-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Tsunami aftermath - Picture of hell and no kerosene Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 20:48:27 +0530 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Suresh Ramasubramanian) To: [email protected] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Relief efforts are going on, following a fairly familiar pattern.
High profile types (politicians, film stars) waltz in, get photographed and go
right back. Journalists hang around near the politicians and film stars. It
is left to a few volunteers to plow a lonely furrow, often without too much
access to all the money that's flowing in
---------
Itâs five kilometres of hell, and itâs right here at Nagapattinam.
Kaviarsi studies â make that studied â in the sixth standard. Her schoolbooks lie a short distance away, and besides them lies a doll. The girl herself lies on a makeshift pyre on what used to be her home, her face totally blackened, her neck twisted upwards, the skin peeling off her legs like torn stockings. There is a large empty container of Pepsi lying just besides her, and four other bodies. And besides the pyre, towards the sunset, are five long kilometers of slushy wasteland strewn with dead bodies.
It wasnât like this five days ago. We â me and two companions â are at a part of Nagapattinum called Akkarakadai, where a prosperous fishing community lived. This five-kilometre-long stretch of land was filled with houses, and had at its heart a bustling Sunday marketplace. The people here were well off â some of them had expensive fishing launches costing many lakhs of rupees. Then the tsunami came.
These settlements begin half a kilometre from the sea, across the road, but the tsunami swept everything away. Every single house was flooded away, all the way till the end of the stretch, and when I went there, I just saw one long expanse of slush. In the distance, there were pyres burning.
Dr Narasimhan, a man Iâd wanted to meet, who heads a team of relief workers that has come down from Salem, told me when I called him that we had to walk into that expanse, beyond the pyres. âWalk towards the sunset till you find me,â he said, and we did.
It took us half-an-hour to traverse the half-kilometre or so until we reached him. The ground was like quicksand in parts, and our shoes would sink in with each step and resist our attempts to lift our feet again. We came across dead bodies on the way: a young girl in a basket, her limbs akimbo, and her face, with some dried blood on it, contorted in an expression that even Damien Hirst would have found too macabre. Three feet away from her lay a woman, with a frozen look of horror on her face, etched into an eerie permanence.
âIn an unprecedented situation, you need an unprecedented responseâ
âFor the next five kilometres,â Dr Narsimhan motion towards the setting sun, âyou will find bodies everywhere. Only the distance you have walked so far â around half a kilometre â has been cleared of corpses. This is the furthest point till which bodies have been cleared. There is so much work to be done.â
âItâs five days since the tsunami happened,â I say. âWhy is this place so deserted, why hasnât all this been sorted?â
Dr Narasimhan sighs. âSorted,â he asks. âAll that the government has been doing is lining the streets outside with bleaching powder. They are not interested in coming here, they left this to the NGOs. And look at this.â He extends his hands towards me. âWeâre doing all the work of moving bodies with surgical gloves made of latex, which are no protection against cuts and bruises.â
I had heard about this before I arrived here, in Pondicherry, where Aid workers had complained that the locals in Nagapattinam had refused to help out in clearing the bodies, and when the aid workers got down to it with their latex gloves, the bodies had started decomposing, and were difficult to manouver, with a limb prone to just falling away from the rest of the corpse.
âWe need heavy earth-moving equipment,â he had said. âThat way the bodies can be shifted en masse and given a mass burial. That is the only way to deal with this situation.â Mani Shankar Aiyar, Indiaâs petroleum minister, had announced on TV four days ago that such equipment was at the top of his wishlist of aid. Then why did it not materialise? Could the government not mobilise its resources even that much?
But that need is redundant now, says Dr Narsimhan. âWhat we need now,â he says, âis kerosene. We need to burn bodies as we come along them on this stretch, before they decompose further. And we have no kerosene.
âWeâve been calling aid agencies and so on asking for fuel to burn the bodies with,â he continues, âbut we got none. We managed to file some cans of kerosene lying around some of the devastated houses, but thereâs no more of even that?â
âBut canât the government give you kerosene?â I ask astonished.
âThe government does nothing,â he says. âI thought differently till I came here, but now Iâve seen it for myself. Everything is left to the junior IAS officers, who are in meetings all day. Ministers come, and all they want to know is how many people are dead. They donât care about relief work at all. In an unprecedented situation you need an unprecedented response. But that has not happened.â
The temple without a toilet
Dr Narsimhan gets back to his work, and I look up, where a helicoptor moves languidly across the sky. âThatâs the fifth one today,â says a lady who is part of the doctorâs team.
âThey come and âsurveyâ the area,which is so pointless, because you cannot actually see the dead bodies from here amid this debris. It is just a show, to reassure themselves that theyâre on top of things. The army officers who come here, they refuse to even touch the bodies. They just hang around aimlessly.â
I ask the lady what she does, and she says that she is a journalist, but would like to remain unnamed for my story. âI have come here to help out and not report,â she says. âThat is more important for me.â I look down, ashamed.
She has been here for three days, and I ask her why, mucky though it may be, the place doesnât have any people looking for their loved ones. âBecause the entire community is wiped out,â she says. âThere arenât too many relatives left of the people who have died here, and those that are have become resigned to their loss.â
âHave you been to any of the refugee camps?â I ask her.
âYes,â she says. âI went to a refugee camp yesterday where there were 1500 homeless people. And not one toilet. Do you know why?
âBecause the camp was based in a temple,â she continues, âand you cannot build a toilet in a temple. And Iâd gone there to speak to them on health issues! And they cannot even wash their hands.
âAnd this is not an isolated example. There are scores of refugee camps like this. I hardly call this relief work.â
And how are the NGOs handling the situation, I ask.âOh, they are doing all the work,the government is doing nothing,â she says. âBut even they are competitive, trying hard to stake a claim to territory.â I had noticed a similar tendency when I was on my way here, with many trucks adorned with banners proclaiming the name of the relief agency involved. The organisation I had chosen to travel with, Aid India, was an exception, though, working hard and sincerely to solve every problem that arose.
So why havenât the press written about this, I ask her. âThe press,â she snorts. âThe journalists from the Hindu are all flying around with dignitaries. That is the kind of reporting they do.â
The sun has set, and there is a column of smoke rising from the pyres flowing in the direction where the sun was. It is New Yearâs eve. I say goodbye to Narasimhan and my unnamed journalist friend, and I do not wish them a happy new year. I wish them kerosene.
[ends]
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Thai Met bureau knew about the tsunami, sat tight on the information
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 10:37:16 +0530
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: -ENOENT
To: Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
CC: Dave Farber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
A forward to the india-gii mailing list .. from Dr.Jai Maharaj no less (now that's a blast from the ghost of usenet past ...)
srs
jai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Swedish newspaper: Tsunami warning was stopped
>
> Source - Expressen (Swedish online newspaper)
> Date - Dec. 28
> Translated by: CLiss
>
> http://www.expressen.se/expressen/jsp/polopoly.jsp?a=223277
>
> "Tsunami warning was stopped"
>
> Just minutes after the earthquake in the Indian Ocean on
> Sunday morning, Thailand's foremost meterological experts
> were sitting together in a crisis meeting. But they
> decided not to warn about the tsunami "out of courtesy to
> the tourist industry", write the Thailand daily newspaper
> The Nation.
>
> The experts got the news around 8:00 am on Sunday morning
> local time. An hour later, the first massive wave struck.
> But the experts started to discuss the economic impacts
> when they were discussing if a tsunami warning should be
> made. The main argument against such a warning was that
> there have not been any floods in 300 years. Also, the
> experts believed the Indonesian island Sumatra would be a
> "cushion" for the southern coast of Thailand. The experts
> also had bad information; they thought the tremor was
> 8.1. A similar earthquake occurred in the same area in
> 2002 with no flooding at all.
>
> <snip>
>
> We finally decided not to do anything because the tourist
> season was in full swing. The hotels were 100% booked
> full. What if we issued a warning, which would have led
> to an evacuation, and nothing had happened. What would be
> the outcome? The tourist industry would be immediately
> hurt. Our department would not be able to endure a
> lawsuit...<snip>
>
> - - - - -
>
> My only comment here would be that if these
> experts believed they would hurt the tourist
> industry by calling out an alarm and it turned
> out to be false, what do they think will happen
> to the tourist industry now?
>
> Posted by cliss on Tue Dec-28-04 03:41 PM
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> Money trumps all concerns.
>
> Posted by RandomKoolzip on Tue Dec-28-04 03:44 PM
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> MORE DISCUSSION HERE:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/62un4
>
> Or,
>
> http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=printer_friendly&forum=102&topic_id=1104420
>
> Jai Maharaj
> http://www.mantra.com/jai
> Om Shanti
>
> ___________________________
> india-gii mailing list:
> https://ssl.cpsr.org/mailman/listinfo/india-gii india-gii archives:
> https://ssl.cpsr.org/pipermail/india-gii/
> Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility: http://www.cpsr.org/
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