Jakarta, January 18, 2005 (Islam Online - IOL) - The weather was quite fine on the morning of Sunday,
December 26, 2004, in Meulaboh, Aceh, Indonesia’s northern-most province. It
was almost 8.00 a.m. local time. Suddenly, a strong earthquake measuring 8.9 on
the Richter scale shocked the inhabitants.
When the quake calmed down, the
people were amazed to see that the water had drawn back as far as 500 meters
from the coastline. The newly exposed area was sandy and full of floundering
fish.
The villagers had never seen such a view before in their life. “We were
very happy when we saw thousands of fish lying in the sand. So, many of us,
including dozens of children, ran to the sandy area to collect the fish,” said
Atuk, 55, a survivor of the disaster in Aceh.
About 10 to 15 minutes later, amidst the “fish harvest”
festivity, a huge white wave was suddenly spotted approaching the beach. In
seconds, the people were swallowed up by waves approximately 20 meters high.
Darmawan, 40, who survived the tsunami after being adrift and buffeted in the
sea for 24 hours, told Indonesia’s news agency ANTARA that, “I saw my village
was drowned under water. I thought that the doomsday had come.”
Meulaboh, located on the western coast of Sumatra, had a
population of around 200,000 people. The tsunami, which was triggered by a very
strong undersea earthquake, killed over 16,000 people and destroyed over 80
percent of the infrastructure and houses in Meulaboh alone. More than 50,000
people in this village were left homeless and isolated from the rest of the
world: its entire infrastructure of roads, airports, and piers were destroyed.
The only way to help the people was by dropping food, drinking water, and
clothes from helicopters.
The Province of Aceh is the worst hit by the tsunami because
the epicenter of the quake in the Indian Ocean was just about 149 km off
Meulaboh’s south coast. Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudoyono declared
three days of national mourning and asked the people to fly flags at half mast.
“The death toll in Aceh and North Sumatra’s provinces has reached over 95,000
people and at least 77,000 others are still missing,” Dr. Naydial Roesdal, a
senior official of the Indonesian Ministry of Health, told the press on
Saturday, January 9, 2005. In Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province, the
death toll stood at over 15,000 people and over 60 percent of the city’s
infrastructure was destroyed.
Roesdal, who chairs the center for health management crisis
in Aceh and North Sumatra, said that the exact figure of people who died due to
the tsunami was still unknown, pending the completion of recovering victims as
there were still unclaimed bodies scattered in remote areas. Up to Monday
January 10, 2005, Indonesian and foreign volunteers were working hard to remove
bodies from rivers and from under the debris.
The death toll of the tsunami in 11 countries was around
155,279 people, while thousands of people are still missing. At least a third
of the total victims were children. “The catastrophe injured at least 4,102
people who are still under medical treatment at different hospitals, mostly
floating and field hospitals. Some of the injured people, especially children,
have been moved to Jakarta for intensive care,” said Dr. Roesdal. Temporary
hospitals were established with the help of a number of other countries such as
Malaysia, Russia, Australia, France, China, Jordan, Singapore, Tunisia and
Egypt. The Indonesian government’s data put the number refugees in Aceh at
around 605,898 people accommodated in more than 50 camp locations. The number
of casualties is expected to increase. “Many of the refugees are suffering from
diarrhea, fevers, skin irritations, respiratory infections, headaches, stomach,
and lung problems,” explained Indonesia’s Health Minister Fadilah Supari.
Outbreaks of diseases are likely due to contaminated water,
poor sanitation, and lack of nutrition. Many of the refugees, especially
children, suffer from serious lung problems due to contaminated seawater that
they swallowed when struggling to survive the killer waves. With the help of
the World Health Organization (WHO), the Indonesian Health Ministry has been
conducting immunization for around 10,000 child refugees. India reported that
UNICEF has planned to immunize 100,000 children in Tamil Nadu and 15,000
children in Kerala, as part of an emergency immunization campaign in
tsunami-hit regions. “Measles is a deadly threat to children living in crowded
camps,” said Dr Marzio Babile, UNICEF’s chief of health in India. “It spreads
quickly, killing children, or severely weakens their immune systems. Those
children are then too weak to fight off other diseases, leading to more deaths.
We can head it off with a good round of immunization and Vitamin A,” he said as
quoted by PTI. Similar health problems were also reported in Sri Lanka.
Given the fact that thousands of children are traumatized
and orphaned, Indonesian doctors, psychologists and pediatricians are very
concerned with the children’s mental health after the tragedy. “A psychological
counseling unit will be established in all refugee camps to help those who are
still in a state of shock after the disaster,” said Minister Supari. Many of
the children are separated from their families and have nightmares. They cannot
go to school because almost all schools in the tsunami-hit regions in Aceh and
North Sumatra were completely destroyed. Around 1,143 teachers were reportedly
killed.
The Indonesian government with the help of social workers
have pledged to take care of the children separated from families or orphaned,
and protect them from any kind of exploitation such as child trafficking.
Devastation of Marine Life
The gigantic waves did not only bring devastation to the
land area but also to the marine life in South Asian seas. Marine experts
estimated that it would take centuries for the marine life such as coral reefs,
mangroves, and fish, to recover. A major problem would be a loss of fish
displaced from their habitat by the waves, and other species that depended on
the reefs. Jerker Tamelander, regional marine program co-coordinator for South
and Southeast Asia with the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in Colombo, Sri
Lanka, was quoted by AFP as saying, “Damage to the marine ecosystem could be
very, very serious.”
In many areas hit by the tsunami, mangroves, which protect
the shore from erosion and often serve as nurseries for young fish, would have
been completely uprooted and destroyed. DPA, a German news agency, reported
from Paris recently that according to the United Nations Educational Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the deadly waves have also damaged a number
of World Heritage sites. Among the affected sites are the old city of Galle and
its fortifications in Sri Lanka; the monuments at Mahabalipuram and the Temple
of the Sun at Konarak, both in India; and large parts of Sumatra’s national
park, as well as a large part of the island’s tropical forest.
Animal senses
Amazingly, many animals seem to have been able to avoid the
powerful natural disaster, thanks to acoustic senses that are far more advanced
than humans’, say French zoologists. Aerial pictures of Sri Lanka’s Yala
National Park, broadcast on international TV news channels, show it was penetrated
by surging floodwater. But there were no signs of any dead elephants, leopards,
deer, jackals, or crocodiles—the species that have given the conservation
reserve worldwide fame. Animals have capabilities to sense any vibrations,
seismic shocks, or sound waves, which human beings do not, said Herve Fritz, a
researcher in animal behavior at France’s National Center for Scientific
Research (CNRS). “Elephants have infrasound communication—low-frequency noise,
usually below 20 Hertz—that is below the human threshold of hearing. They can
pick up these sounds at very great distances, dozens of kilometers away,” he
explained as reported by AFP. Group animals like elephants, deer, and birds,
also have efficient “alarm codes”—special cries, which enable the whole community
to flee when danger is spotted,” said Gauthier. Thanks to these senses, in
Thailand, several tourists were saved who were on the back of elephants a few
minutes before the disaster. The elephants made a strange cry and then ran,
with the tourists still on their backs, to a higher place.
Elephants, which live in Sumatra, Thailand, and India, are
now reportedly being mobilized to help clean up the debris and remove the dead
bodies in the devastated areas.
Early warning system
The tsunami struck without warning to the countries hit by
the disaster, but actually, it was not undetected. Seismologists monitoring the
Pacific Ocean recorded Sunday’s undersea earthquake near Indonesia, but
warnings of tidal waves did not reach the coastal areas around the Indian
Ocean.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the International
Tsunami Information Center, both in Hawaii, detected the December 26 earthquake
off Indonesia that generated the tsunami. But the centers were set up to
provide alerts to Pacific nations, and scientists were not able to contact
countries in the path of the giant waves, which experts say could travel across
oceans at up to 800 kilometers (496 miles) an hour. As a result, they lost the
chance to alert some of the worst hit areas hours before the tsunamis hit.
US Geological Survey geophysicist Ken Hudnut told AFP that
there was sufficient time between the time of the quake and the time of the
tsunamis hitting some of the affected areas to have saved many lives if a
proper warning system had been in place. Several countries agreed on the
establishment of an Indian Ocean tsunami-monitoring network to mirror the
Honolulu-based system already covering the Pacific. Japan announced it would
establish a tsunami-warning center in Tokyo covering the northwestern Pacific
from Siberia to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where 2,200 people were killed
by a tidal wave in 1998. Japan even expressed its willingness to help establish
the tsunami early warning systems in several Indian Ocean countries. “Tsunamis rarely
hit the Indian Ocean, and so there is not much data available. Therefore, there
was very little awareness. Tsunamis are far more common in the Pacific, which
lies in the so-called “Ring of Fire” of geological hotspots,” explained Hudnut.
The tsunami on December 26 is believed to be the first in
the Indian Ocean since 1883, associated with the famous eruption of Krakatoa
between Sumatra and Java. A Pacific warning system was established in 1949
after a tsunami killed 149 in Hawaii. It uses seismic monitoring and tidal
gauges to predict the destination and severity of tidal waves. Public warnings
are issued via coastal sirens, television and radio bulletins, and even SMS
messages in some countries.
Meanwhile, talks about setting up a warning system similar
to the one in the Pacific Ocean will be conducted further at the UN-sponsored
World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan, next month, according to
Dr Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.
“Thousands of lives could have been saved if a similar alert system to that in
the Pacific Ocean had been in place in the stricken countries, which include
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India,” Kong said. Learning the lesson from
the tragedy, Minister of Communication M. Hatta Rajasa told a local TV station
recently that Indonesia plans to put as many warning boards as possible on the
country’s beaches, reminding the people to “beware of a change of the seawater
level. When the water suddenly ‘dries up’ extremely, run to higher places.
Tsunami waves might come.”
Sources:
§ ANTARA,
2005: “Doomsday in Meulaboh Follows Fish Festivity”
§ AFP,
2005: “Marine Life Could Take Centuries to Recover From Killer Waves.”
§ PTI,
2005: “UNICEF to Launch Emergency Immunization Campaign in Kerala.”
§ ANTARA,
2005: “Tsunami-related death toll in Aceh and N. Sumatra reaches 95,000.”
§ AFP,
2004: “Scientists: Indian Ocean tsunami warning system would have saved lives.”
§ DPA,
2004: “Tsunamis damaged numerous world heritage sites, UNESCO says.”
§ Reuters,
2005: “U.N. Fears for ‘Tsunami Generation’ of children.”
§ AFP,
2005: “The Great Wave: How Did So Many Animals Escape?”
§ ANTARA,
2005: “Kofi Annan appeals to donor countries to be consistent within their aid
pledges.”
** Hani’ Mumtazah is an
environmental journalist based in Jakarta, Indonesia. She graduated from a
three-year English language non-decree program at the University of Indonesia,
Jakarta. She attended the Non-Aligned News Agencies Journalism Course in New
Delhi, India, in 1987. Comments and suggestions may be forwarded to her by
contacting the editor at: ScienceTech@islam-online.net.
No comments:
Post a Comment