourning.
A tractor brought in about 15 corpses of mostly women and children, some wrapped in white plastic sheets, while a Buddhist temple across the street tried to help people find their missing.
"The toll is increasing," said Brig. Daya Ratnayake, a military spokesman. "We are finding more bodies."
Indonesia and Sri Lanka had at least a million people each driven from their homes. Helicopters in India rushed medicine to stricken areas, while warships in Thailand steamed to island resorts to rescue survivors.
In Banda Aceh, capital of Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra, the streets were filled with overturned cars and the rotting corpses of adults and children. Shopping malls and office buildings lay in rubble, and thousands of homeless families huddled together in mosques and schools. The minaret of the city's 125-year-old mosque leaned precariously.
At least 3,000 people died in the city of 400,000, which was virtually unique in the region in that Banda Aceh was destroyed by the temblor rather than the floodwaters. Officials said Indonesia's death toll could double to 10,000 when the full devastation in Aceh province becomes known.
In Thailand, the government offered free flights for thousands of Western tourists desperate to leave the southern resorts ravaged by the tsunami. Chaos erupted at Phuket airport as hundreds of tourists, many bandaged and brought to the airport in ambulances, tried to board planes for Bangkok.
Bodies were pulled from roadsides, orchards and beaches as Khao Lak resort, where the Swedish tour operator Fritidsresor said 600 Swedes had not been accounted for.
Jimmy Gorman, 30, of Manchester, England, said he saw 15 bodies, including up to five children and a pregnant woman, on Phi Phi island, one of Thailand's most popular destinations for Westerners,
"Disaster. Flattened everything," Gorman said. "There's nothing left of it."
The United States dispatched disaster teams and prepared a $15 million aid package to the Asian countries, and the 25-nation European Union promised to quickly deliver $4 million. Japan, China and Russia were sending teams of experts.
Egeland said he expected hundreds of relief airplanes from two dozen countries within the next 48 hours
"He that is from God listens to the sayings of God..." -- John 8:47
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Scapegoat (Leviticus 16:10)
- YORWW CONGREGATION MODERN DAY SERVANT
- Posts: 332
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Disease Fears Rise As Tsunami's Toll Tops 52,000
DISEASE FEARS RISE AS TSUNAMI'S TOLL TOPS 52,000
As count climbs, WHO expert says aftermath may be equally deadly
NBC News and news services
Source of Article
Updated: 2:53 p.m. ET Dec. 28, 2004
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - As the death toll from the epic tsunamis that slammed 11 countries soared beyond 52,000 people on Tuesday, a top World Health Organization health expert warned that diseases could double the natural disaster’s death count before the situation can be stabilized.
The number of dead continued to climb rapidly as authorities in Indonesia added 8,000 fatalities to the death toll there, bringing the total number killed to more than 27,000. India, Sri Lanka and Thailand also added to their death counts as they re-established contact with remote islands and isolated coastal areas and confirmed their worst fears.
The overall figure was expected to continue to climb as emergency workers make their way into inundated and still isolated villages and towns.
Medical supplies, food and water purification systems poured into the region, part of what the United Nations said would be the biggest relief effort the world has ever seen to aid the millions left homeless by the oceanic torrent that battered the countries after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake Sunday off Sumatra.
Disease fears rising
Bodies, many of them children, still filled beaches and choked hospital morgues, raising fears of disease.
“There is certainly a chance that we could have as many dying from communicable diseases as from the tsunami,” he said.
He said local hospitals and health services were overwhelmed treating victims of the tsunami and thus less able to cope with people who may fall ill.
"The initial terror associated with the tsunamis and the earthquake itself may be dwarfed by the longer term suffering of the affected communities," Nabarro warned.
Robert Bazell, NBC's chief science correspondent, said the health risk for survivors is twofold.
"There is a shortage of clean water and an enormous amount of water left behind. That’s a recipe for disaster from diseases such as cholera and typhoid, which are spread by fecal material that gets into the water," he said. "Also, millions are homeless in a very wet situation; that’s a huge potential for the spread of respiratory diseases and other lesser-known diseases which can kill people, especially children."
In addition to the enormous human toll, the disaster could be the costliest in history, said U.N. Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination. Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions are living with polluted drinking water and no health services, he said.
Geographic scope of crisis unparalleled
The geographic scope of the disaster was unparalleled. Relief organizations used to dealing with a centralized crisis had to distribute resources over 11 countries in two continents.
Helicopters in India rushed medicine to stricken areas, while warships in Thailand steamed to island resorts. In Sri Lanka, the Health Ministry dispatched 300 physicians to the disaster zone, dropping them off by helicopter.
Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar said the United States was sending helicopters, and an airborne surgical hospital from Finland arrived. A German aircraft was en route with a water purification plant. “A great deal is coming in, and they are having a few problems at the moment coordinating it.”
UNICEF officials said that about 175 tons of rice arrived in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, late Monday and six tons of medical supplies were expected to arrive by Thursday. But most basic supplies were scarce.
Meantime, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday the United States “will do more” to help the victims and said in an interview on NBC's “Today” show that “clearly, the United States will be a major contributor to this international effort. And, yes, it will run into the billions of dollars.”
He also said he regretted a statement by Egeland, the U.N. official overseeing the relief effort, suggesting America was being "stingy".
Initially, the U.S. government pledged $15 million and dispatched disaster specialists to help the Asian nations devastated by the catastrophe.
As the relief effort gained momentum, emergency workers reaching areas isolated since the waves hit were seeing their worst nightmares realized.
10,000 killed in single town
Indonesian teams found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, in Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra island, said Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry. Another 9,000 were confirmed dead so far in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, and surrounding towns, he said.
In Sri Lanka, authorities said that approximately 1,000 people were killed or missing from a train that was flung off its tracks when the gigantic waves hit.
And in India, rescuers on Tuesday estimated that at least 7,000 people had been killed on the remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, with one town losing two-thirds of its population to the rampaging waters.
Sri Lanka's government raised its death toll past 18,700 and feared the final death toll would reach 25,000.
"Dead bodies are washing ashore along the coast," said Social Welfare Minister Sumedha Jayasena, who is coordinating relief efforts. "Reports reaching us from the rescue workers indicate there are 25,000 feared dead, and we don't know what to do."
In Thailand, which had previously reported 1,516 dead, including more than 700 tourists, rescue workers recovered more than 300 bodies on Thailand’s remote Phi Phi Island, a tourist getaway made famous by the Leonardo DiCaprio film "The Beach."
Indonesia toll tops 27,000
In Indonesia, the country closest to Sunday's 9.0 magnitude quake that sent walls of water crashing into coastlines thousands of miles away, the count rose to 27,178.
"Thousands of victims cannot be reached in some isolated and remote areas," said Sidik, the national disaster director.
Indonesia’s Aceh province near the epicenter exemplified the challenge to aid workers. The government until Monday barred foreigners because of a long-running separatist conflict. Communications lines were still down, and remote villages had yet to be reached.
“There is not anyone to bury the bodies,” said Steve Aswin, an emergency officer with UNICEF in Jakarta. “I heard that many bodies are still in the hospitals and many places. They should be buried in mass graves but there is no one to dig graves.”
India's Home Ministry said 4,371 died. But, the International Red Cross estimated around 6,000 deaths in the south Asian country.
Scores of people were killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Maldives. Deaths were even reported in Africa — in Somalia, Tanzania and Seychelles, close to 3,000 miles away.
At least 12 Americans among dead
At least 12 Americans were among the dead, and U.S. embassies in the region were trying to track down hundreds more who were unaccounted for.
Desperate residents on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island — 100 miles from the quake’s epicenter — looted stores Tuesday. “There is no help, it is each person for themselves here,” district official Tengku Zulkarnain told el-Shinta radio station.
Elsewhere, Indonesian soldiers and volunteers combed through destroyed houses to try to find survivors — or bodies.
In Galle, Sri Lanka, officials used a loudspeaker fitted atop a fire engine to tell residents to place bodies on the road for collection.
Sri Lankan police waived the law calling for mandatory autopsies, allowing rotting corpses to be buried immediately. “We accept that the deaths were caused by drowning,” police spokesman Rienzie Perera said.
In Thailand’s once-thriving resorts, volunteers dragged scores of corpses — including at least 700 foreign tourists — from beaches and the remains of top-class hotels.
A large proportion of southern Asia’s dead were children — as many as half the victims in Sri Lanka, according to officials there.
Lack of warnings questioned
Sunday’s quake of 9.0 magnitude sent 500-mph waves surging across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal in the deadliest known tsunami since the one caused by the 1883 volcanic eruption at Krakatoa — located off Sumatra’s southern tip — which killed an estimated 36,000 people.
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia conceded that immediate public warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives. The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours after the quake.
But governments insisted they couldn’t have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard and the head of the British Commonwealth bloc of Britain and its former colonies called for talks on creating a global early warning system for tsunamis.
The U.N.'s Egeland said the issue of creating a tsunami warning system would be taken up at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan, from Jan. 18-22.
Tsunamis as large as Sunday’s happen only a few times a century. A tsunami is a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near the ocean floor. With nothing to stop them, the waves can race across the ocean like the crack of a bullwhip, gaining momentum over thousands of miles.
NBC's chief science correspondent Robert Bazell, the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
As count climbs, WHO expert says aftermath may be equally deadly
NBC News and news services
Source of Article
Updated: 2:53 p.m. ET Dec. 28, 2004
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - As the death toll from the epic tsunamis that slammed 11 countries soared beyond 52,000 people on Tuesday, a top World Health Organization health expert warned that diseases could double the natural disaster’s death count before the situation can be stabilized.
The number of dead continued to climb rapidly as authorities in Indonesia added 8,000 fatalities to the death toll there, bringing the total number killed to more than 27,000. India, Sri Lanka and Thailand also added to their death counts as they re-established contact with remote islands and isolated coastal areas and confirmed their worst fears.
The overall figure was expected to continue to climb as emergency workers make their way into inundated and still isolated villages and towns.
Medical supplies, food and water purification systems poured into the region, part of what the United Nations said would be the biggest relief effort the world has ever seen to aid the millions left homeless by the oceanic torrent that battered the countries after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake Sunday off Sumatra.
Disease fears rising
Bodies, many of them children, still filled beaches and choked hospital morgues, raising fears of disease.
“There is certainly a chance that we could have as many dying from communicable diseases as from the tsunami,” he said.
He said local hospitals and health services were overwhelmed treating victims of the tsunami and thus less able to cope with people who may fall ill.
"The initial terror associated with the tsunamis and the earthquake itself may be dwarfed by the longer term suffering of the affected communities," Nabarro warned.
Robert Bazell, NBC's chief science correspondent, said the health risk for survivors is twofold.
"There is a shortage of clean water and an enormous amount of water left behind. That’s a recipe for disaster from diseases such as cholera and typhoid, which are spread by fecal material that gets into the water," he said. "Also, millions are homeless in a very wet situation; that’s a huge potential for the spread of respiratory diseases and other lesser-known diseases which can kill people, especially children."
In addition to the enormous human toll, the disaster could be the costliest in history, said U.N. Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination. Hundreds of thousands have lost everything, and millions are living with polluted drinking water and no health services, he said.
Geographic scope of crisis unparalleled
The geographic scope of the disaster was unparalleled. Relief organizations used to dealing with a centralized crisis had to distribute resources over 11 countries in two continents.
Helicopters in India rushed medicine to stricken areas, while warships in Thailand steamed to island resorts. In Sri Lanka, the Health Ministry dispatched 300 physicians to the disaster zone, dropping them off by helicopter.
Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar said the United States was sending helicopters, and an airborne surgical hospital from Finland arrived. A German aircraft was en route with a water purification plant. “A great deal is coming in, and they are having a few problems at the moment coordinating it.”
UNICEF officials said that about 175 tons of rice arrived in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, late Monday and six tons of medical supplies were expected to arrive by Thursday. But most basic supplies were scarce.
Meantime, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday the United States “will do more” to help the victims and said in an interview on NBC's “Today” show that “clearly, the United States will be a major contributor to this international effort. And, yes, it will run into the billions of dollars.”
He also said he regretted a statement by Egeland, the U.N. official overseeing the relief effort, suggesting America was being "stingy".
Initially, the U.S. government pledged $15 million and dispatched disaster specialists to help the Asian nations devastated by the catastrophe.
As the relief effort gained momentum, emergency workers reaching areas isolated since the waves hit were seeing their worst nightmares realized.
10,000 killed in single town
Indonesian teams found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, in Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra island, said Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry. Another 9,000 were confirmed dead so far in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, and surrounding towns, he said.
In Sri Lanka, authorities said that approximately 1,000 people were killed or missing from a train that was flung off its tracks when the gigantic waves hit.
And in India, rescuers on Tuesday estimated that at least 7,000 people had been killed on the remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, with one town losing two-thirds of its population to the rampaging waters.
Sri Lanka's government raised its death toll past 18,700 and feared the final death toll would reach 25,000.
"Dead bodies are washing ashore along the coast," said Social Welfare Minister Sumedha Jayasena, who is coordinating relief efforts. "Reports reaching us from the rescue workers indicate there are 25,000 feared dead, and we don't know what to do."
In Thailand, which had previously reported 1,516 dead, including more than 700 tourists, rescue workers recovered more than 300 bodies on Thailand’s remote Phi Phi Island, a tourist getaway made famous by the Leonardo DiCaprio film "The Beach."
Indonesia toll tops 27,000
In Indonesia, the country closest to Sunday's 9.0 magnitude quake that sent walls of water crashing into coastlines thousands of miles away, the count rose to 27,178.
"Thousands of victims cannot be reached in some isolated and remote areas," said Sidik, the national disaster director.
Indonesia’s Aceh province near the epicenter exemplified the challenge to aid workers. The government until Monday barred foreigners because of a long-running separatist conflict. Communications lines were still down, and remote villages had yet to be reached.
“There is not anyone to bury the bodies,” said Steve Aswin, an emergency officer with UNICEF in Jakarta. “I heard that many bodies are still in the hospitals and many places. They should be buried in mass graves but there is no one to dig graves.”
India's Home Ministry said 4,371 died. But, the International Red Cross estimated around 6,000 deaths in the south Asian country.
Scores of people were killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Maldives. Deaths were even reported in Africa — in Somalia, Tanzania and Seychelles, close to 3,000 miles away.
At least 12 Americans among dead
At least 12 Americans were among the dead, and U.S. embassies in the region were trying to track down hundreds more who were unaccounted for.
Desperate residents on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island — 100 miles from the quake’s epicenter — looted stores Tuesday. “There is no help, it is each person for themselves here,” district official Tengku Zulkarnain told el-Shinta radio station.
Elsewhere, Indonesian soldiers and volunteers combed through destroyed houses to try to find survivors — or bodies.
In Galle, Sri Lanka, officials used a loudspeaker fitted atop a fire engine to tell residents to place bodies on the road for collection.
Sri Lankan police waived the law calling for mandatory autopsies, allowing rotting corpses to be buried immediately. “We accept that the deaths were caused by drowning,” police spokesman Rienzie Perera said.
In Thailand’s once-thriving resorts, volunteers dragged scores of corpses — including at least 700 foreign tourists — from beaches and the remains of top-class hotels.
A large proportion of southern Asia’s dead were children — as many as half the victims in Sri Lanka, according to officials there.
Lack of warnings questioned
Sunday’s quake of 9.0 magnitude sent 500-mph waves surging across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal in the deadliest known tsunami since the one caused by the 1883 volcanic eruption at Krakatoa — located off Sumatra’s southern tip — which killed an estimated 36,000 people.
Officials in Thailand and Indonesia conceded that immediate public warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives. The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late. The waves hit Sri Lanka and India more than two hours after the quake.
But governments insisted they couldn’t have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard and the head of the British Commonwealth bloc of Britain and its former colonies called for talks on creating a global early warning system for tsunamis.
The U.N.'s Egeland said the issue of creating a tsunami warning system would be taken up at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan, from Jan. 18-22.
Tsunamis as large as Sunday’s happen only a few times a century. A tsunami is a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near the ocean floor. With nothing to stop them, the waves can race across the ocean like the crack of a bullwhip, gaining momentum over thousands of miles.
NBC's chief science correspondent Robert Bazell, the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
"He that is from God listens to the sayings of God..." -- John 8:47
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Scapegoat (Leviticus 16:10)
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Quake: Strength of a Million A-Bombs
QUAKE: STRENGTH OF A MILLION A-BOMBS
Monday 27 December 2004, 13:09 Makka Time, 10:09 GMT
Source of Article
Thousands have been killed from Indonesia to Somalia
The reaction that sent waves, equal in power to a million atomic bombs, crashing into Indian Ocean coasts on Sunday started more than 10km beneath the sea floor close to Sumatra, Indonesia.
Geologic plates pressing against each other slipped violently, creating a bulge on the bottom that could be as high as 10m and hundreds of kilometres long, one scientist said.
"It's just like moving an enormous paddle at the bottom of the sea," said David Booth, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey. "A big column of water has moved, we're talking about billions of tons. This is an enormous disturbance."
Moving at about 800kph the waves took more than two hours to reach Sri Lanka, where the human toll has been horrific, and longer to spread to India and the east coast of Africa.
And because such tidal waves rarely occur in the Indian Ocean, there is no system in place to warn coastal communities they are about to be hit, such as exists in the Pacific, Booth said.
"With 20-20 vision of hindsight, that will be reconsidered," he said.
An Australian scientist had suggested in September that an Indian Ocean warning system be set up, but it takes a year to create one.
Also, those living along the Indian Ocean's shores were less likely than Pacific coastal dwellers to know the warning signs of an impending tidal wave - water receding unusually fast and far from the shore, Booth said.
Thousands were killed in countries from Indonesia to Somalia.
The underwater quake, which the US Geological Survey put at magnitude 9, was the biggest since 1964, when a 9.2-magnitude tremor struck Alaska, also touching off tsunami waves.
There were at least a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, one of magnitude 7.3.
Million atomic bombs
"All the planet is vibrating [from the quake]"
Enzo Boschi, head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute
Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute, likened the quake's power to detonating one million atomic bombs the size of those dropped on Japan during the second world war, and said the shaking was so powerful it even disturbed the Earth's rotation.
"All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, he told Italian state radio. Other scientists said it was too early to say whether the rotation was affected by the quake.
The earthquake occurred at a spot where the Indian Ocean plate is gradually being forced underneath Sumatra, which is part of the Eurasian plate, at about the speed at which a human fingernail grows, Booth explained.
"This slipping does not occur smoothly," he said. Rocks along the edge stick against one another and pent-up energy builds over hundreds of years.
It is "almost like stretching an elastic band, and then when the strength of the rock is not sufficient to withstand the stress, then all along the fault line the rocks will move," he said.
Ring of Fire
Indonesia is well-known as a major quake centre, sitting along a series of fault lines dubbed the Ring of Fire. But scientists are unable to predict where and when quakes will strike with any precision.
The force of Sunday's earthquake shook unusually far afield, causing buildings to sway hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre, from Singapore to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to Bangladesh.
The quake probably occurred about 10km beneath the ocean floor, causing the huge, step-like protrusion on the sea bed and the resulting tidal waves.
As the waves moved across deep areas of the ocean in the early morning, they may have been almost undetectable on the surface, with swells of about a metre or less.
But when they approached land, the huge volumes of water were forced to the surface and the waves grew higher, swamping coastal communities and causing massive numbers of casualties.
Monday 27 December 2004, 13:09 Makka Time, 10:09 GMT
Source of Article
Thousands have been killed from Indonesia to Somalia
The reaction that sent waves, equal in power to a million atomic bombs, crashing into Indian Ocean coasts on Sunday started more than 10km beneath the sea floor close to Sumatra, Indonesia.
Geologic plates pressing against each other slipped violently, creating a bulge on the bottom that could be as high as 10m and hundreds of kilometres long, one scientist said.
"It's just like moving an enormous paddle at the bottom of the sea," said David Booth, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey. "A big column of water has moved, we're talking about billions of tons. This is an enormous disturbance."
Moving at about 800kph the waves took more than two hours to reach Sri Lanka, where the human toll has been horrific, and longer to spread to India and the east coast of Africa.
And because such tidal waves rarely occur in the Indian Ocean, there is no system in place to warn coastal communities they are about to be hit, such as exists in the Pacific, Booth said.
"With 20-20 vision of hindsight, that will be reconsidered," he said.
An Australian scientist had suggested in September that an Indian Ocean warning system be set up, but it takes a year to create one.
Also, those living along the Indian Ocean's shores were less likely than Pacific coastal dwellers to know the warning signs of an impending tidal wave - water receding unusually fast and far from the shore, Booth said.
Thousands were killed in countries from Indonesia to Somalia.
The underwater quake, which the US Geological Survey put at magnitude 9, was the biggest since 1964, when a 9.2-magnitude tremor struck Alaska, also touching off tsunami waves.
There were at least a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, one of magnitude 7.3.
Million atomic bombs
"All the planet is vibrating [from the quake]"
Enzo Boschi, head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute
Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute, likened the quake's power to detonating one million atomic bombs the size of those dropped on Japan during the second world war, and said the shaking was so powerful it even disturbed the Earth's rotation.
"All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, he told Italian state radio. Other scientists said it was too early to say whether the rotation was affected by the quake.
The earthquake occurred at a spot where the Indian Ocean plate is gradually being forced underneath Sumatra, which is part of the Eurasian plate, at about the speed at which a human fingernail grows, Booth explained.
"This slipping does not occur smoothly," he said. Rocks along the edge stick against one another and pent-up energy builds over hundreds of years.
It is "almost like stretching an elastic band, and then when the strength of the rock is not sufficient to withstand the stress, then all along the fault line the rocks will move," he said.
Ring of Fire
Indonesia is well-known as a major quake centre, sitting along a series of fault lines dubbed the Ring of Fire. But scientists are unable to predict where and when quakes will strike with any precision.
The force of Sunday's earthquake shook unusually far afield, causing buildings to sway hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre, from Singapore to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to Bangladesh.
The quake probably occurred about 10km beneath the ocean floor, causing the huge, step-like protrusion on the sea bed and the resulting tidal waves.
As the waves moved across deep areas of the ocean in the early morning, they may have been almost undetectable on the surface, with swells of about a metre or less.
But when they approached land, the huge volumes of water were forced to the surface and the waves grew higher, swamping coastal communities and causing massive numbers of casualties.
"He that is from God listens to the sayings of God..." -- John 8:47
-
Scapegoat (Leviticus 16:10)
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6.0-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Near Tokyo
6.0-MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE STRIKES NEAR TOKYO
More than a dozen injured; no tsunami alert
The Associated Press
Updated: 8:32 a.m. ET July 23, 2005
Source of Article
TOKYO - A 6.0-magnitude earthquake shook eastern Japan on Saturday, injuring more than a dozen people, rattling buildings in the capital and temporarily suspending flights and train services.
There was no danger of tsunami waves, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said.
The earthquake, which struck at 4:35 p.m. (3:35 a.m. ET), was centered about 55 miles underground in Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo, the agency said. The quake injured about 16 people throughout the region, including five people who were injured by a falling signboard at a supermarket, Kyodo News agency reported.
More than a dozen injured; no tsunami alert
The Associated Press
Updated: 8:32 a.m. ET July 23, 2005
Source of Article
TOKYO - A 6.0-magnitude earthquake shook eastern Japan on Saturday, injuring more than a dozen people, rattling buildings in the capital and temporarily suspending flights and train services.
There was no danger of tsunami waves, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said.
The earthquake, which struck at 4:35 p.m. (3:35 a.m. ET), was centered about 55 miles underground in Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo, the agency said. The quake injured about 16 people throughout the region, including five people who were injured by a falling signboard at a supermarket, Kyodo News agency reported.
"He that is from God listens to the sayings of God..." -- John 8:47
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Mary
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Major Quake Hits Nicobar Islands
Breaking News
Source of Article
A major earthquake has hit the Nicobar Islands in India, the US Geological Survey has announced.
The quake, measuring seven on the Richter scale, occurred at 1542 (GMT), the US scientists said.
It was felt as far away as Madras (Chennai) in India, and Phuket in Thailand, they said.
The US scientists warned the quake may have caused damage "due to its location and size", but there were no early reports of destruction or casualties.
Breaking News
Source of Article
A major earthquake has hit the Nicobar Islands in India, the US Geological Survey has announced.
The quake, measuring seven on the Richter scale, occurred at 1542 (GMT), the US scientists said.
It was felt as far away as Madras (Chennai) in India, and Phuket in Thailand, they said.
The US scientists warned the quake may have caused damage "due to its location and size", but there were no early reports of destruction or casualties.
_______________________________________________________________________________
"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
George Bernard Shaw
"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
George Bernard Shaw
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Guest
Watching the World- Earthquakes up to date
Hello everyone! I thought I would post this link: http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/qed/
This site has all the recent Earthquakes that have occurred during this year and keeps track of the "hot spots' around the world.
Peace
Stinger
This site has all the recent Earthquakes that have occurred during this year and keeps track of the "hot spots' around the world.
Peace
Stinger
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Scapegoat (Leviticus 16:10)
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