antara gempa pertama dengan tsunami ada jarak waktu moreless setengah jam.
setengah jam kalo di pake jalan saja dgn kecepatan 8km/jam sudah bisa
dapet 4km. jarak terjangan rata" dari tsunami menurut citra landsat di
metroTV adalah 4km.
SO...jelas bahwa sebenarnya waktu dan peringatan tuh bisa dibilang sudah
memadai, hanya saja massa yg waktu itu tidak 'ngeh' karena memang mereka
tidak tau dan tidak mengerti.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
03/01/2005 01:38 PM
Please respond to iagi-net
To: iagi-net@iagi.or.id
cc:
Subject: RE: [iagi-net-l] How scientists and victims watched
helplessly
jika memang benar demikian, pemahaman yang begini yang menyelamatkan
saudara-saudara kita di P. Simeuleu...
jika pengetahuan sederhana ini bisa dibekalkan ke masyarakat Aceh sebelum
kejadian tsunami, korban yang demikian besar tidak perlu terjadi, hal ini
menjadi PR besar kita semua supaya kejadian serupa bisa diantisipasi
dikemudian hari
salam,
didik
-----Original Message-----
From: Nurhayati [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 1:36 PM
To: iagi-net@iagi.or.id
Subject: RE: [iagi-net-l] How scientists and victims watched helplessly
Dalam program Indonesia Menangis METRO TV yang ditayangkan terus menerus
sampi hari Minggu kemarin, saya melihat dari tayangan video amatir di P
Simeuleu. Memang benar tidak semua bangunan hancur.
Morfologi pulau itu sangat menolong plus dengan pengetahuan mereka, bahwa
jika laut tiba-tiba surut setelah gempa akan ada gelombang besar, sehingga
setelah gempa itu terjadi mereka panik menyelamatkan diri naik ke
pebukitan
sehingga kebanyakan dari mereka selamat. Hanya 4 orang yang dinyatakan
tewas...
salam,
Nurhayati
-----Original Message-----
From: Musakti, Oki [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 9:58 AM
To: iagi-net@iagi.or.id
Subject: RE: [iagi-net-l] How scientists and victims watched helplessly
Tolong klarifikasi apakah benar 'semua bangunan' di Pulau Simelue memang
hancur. Yang saya lihat di TV (terutama CNN dan Metro), kerusakan
bangunan akibat tsunami nya sendiri relative tidak sebesar di kota
Meulaboh misalnya, ie. Banyak bangunan di sisi pantai yang masih
berdiri.
Jadi, apakah penduduk pulau Simeuleu selamat karena 'kearifan lokal'
atau lebih karena gelombang yang menerjang relative kecil dibandingkan
dengan yang jatuh di Meulaboh misalnya?
Apapun, tentu hal ini tidak mengurangi rasa syukur kita akan
'sedikitnya' korban yang jatuh di Simeuleu (dan rasa prihatin kita akan
jatuhnya begitu banyak korban di tempat lain....)
Oki
'Hentikan duka, mulai berkarya.....'
-----Original Message-----
From: O.K Taufik [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, 3 January 2005 9:50 AM
To: iagi-net@iagi.or.id
Cc: Himpunan Ahli Geofisika Indonesia (HAGI)
Subject: RE: [iagi-net-l] How scientists and victims watched helplessly
Point yg benar tan, kondisi P.Simeulue bisa jadi pelajaran buat kita
semua, walaupun semua bangunan dan infrastruktur hancur, korban disana
sangat sedikit..karena ada pembelajaran dengan alam, pengakuan penduduk
disana bahwa anak kecil saja mengerti bahaya setelah ada gempa, suatu
sikap kewaspadaan yg tertanam dengan baik. Mereka belajar dari alam
bukan dari geologist.Hal-hal kecil begini yg perlu pencerahan dan
ditanamkan untuk warga disuatu daerah menyangkut potensi bahaya bencana
alam didaerahnya. Anak-anak didik disekolah mungkin perlu di beri
informasi, apa yg harus mereka lakukan saat gempa muncul, saat
disekolah, dirumah atau di tempat umum lainnya. dan juga bencana alam
lainnya.
Suatu hal lain yg penting diluar bidang kita, semestinya kesiapan Badan
Penanggulan Bencana Nasional bisa cepat menanggulangi
korban bencana, melihat mayat yg tidak terurus dan sisa-sisa bangunan yg
hancur, membuat kesan dan trauma gempa tersebut jadi berlarut-larut, tak
ada salahnya belajar dari Negara maju, USA dan Jepang sangat cepat
melakukan recovery suatu daerah bencana, sehingga penduduknya cepat
untuk bangkit kembali.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 9:14 AM
To: iagi-net@iagi.or.id
Cc: Himpunan Ahli Geofisika Indonesia (HAGI); iagi-net@iagi.or.id
Subject: Re: [iagi-net-l] How scientists and victims watched helplessly
Importance: High
jelas musibah di Aceh itu ga perlu terjadi,,kalau..
semua ilmu kita yang 'hebat' ini bisa dimengerti oleh masyrakat
awam..sedikit saja ga usah semua
dimengerti
sebenarnya intinya bukan di diskusi teknis iagi dan lain2. intinya
adalah
Tidak Ada sarana komunikasi antara ilmu geologi yang sudah ada di kepala
kita dengan kepala masyrakat awam, yg notabene tidak tahu ilmu geologi.
itu yang harus di pecahkan, dicarikan solusi gimana caranya MENTRANSFER
pengetahuan kita ke mereka
dari geologist saya pikir jelas tidak merasa rugi untuk mentransfer itu,
dari masyrakat pasti akan sangat antusias jika ingin di sharing ilmu itu
(apalagi sekarang adalah moment yg pas krn masih 'hot')..yang tidak ada
adalah MEDIA nya. minta 1 jam khusus di Metro TV ato di TV mana gitu
buat
transfer ini, ato di koran KOMPAS, ato mungkin juga di detik dot com,
karena geologi juga bisa membantu mengurangi korban-korban lain dari
bahaya alam (gunung meletus, zat beracun dari gn api, longsor, banjir
bandang, dlsb)
Rovicky Dwi Putrohari <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
01/01/2005 06:08 PM
Please respond to iagi-net
To: "Himpunan Ahli Geofisika Indonesia (HAGI)"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
iagi-net@iagi.or.id
cc:
Subject: [iagi-net-l] How scientists and victims watched
helplessly
Miris aku baca ini,
bagaimana ilmu yg kita geluti selama ini seolah ngga bisa berguna
menghadapinya
buat apa ?
RDP
"renungan di awal taun"
=====
How scientists and victims watched helplessly
December 31, 2004
GAUGING DISASTER
How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
It was 7 p.m. Seattle time on Dec. 25 when Vasily V.
Titov raced to his office, sat down at his computer
and prepared to simulate an earthquake and tsunami
that was already sweeping across the Indian Ocean.
He started from a blank screen and with the muted hope
that just maybe he could warn officials across the
globe about the magnitude of what was unfolding. But
the obstacles were numerous.
Two hours had already passed since the quake, and
there was no established model of what a tsunami might
do in the Indian Ocean. Ninety percent of tsunamis
occur in the Pacific, and that was where most research
had been done.
Dr. Titov, a mathematician who works for a government
marine laboratory, began to assemble his digital tools
on his computer's hard drive: a three-dimensional map
of the Indian Ocean seafloor and the seismic data
showing the force, breadth and direction of the
earthquake's punch to the sea.
As he set to work, Sumatra's shores were already a
soup of human flotsam. Thailand to the east was awash.
The pulse of energy transferred from seabed to water,
traveling at jetliner speed, was already most of the
way across the Bay of Bengal and approaching
unsuspecting villagers and tourists, fishermen and
bathers, from the eight-foot-high coral strands of the
Maldives to the teeming shores of Sri Lanka and
eastern India.
In the end, Dr. Titov could not get ahead of that wave
with his numbers. He could not help avert the wreckage
and death. But alone in his office, following his
computer model of the real tsunami, he began to
understand, as few others in the world did at that
moment, that this was no local disaster.
With an eerie time lag, his data would reveal the
dimensions of the catastrophe that was unfolding
across eight brutal hours on Sunday, one that stole
tens of thousands of lives and remade the coasts of
the Asian subcontinent.
For those on the shores of the affected countries, the
reckoning with the tsunami's power came all but out of
the blue, and cost them their lives. It began near a
corner of the island of Sumatra, and ended 3,000 miles
away on the East African shore.
For the scientists in Hawaii, at the planet's main
tsunami center, who managed to send out one of the
rare formal warnings, there was intense frustration.
They had useful information; they were trained to get
word out; but they were stymied by limitations,
including a lack of telephone numbers for counterparts
in other countries.
For Colleen McGinn, a disaster relief worker in
Melbourne, Australia, the developing crisis would send
her off on an aid mission that she could not have
comprehended and that United Nations officials have
projected to be the greatest relief effort ever
mounted.
For others like Phil Cummins, an Australian
seismologist, what was happening made all too much
sense. He had grasped the dangers a year earlier, and
in 2004 had delivered a Powerpoint presentation to
tsunami experts in Japan and Hawaii.
"It really seems strange now to see the title," Dr.
Cummins recalled yesterday. "Tsunami in the Indian
Ocean - Why should we care?"
Hawaii: Helpless Warners
He wore two beepers, in case one failed. Both chirped.
It was a languorous Christmas afternoon, with his
girlfriend away and nothing to do, and Barry Hirshorn,
48, was asleep. As a geophysicist, he was used to
having his rest interrupted. Almost daily, earthquakes
announced themselves somewhere, usually modest
nuisances, and off went his pagers.
It was just after 3 p.m. in Honolulu, nearly halfway
around the globe from where the earth was trembling.
Mr. Hirshorn worked at the Pacific Tsunami Warning
Center, a stubby cinderblock structure set in a weedy
plain in Ewa Beach. He was one of five staff
scientists entrusted with the big task of alerting
Pacific countries and the United States military to
deadly tsunamis.
"I knew it wasn't tiny," he said. "Probably over a 6."
The messages on his beepers indicated alerts from two
far-apart seismic monitoring stations, meaning the
quake had power.
Shrugging into a shirt, he hopped onto his "duty
bike," and pedaled the several hundred yards to the
center, operated by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
Stuart Weinstein, 43, was already at a terminal in the
windowless operations room, staring at the thick blue
seismic lines that signaled an "event." "This is a big
earthquake," he recalled thinking. "Maybe a 7."
Dr. Weinstein began pinpointing the location. Sliding
into the seat beside him, Mr. Hirshorn waited to
calculate the magnitude. Within minutes, they
concluded it was a quake of 8.0 magnitude.
More data arrived, and they reworked their
calculations. But they stayed with 8.0.
At 3:14 p.m., 15 minutes after the earthquake struck,
they issued a routine bulletin announcing an event off
Sumatra with a magnitude of 8.0. It added, "There is
no tsunami warning or watch in effect." This referred
to the Pacific.
The bulletin alerted perhaps 26 countries, including
Indonesia and Thailand, though it did not go to other
coastal areas of the Indian Ocean, for they were not
part of any warning system.
Next, the men tackled a slower but more precise means
to measure an earthquake, using waves that pierce the
earth's mantle rather than simply the initial waves.
They got an 8.5, a marked difference in possible
threat. "Uh oh," Dr. Weinstein said.
It was 3:45 and time to call the boss: Dr. Charles
McCreery stood in a friend's living room a few miles
away, delivering a gift after a brunch at his
sister-in-law's. His 4-year-old twin daughters were
hoping that he would soon assemble their new bicycles.
Dr. McCreery, 54, said a fresh bulletin should go out,
reporting the higher magnitude and mentioning the
chance of a tsunami near the epicenter. But he and his
colleagues doubted that an 8.5 quake would unleash a
far-ranging "teletsunami" that could traverse an ocean
and wipe out villages.
Once the second bulletin left, at 4:04 p.m., there was
little more that their machines could confide, unless
tsunamis crossed the Indian Ocean and entered the
Pacific. They had no sea monitors in the Indian Ocean.
Dr. Weinstein scrolled the Internet. They tuned in CNN
on television. Only in the same way that most of the
world learned, from news reports, did the three men
come to see the ghastly reality, the widening tsunami
paths and the lethal coastal destruction.
A wire dispatch at 5:30 told them that Sri Lanka had
been pounded. Their spirits drooped. "More are going
to die," Mr. Hirshorn said.
Their instinct was to somehow tell more, to warn the
region that it would continue, to reach people who
could clear beaches. But how? Mr. Hirshorn recalled a
tsunami expert he knew in Australia, called and got an
answering machine. He left a message. Someone phoned
the International Tsunami Information Center, asking
if they knew people in the stricken region. The center
simply had no contacts in this distant world.
At 7:25, an e-mail message from Harvard's seismology
group reckoned the earthquake at 8.9. Now they
understood why such a monster tsunami had been
unleashed.
They continued to scramble to reach countries that
could still escape death, but they were reaching into
a void. Around 10:15 p.m., they did speak to the
United States embassies in Mauritius and Madagascar,
which promised to warn Somalia and Kenya, not yet hit,
but it is unclear what came of this.
Their day ended, engulfed in gloom. "Part of me said I
wish it had occurred in the Pacific, because we could
have saved an awful lot of people," Dr. Weinstein
said. "We felt terrible that we couldn't get the
messages to where they were most needed."
Japan: Looking On
The seismograph at the Matsushiro Seismological
Observatory, about 110 miles northwest of Tokyo, is
buried inside a mountain tunnel. The tunnel had first
been created as an alternative headquarters for the
country's imperial military during the final years of
the war in the Pacific, and scientists saw it had
advantages for recording as precisely as possible
tremors in the earth: protection from the effects of
temperature and wind.
"Our job is to identify the epicenter and the size of
earthquakes all over the world," said Masashi
Kobayashi, an official at the observatory. "There are
many observatories recording the earthquakes in the
vicinity of Japan, but this observatory is the only
one in Japan for observing the earthquakes of the
world."
And Mr. Kobayashi said he did not mistake the
significance of what got recorded deep inside the
mountain on Sunday.
"I got surprised," he said.
The recording showed an earthquake with a magnitude of
8.
"In the vicinity of Japan," he said, "that size is
recorded only once in several years to 10 years."
Mr. Kobayashi said he had calculated the location, as
well as the magnitude of the quake. "I reported it is
west of Sumatra island, including the latitude and
longitude," he said.
And with that, he said, he realized something else.
"When I found it was in the ocean," he said, "I
thought the first thing to worry about was a tsunami."
There has been over the last several days, as the
death count from the earthquake and tsunami has
steadily climbed to more than 100,000, much discussion
of whether enough was done by scientists and
government officials around the world to relay word of
the possible peril millions of people suddenly faced.
There have been accounts in newspapers of officials in
Indonesia and Thailand and Malaysia struggling to
comprehend the threat and get out warnings. All agree
that, whatever people's intentions or capabilities, no
sufficient warnings were transmitted that might have
limited the toll at some of the hardest-hit places.
What Mr. Kobayashi did with his information, and
concern, is not entirely clear. In an interview, he
said he had made his reports to headquarters. It is
not clear what, if anything, his superiors did.
Asked directly if he thought his reports led to any
movement toward issuing a warning about a tsunami, Mr.
Kobayashi said, "My job is to decide the size and the
location of the earthquake epicenter, so it is beyond
my job to answer that question."
Indonesia: First Losses
As deputy mayor of Banda Aceh, Aceh Province's most
bustling town, Muhammad Kadir was about the closest
thing the townspeople had to an alarm bell when the
tsunami hit Indonesia.
Elected to office as an elder statesman of sorts, the
76-year-old Mr. Kadir had hurried Sunday morning to a
seaside market at the tip of the island of Sumatra for
emergency supplies after the initial earthquake
struck. It was at the market, a few minutes later,
that he said he had looked far out to sea and noticed
something strange: the waterline was dipping off to
the sides and rising furiously in the middle.
"The water separated, then it attacked," he said.
"I've never even seen anything like it in the movies.
I couldn't imagine anything like it."
After spotting the raging waters, Mr. Kadir raced
through the town banging on doors and shouting into a
local mosque. "I told people the water was getting
higher and higher - get out," he recounted.
His mad dash was the closest many people on Sumatra
would come to an early warning system. Before the
waves subsided, more than 43,000 people in the Aceh
region alone - many of them women and children unable
to resist the violent waters - would perish.
"The water was coming too hard, too fast," Azwar
Muhammad, a local resident, said. "This was God's
destiny."
As a separate set of mammoth waves hurtled across the
Indian Ocean in the opposite direction, due west, Amir
Khan, a strapping 30-year-old off-duty police officer,
relaxed in his home in the town of Kalmunai on the
east coast of Sri Lanka.
Mr. Khan, like every other local government official,
was enjoying a day off and completely oblivious to the
walls of water surging toward Sri Lanka when he heard
what sounded like a low-flying helicopter. Some in
Kalmunai remember the ocean's abruptly changing colors
from green to a dark, menacing black, as if it were
filled with oil. Others remember the water turning
white with foam. All recall the first wave's shape: a
10- to 12-foot-tall wall of water.
Mr. Khan shouted, "Run! Run!" to his parents and
siblings and bolted out of his house, sprinting as
fast as his strong, young legs would carry him. His
68-year-old father and 50-year-old mother stayed in
the house. As water engulfed them, they grabbed onto a
ceiling beam and were able to survive.
His three sisters-in-law were less lucky. Two ran but
drowned in the water. A third remained in the house
and drowned as well.
Three subsequent waves, each larger and more powerful
than the last, obliterated the neighborhood and
reached 700 yards inland. The waves ripped sturdy,
one-story brick homes off their foundations, snapping
four-inch-thick brick walls into small chunks. It
picked up cars and swept them hundreds of yards
inland. It reached the rooftops off one-story
buildings, ripping off gutters as it surged passed.
Kalandar Umma, a 60-year-old grandmother, was found
clinging to the upper branches of a tree. She had no
memory of the waves or how she got there. Nineteen
members of her family died, including one son, five
granddaughters and two grandsons, including an
18-month-old boy.
Local officials, unsure what had happened, ordered
people to go to high ground. Groups of stunned
municipal employees, schoolteachers and retirees began
searching for bodies. In the first day alone, 1,824
bodies were recovered and buried behind a local
mosque. Local government officials quickly lost
control of the process, with families burying
relatives as soon as they discovered them.
Advance notice of the wave's approach would have saved
thousands of lives, according to officials and
residents. Baheera Sahariban, a waiflike 25-year-old
mother, said she had easily been able to carry her
18-month-old son to safety from her house, which sits
only 15 yards from the ocean. The reason: a warning.
"Someone helped me," Ms. Sahariban said, as she gently
cradled her son. "Someone said, 'Run away.' "
Australia: A Call to Aid
At 6 p.m. Sunday in Melbourne, Colleen McGinn was
having tea in her backyard patio with a man she had
met recently in an emergency first aid class. It was a
year to the day that Oxfam, the relief organization
that Ms. McGinn worked for, had gotten the call about
an earthquake in Iran that would kill 26,000.
Today, it was again Boxing Day, a national holiday in
Australia, and it was her turn to be on call. She knew
anything could happen. She hoped nothing would. But
she kept her cellphone near. Then the phone rang.
"I hate to bother you," the caller said. It was
Marlene McIntyre, one of the bosses at Oxfam, who also
happened to be her friend. "But there has been an
earthquake."
"Very funny, Marlene," Ms. McGinn said, chuckling.
"Merry Christmas to you, too."
"No, this is real," Ms. McIntyre said. "There has been
an earthquake and a tsunami. Sri Lanka was hit, we
were hearing."
It was six hours after an undersea earthquake off the
Indonesian island of Sumatra had set off one of the
worst natural disasters in recent decades. Ms. McGinn,
who was born in Indonesia but raised in Athens, Ohio,
had worked previously in Sierra Leone, the Balkans and
Afghanistan, dealing with war victims and refugees.
Those were man-made disasters. This would be
different. This was nature, and the marathon of
tackling people's misery had just begun.
"I need a ride," she told her friend, instantly
enlisting the young man, a potential date, into a
relief aide. Off they went, on his motorcycle, along
the beachside highway, driving as the sun set to the
nearby home of her boss at Oxfam, Chris Stewart. The
global Oxfam emergency response machine needed to be
put into motion. It was up to these two women to start
the engine. Now.
Out came the emergency contact list, and the chain of
calls began: East Asia regional manager, South Asia
regional manager, the agency executive director. The
list went on.
But even while they were working the phones, the news
coming from the television and Internet started to
turn darker and darker.
The would-be date turned into a decent assistant.
"We need a better map," she told him. "We need another
map."
The telephone calls continued for hours, fueled by
pizza and coffee that was ordered. Day had become
night. But as darkness fell, what had at first
appeared to be a probably deadly, but at least
isolated incident - impacting perhaps just Indonesia
and Sri Lanka at first - was turning into a
incomprehensible catastrophe.
"This is unbelievable," Ms. McGinn said, pausing to
look up at the television. "All the countries in the
Indian Ocean have been hit. This is massive. Oh my
God."
Across the world, in New York, there was a similar
growing sense of dread.
Jan Egeland, the United Nations' emergency relief
coordinator and under secretary for humanitarian
affairs, is a 46-year-old Norwegian whose boyish looks
and shock of chestnut hair falling across his forehead
would become familiar to millions of television
viewers around the world as he reported on the global
relief effort.
He had been lying in bed in the midtown Manhattan
apartment where he lives with his wife and two
daughters when his telephone rang at 7 a.m. New York
time, bringing him the first word of tsunami. Mr.
Egeland and his colleagues at the United Nations
offices in Geneva sent emergency relief teams to the
Maldives, Sir Lanka and Indonesia, the first countries
to request help, right away and began to consider
additional countries as they learned more about the
geographical extent of the damage. Teams would soon be
added for India, Thailand and Malaysia.
"We were not even close to understanding the true
enormity of it," he said. "The initial indication was
that a few hundred were affected."
Ms. McGinn and Ms. Stewart would wrap up their initial
round of calls sometime before midnight in Melbourne.
Monday would be another day of telephone calls, as
work was now under way by different Oxfam offices to
prepare an IL-76 cargo plane, packed with 27 tons of
emergency supplies that would soon take off for Sri
Lanka and Indonesia. Water tanks, pumps and taps to
set up emergency drinking water would all be included,
as would latrine slabs to build emergency bathrooms.
Ms. McGinn would soon be boarding a plane herself to
fly to Sri Lanka, leaving Melbourne on Tuesday, for
the trip across Asia to the dead zone. Her father had
been in Indonesia at the moment of the earthquake,
although not near the affected part of the country.
Still, she had not heard from him.
It was not long after she landed at the airport in
Colombo, Sri Lanka, that it was clear what that phone
call on a gorgeous day after Christmas had spelled:
fields of misery and devastation unlike any she had
ever seen.
First, as she approached the seaside community of
Batticaloa, it was simply the crowds of people
standing outside schools and other government
buildings, which had been transformed into shelters.
Then it was roads clogged with emergency vehicles and
trucks. And then it was a stretch of coastline where
there was such utter chaos it was unclear how and
where the work should begin.
Boats sitting upturned on land, far from the shore. A
major bridge had been lifted off its supports, twisted
and then thrown like a toy. Whole swaths where houses
once stood were now flat, wide-open land, the ground
strewn with debris. People milled around, eyes glazed
over with fear and despair. To top it all, this was
the rainy season, so it was pouring.
"I never seen anything like this," Ms. McGinn said.
The only option was to begin work, unloading trucks
that had arrived with relief supplies, everything from
clothes and instant noodles to soap. It was quite a
distance she had traveled from that lazy evening
sipping tea on the patio in Melbourne.
California: A Scientist Explains
As soon as Kerry Sieh, an earthquake expert at
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, heard
the reports on Sunday of the earthquake and tsunamis
in the Indian Ocean, he knew exactly what had
happened.
He was preparing for his next trip to Sumatra, the
island hardest hit by the tsunami. He had spent a
decade there and on nearby islands, cutting slices out
of coral heads with a chainsaw to read traces of past
seismic upheavals, and to look for hints about future
quakes.
Most of his colleagues who study undersea earthquakes
were focused on even more violent fault lines closer
to the developed world, those off Japan and the
Pacific Northwest and the island arc of the Aleutians
in the far North Pacific.
Like them, Dr. Sieh was consumed with what he could
learn about the dynamics of the earthquake factories
called subduction zones. But the archives he mined
existed only in the coral off Sumatra. "It's tucked
away in a corner of the world that just doesn't have
much scientific traffic," he said.
In the calcium carbonate coral layers, he could read
the seafloor's history. Deformations of the layers
showed when the seabed beneath had been shoved upward,
plunged down or tilted.
So the mechanism of the earthquake that had just
occurred was familiar. The offshore plate of rock
underlying the Indian Ocean normally slides
relentlessly under Indonesia, like the disappearing
belt on an airport walkway, descending into the
earth's mantle to be consumed and recycled.
In places, this process was smooth. The junction
between that ever-shifting India plate and the plate
under Southeast Asia was "greased," he said. But there
were places where it was stuck.
In 1797, 1833, 1861 and now again long stretches that
were stuck sprang free. In each case, the rock had
built up tension in the intervening decades, as the
greased sections continued to shift, leaving the stuck
part behind, just as an archer's bow flexes when
drawn.
At some point, the force is too great. Friction is
overcome. The stuck section gets to catch up, in
seconds making up for a century of lagging behind, and
if the plate is moving up or down, that energy is
transferred pistonlike to the incompressible water
above.
The energy unleashed in a 9.0 quake, as this one would
ultimately come to measure, is roughly the amount that
would be unleashed if it were possible to create a
bomb made of 32 billion tons of TNT and set it off.
As the news media calls began flooding in, Dr. Sieh
began to recount the mechanism he knew so well. It
would be two days and nights before he would have time
to turn on a television and witness the consequences
of the upheaval. It was likely that a fresh distortion
would be etched in the corals. It was certain that a
region and people he had grown to love had been ripped
asunder.
Australia: International Inertia
The possibility of tsunamis arising in the Indian
Ocean had not completely escaped international
attention. During the 1990's, an obscure United
Nations group, the International Coordination Group
for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific,
periodically considered the extension of tsunami alert
systems to parts of the globe outside the Pacific,
including the Caribbean and Indian Ocean.
At a meeting of the group in Lima, Peru, in September
1997, for example, its members had considered
proposals to expand the network to the Indian Ocean,
particularly because of Indonesia's tectonic activity.
Nothing concrete happened.
Among the scientists who kept up a restrained but
insistent pressure was Dr. Phil Cummins, a
seismologist with Australia's geosciences agency. He
continued to gather and present evidence that an
Indian Ocean tsunami was inevitable, although
unpredictable in terms of timing, and posed a grave
threat to many countries. He met with no ill will, but
with considerable inertia, he said.
"Just look at the name," he said. "The international
body designed to coordinate international
tsunami-related activity is mandated as a Pacific
entity."
Dr. Cummins cited details from dusty records kept by
the Dutch colonists in Indonesia and from Dr. Sieh's
coral studies that great 19th-century earthquakes in
the 1,200-mile arc of faults west of Sumatra had
generated destructive ocean-spanning waves.
He made his case in October 2003, at a meeting of the
international tsunami group in Wellington, New
Zealand, when he pushed for formal expansion of the
international network into the Indian Ocean.
The group rebuffed him, saying, in the stiff language
of meeting minutes, that any such expansion could
occur only if an overarching governing body dealing in
global oceanographic issues formally redefined its
"terms of reference."
In the meantime, it voted to establish "a sessional
working group to prepare a recommendation to establish
an intersessional working group that will study the
establishment of a regional warning system for the
Southwest Pacific and Indian Ocean."
Dr. Cummins prepared a position paper at that meeting
laying out his arguments. He used a computer model
similar to that used by Dr. Titov in Seattle to study
how tsunamis spread from the great Sumatran quake of
1833.
He simulated the quake in a mathematical simulacrum of
the ocean, and simulated waves radiated until they
struck as far north as eastern India and all around
western Australia. The Sumatran shore east of the
fault was devastated, and a directional pulse of
energy, resulting in higher waves, splayed westward
like a shotgun blast.
At the time, the images of those reconstructed virtual
waves must have seemed like yet another computer
analysis, predicting yet another potential disaster
that might or might not occur in this, or the next
century.
Now, the reconstructions, so similar to what happened
last Sunday, carry a disturbing weight.
Kenya: A Last Victim
Capt. Twalib Hamisi was sitting in his office at the
Port Authority in Mombasa, Kenya, when word of the
curious water first reached him. A staffer had phoned
to report unusual movements in the main port there.
"The tide was supposed to be falling, but it was
rising," Mr. Hamisi, the harbor master, recalled. "I
went to the water, and we saw it moving really fast. I
thought a pipe might be broken in the port."
It was about 1 p.m. Sunday, and he decided to call
other ports in Malindi and Lamu, where workers
reported similar water movements. "It was like seeing
the sun setting in the east," he said. "The tide was
crazy. The water wasn't following the rules."
Then, Mr. Hamisi said, the minister of foreign affairs
phoned to report the heavy damage in Asia.
After realizing the direction the waves were headed,
Mr. Hamisi called the Port Authority director. "I
said: 'We have a problem. We have to institute our
emergency plan.' "
The emergency plan was intended for things like oil
spills or fires, not tsunamis. But it was all they
had. The police were informed to evacuate beaches. The
news media were called to spread the word. The local
authorities were mobilized up and down the coast.
Radio messages were sent to commercial fishing vessels
and ships. For the wooden dhows that are so common in
Kenya and that lack radio communication, the looming
danger was spread by word of mouth.
At Jomo Kenyatta Beach in Mombasa, there were
thousands of people packed on the sand. The police
made announcements at first, and then armed riot
policemen moved in to relocate people away from the
water.
"It was Sunday, so the beaches were full of holiday
makers," Mr. Hamisi said.
At Hemingway's Resort in Watamu, a plush seaside
hotel, employees who heard of the storm on television
began working the phones. They called the Port
Authority, but the person who answered the phone there
did not seem overly alarmed. They called the Kenyan
Navy, where someone agreed to investigate. They tried
to track down a British professor who someone said was
an expert on the wave patterns off the Kenyan coast.
Frustrated and fearful, Hemingway's staff began
evacuating guests to a parking lot half a mile from
the coast.
Further north, Mabeya Mogaka, the district
commissioner in Malindi, was spreading word of the
dangerous seas as well. "I ran out and told people not
to panic but to be aware," he said.
The beaches were virtually deserted, he said. But not
everybody got the message that danger was near. There
were still people swimming when the waves began to
churn with more force.
One of them was Samuel Njoroge, 20, a mechanic from
Nairobi who was in the water with his uncle and was
swimming for the first time. He was about 10 feet from
the sand when the waves became rough. His relatives
describe what happened next: Samuel was pulled under.
His uncle grabbed him but was also pulled under.
Eventually, Italian tourists who were swimming nearby
got both men to shore.
But Samuel had already taken in too much water. More
than seven hours after the tsunami hit land in
Indonesia, some 3,000 miles away, Samuel became
Kenya's only confirmed storm-related death.
''We are in shock,'' said Peter Mwanji, a relative who
visited the mortuary on Thursday to claim Samuel
Njoroge's body. ''We are still trying to understand
how this storm could have taken him. He was so excited
to see the ocean and to swim in it. He was so happy.
Then he was gone.''
Seattle: A Final Picture
Back in Seattle, around the time that the beaches of
East Africa were being swept by the great pulse of
waves, Dr. Titov was close to finishing his
fresh-minted model for simulating Indian Ocean
tsunamis.
He hit enter on his terminal keyboard, and the
computer began calculating numbers.
As the real tsunami was spending its last destructive
power, his virtual tsunami began. It burst out like a
shotgun blast from the epicenter of the quake, focused
due west from the fault line.
By 4:28 a.m. Sunday morning, the simulation had run
its course, and Dr. Titov posted his work on the Web
and stumbled home, knowing, but still not knowing
since he had seen no news, what had happened.
Like everyone else, he became transfixed by television
images of heaving seas and devastation, with one
difference, he said: ''It feels like I have already
seen it.''
Reporting for this article was contributed by Eric
Lipton in Washington, Eric Lichtblau in Indonesia,Marc
Lacey in Kenya, N. R. Kleinfeld in New York, David
Rohde in Sri Lanka,Yasuko Kamiizumi in Japanand
Michele Kayal in Hawaii.
The New York Times
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