tsunami day | Manila Times

Christmas is usually a humble affair for me, for various reasons, and this year was no exception. This is not a complaint, because I love my vacation that way. However, I love them most when not a large part of the country is struggling to recover from a massive natural disaster at the same time.

Or for that matter, the whole world. Besides those trying to address the consequences of Typhoon Odette here, people in several states in Malaysia are dealing with damage from widespread flooding that occurred – seemingly coincidentally – at the same time as Typhoon hit the Philippines. Meanwhile, people across a swathe of the central United States are still recovering from the unprecedented outbreak of tornadoes that devastated entire towns there about two weeks ago.

Mother Nature has not so much respected the human calendar, and the holiday is as good a day as any for her to try to crush each other into the void. Thinking about this, it occurred to me that today is the anniversary of another holiday disaster of mind-boggling scale, the Boxing Day Tsunami, which occurred exactly 17 years ago on December 26, 2004.

The passing of the years and other disasters made the memories of that catastrophe fade, but it’s hard to overstate how mysterious it was at that time, even for people watching from afar. The massive earthquake – estimated to have a magnitude of 9.1 – along the tectonic plate boundary just west of north Sumatra set off a series of tsunamis that killed more than 227,000 people in 14 countries around the Indian Ocean, and battered coastal communities with walls of water. It was 30 meters high in some places. The earthquake was so powerful that it caused a 900-kilometre crack in the ocean floor. Its vibrations were still detectable as it orbited the Earth two months later. Some tsunamis even made their way into the Pacific Ocean, where small (but then harmless) tsunamis were recorded on the coasts of Mexico and Alaska about a day later.

The first combination of earthquake and tsunami did not occur, even in that part of Indonesia; A similar earthquake at roughly the same location in 1907 triggered a tsunami that killed about 2,200 people in an area sparsely populated at the time. However, what stands out about the 2004 disaster is that it was the first disaster to be watched in almost real time around the world, thanks to the Internet. Some videos of the earthquake appeared online even before the tsunami arrived, and as the disaster struck throughout the day, people were able to watch them with a time delay of hours at most, and in most cases only minutes. Now, of course, we are able to watch such disasters live.

As obsessive as it may sound, this is actually a good thing. Humans have a perverted fascination with disaster, but at the same time they have a wonderful collective capacity for empathy. The ability to indirectly put ourselves in the unfolding catastrophe motivates us to try to help those who have fallen into its trap in reality. This is clearly beneficial for a country like the Philippines, which experiences major natural disasters – hurricanes, with a strange earthquake or occasional volcanic eruption for the sake of variety – on a regular basis.

Likewise, watching Mother Nature beat someone else is a valuable learning experience. Prior to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Philippines did not have its own tsunami warning system, although it was at some risk of such an event. Much of the loss of life in places like Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India was due to people being completely taken aback, either unaware of what was happening or not realizing the danger they were in. Seeing this, the government here in the past years after 2004 was able to set up a monitoring network that provides better protection in conjunction with the existing network in the Pacific.

The recent hurricane of Odette, if there is any positive side to extract from that dark, untimely cloud, also provides lessons for government and ordinary citizens alike. For the government, it should inspire a careful reassessment of the continued viability of communications infrastructure, the facilities where people are housed and relief supplies. For the rest of us, we can think of answers to the natural question, “What would I do if I fell into such a storm?” With our environment here being what it is, it’s not only likely that we’ll need these answers someday, it’s almost certain.

And with that, up until the last, short week of a year that was eventful for so many wrong reasons. If you can, try to help make it easier for your less fortunate neighbors.

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Twitter: @benkritz

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