First published in September 2005 …

In about three and a half months, the first anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami will be marked. Here are some relevant notes.

When the tsunami occurred on December 26, 2004, I was reading a travelogue about Britain’s coast by Paul Theroux, who happened to mention the late Irish poet Louis MacNeice. Theroux quoted a couple of lines that took on added poignany in the face of the Indian Ocean disaster:

Upon this beach the falling wall of the sea
That never-satisfied old maid, the sea/ rehangs her white lace curtains ceaselessly

I found MacNeice on the Internet and found this stirring poem, which would make a fine eulogy:

Wolves

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of the sand
Flushed, by the children’s bedtime, level with the shore.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them amongst the talk and laughter.

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Sumatra Quake Shook Earth’s Total Surface
May 19, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) - December’s great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake – the most powerful in more than 40 years and the trigger of a devastating tsunami – shook the ground everywhere on Earth’s surface. Weeks later the planet was still trembling.
The quake resulted from the longest fault rupture ever observed – 720 to 780 miles, which spread for 10 minutes, also a record. A typical earthquake’s duration would be 30 seconds.
The December quake was the first of its size to be measured and studied by the new worldwide array of digital seismic instruments.
Those results are starting to come in, with a special section of a half-dozen research papers on the quake appearing in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
“This is really a watershed event. We’ve never had such comprehensive data for a great earthquake because we didn’t have the instrumentation to gather it 40 years ago,” said Thorne Lay, professor of Earth sciences and director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“It is nature at its most formidable,” Lay said in a statement.
The earthquake and resulting tsunami, which swept across the Indian Ocean, killed more than 176,000 people in 11 countries and left about 50,000 missing and hundreds of thousands homeless.
The quake occurred where two of the giant plates that form the surface of the Earth grind together.
At that spot the Eurasian plate was being pulled downward by the descending Indo-Australian plate. The quake released the edge of the Eurasian plate, which sprang up, lifting the ocean floor and sending the sea water off in the giant wave that killed so many, the researchers reported.
They said the higher sea floor displaced so much water from the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea that sea level worldwide was raised 0.004 inch.
“No point on Earth remained undisturbed,” wrote Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado.
Indeed, ground movement of as much as 0.4 inch occurred everywhere on Earth’s surface, though it was too small to be felt in most areas.
And the temblor “delivered a blow to our planet” that was felt for weeks, noted a team of researchers led by Jeffrey Park of Yale University.
His group calculated that the quake caused the planet to oscillate like a bell, at periods of about 17 minutes, which they were able to measure for weeks afterward. A similar phenomenon was first noted in the 1960 quake in Chile.
The initial Dec 26 Sumatra quake is estimated to have had a magnitude of 9.1 to 9.3 and a second quake to the south on March 28 registered 8.6.
By comparison, the 1960 Chile earthquake was magnitude 9.5 and the 1964 Alaska earthquake was magnitude 9.2. California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake had a magnitude of 6.9.
Among the other findings reported in the various papers:
* In Sri Lanka, more than 1,000 miles from the epicenter, the ground moved nearly 4 inches.
* The rupture spread from south to north, resulting in a Doppler effect in instruments measuring it. Seismometers in Russia recorded the quake at a higher frequency because it was moving toward them, while those in Australia measured a lower frequency as it moved away.
* When the surface waves from the Sumatra quake reached Alaska they triggered a swarm of 14 local earthquakes in the Mount Wrangell area.

Deadly Tsunami Reached Around the Globe
Aug 25 2005
Associated Press
Last year’s Sumatra tsunami focused its death and destruction on the lands around the Indian Ocean, but the great wave traveled around the world and was recorded as far away as Peru and northeastern Canada.
The wave rose a massive 30 feet as it destroyed communities around the Indian Ocean.
Tide gauges worldwide recorded its arrival from hours to a day after its Dec 26 start, and movement of the wave was also tracked by satellite, according to a study appearing Thursday in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.
A research team led by Vasily Titov of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle reported that the wave moved in a complex pattern as it circled the globe, guided by ocean floor ridges that helped
focus its energy in particular places.
The wave traveled several times around the globe before it finally dissipated, Titov reported.
Wave heights recorded at Callao, Peru, 11,400 miles east of the epicenter of the quake that caused the wave, and at Halifax, Nova Scotia, 14,400 miles west, were higher than at the Cocos Islands, located just over 1,000 miles south of the quake, the team noted.
The unusually high waves so far from the quake site result from two factors, the main east-west direction of the wave’s energy and the focusing mechanism of the deep-sea ridges, Titov’s team reported.
The first tsunami wave arriving at the Cocos Islands peaked at about 12 inches, the team said. By contrast, waves arriving at Callao and Halifax topped 20 inches, the team reported.
Other communities where tide gauges recorded arrival of the tsunami included Kodiak, Alaska, 10.4 inches; Point Reyes, Calif., 15.6 inches; Corral, Chile, 7.6 inches; Port Stanley, Falkland Islands, 17.8 inches;
Newlyn, England, 2 inches and Brest, France, 3.2 inches.
Tsunami wave heights along the East Coast of the United States are less exact because a storm passing along the coast also induced oscillations in the water. Tsunami height estimates included 9 inches at Atlantic City, New Jerset, 14 inches at Trident Pier, New Jersey and 3 inches at Magueyes Island, Puerto Rico.

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My newspaper, The Nation, had a look into its veracity of the disturbing claims in this article from The Times of London, dated January 5, 2005, but came up with nothing to corroborate them.

Secret mass grave for tourists
By Daniel McGrory
Our correspondent discovers a burial site for 10,000 bodies near a Buddhist temple in Thailand

THE bodies of British and other Western tourists are being secretly buried in vast mass graves in an open field close to a busy road. Families still searching for missing relatives were not told of the decision to dispose hastily of hundreds of unidentified victims yesterday with no ceremony or memorial in a mass burial site on
scrubland owned by a nearby Buddhist temple. Local Red Cross officials told The Times that they were ordered to prepare a site for 10,000 bodies, far more than the Thai Government says were killed by the tsunami, raising doubts that a true count of victims will ever be known.
Grieving relatives of all nationalities are banned from visiting this sprawling site, which is hidden behind a line of banyan trees near the end of an unmarked lane at Bang Muang, 80 miles north of Phuket.
As bodies wrapped in plastic sheets were carried in the bucket of a mechanical digger to the edge of open trenches, Weiapol Pitcun, a Thai official, said: “This may look insensitive but what else can we do? There are too many for us to cope with, so this is the most efficient way to store the bodies.”
Mr Pitcun said that the authorities would deter visits by relatives to prevent the site from becoming a place of pilgrimage. “Families should not come here, it will only upset them,” he said. “Tell them there is not anything worthwhile to see.”
The slow pace of identification, the red tape and now this tactless method of dealing with the remains is certain to compound the grief of relatives who arrive on every flight to Thailand, determined not to leave until they have found what they came for.
Even if they discover this place and evade the security cordon there is nothing on the long line of stakes stuck in mounds of earth to identify the gender, the race or the age of those buried here.
From first light, construction teams had worked to gouge out 20 trenches, each more than 150 yards long. Armed police deterred local onlookers from investigating what was happening in this rural backwater near the Yanyoa Buddhist temple in Phangnga province, home to some of Thailand’s favourite resorts, and the worst-hit region in this disaster. Twenty yards from where weary teenage volunteers clad in white forensic science suits and orange rubber gloves were laying bodies side by side in shallow pits, there were half a dozen funeral pyres burning throughout the day as Thai victims, identified by their families, were cremated in the open air.
With a shortage of fuel, workers threw bicycle inner tubes and car tyres on top of the flimsy, white plywood coffins to make them burn faster. Columns of acrid smoke carried on the sea breeze drifted across the country lane briefly obliterating the sight of the open graves.
Monks from the temple occasionally appeared to say prayers over the funeral pyres but paid no attention to the procession of burials across the narrow lane. Shopowners less than a mile away were astounded to be told that Thailand’s most miserable landmark was on their doorstep.
At one stage the volunteer undertakers were seen carrying a number of what from their size were obviously very young children to the open pit.
Thai officials insist that the tsunami victims are not being dumped here and forgotten. Mr Pitcun demonstrated how each body is given a serial number. He untied one body bag, and slipped the first copy of this tag number in a sealed plastic envelope under the decaying T-shirt of a man. A second tag is then attached to the outside of each body bag, and the final label is tied to a stake in the ground.
The plan is that when DNA samples provided by British families are matched to a body here then the Thai authorities will pay to exhume the remains and repatriate them to Britain. With so few foresenic science experts to hand, officials conceded yesterday that this process could still be going in a year unless more help is received. Countries such as Britain are being urged to send more scientists. To ease the backlog China has offered to test the tissue samples at its laboratories.
Mr Pitcun does not know what will happen to those bodies that remain without identification, or how long they are prepared to leave the victims buried here. He did admit that bodies of Westerners stored in refrigeration units would be brought here for burial in the next few days.
Nothing illustrated the present shambles better than when orders were given to exhume 300 of the first bodies to be buried here. Thai officials admitted that tags put on bodies had already deteriorated in the heat, forcing forensic science experts to conduct new DNA tests on all these remains, further delaying the
process.

FOREIGN DEATH TOLL Tourists dead and (missing)

Europe
Austria 10 (443)
Belgium 6 (73)
Britain 41 (159)
Croatia 1 (1)
Czech Republic 1 (17)
Denmark 7 (166)
Estonia 3
Finland 15 (183)
France 22 (100)
Germany 60 (1,000)
Greece 7
Italy 18 (570)
Ireland 21
Latvia 15
Lithuania 1
Luxembourg 2
Netherlands 6 (180)
Norway 16 (88)
Poland 1 (42)
Portugal 8
Russia 2 (143)
Spain 7
Sweden 52 (1,903)
Switzerland 23 (500)
Turkey 1 (16)
Ukraine 17

Asia-Pacific
Australia 14 (77)
Brunei 2
China 3 (15)
Hong Kong 8 (42)
Japan 22
Philippines 3 (20)
New Zealand 3 (4)
Singapore 9 (175)
South Korea 12 (9)
Taiwan 3

Americas
Brazil 2 (118)
Canada 5 (150)
Chile 1
Colombia 1
Mexico 4
United States 15 (5,000)

Others
South Africa 9 (7)
Israel 3 (7)

TOTAL 394 (11,396)