On the local news, there was a guy who said he had predicted this big earthquake and tsunami. Apparently, he often comes on TV after earthquakes to say he predicted them… how useful is that?!? And they still give him news time???
Tsunami death toll climbs to 25,000, with 30,000 still missing on remote Indian and Thai islands.
Sure, a warning system would have been great, but there wasn’t one. The Thai meteorogical bureau did have news of the big quake early in the morning, and it DID pass on the news of the event to Thai radio and TV stations, but the news didn’t get on the air until after the waves hit, and the people on the beach were not listening to the radio anyways.
An editorial in one of the Western papers said it best:
[It’s instinctive in humans to search for the meaning of an event like this, once shock and grief have begun to subside. And there will be plenty of meanings to find in the ways that humans reacted as this disaster struck and in its aftermath as the relief effort begins. But except for our obligations to help the victims in any way we can, the underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them. Whenever those forces punctuate human history, they do so tragically. They demonstrate, geologically speaking, how ephemeral our presence is.]
Obviously, the editorial writer is an agnostic, or worse.
“Amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface”?
When TIME and NEWSWEEK’s Asia editions come out next Monday, there will be some very good reporting inside, with amazing quotes and eye-witness accounts from expats who were on the beaches of Phuket and Phi Phi when the waves came. One Swedish woman in hospital now says her husband and 14 year old daughter were swept out of their bungalow room, and are gone forever. She and her teen son survived, and have nothing but a hospital gown now: lost passports, credit cards, clothes, just “lucky to be alive” she said. “Or unlucky. Sometimes I wish I had died with them. This is not going to be easy.”
A Western expat in Sri Lanka on holiday there with his girlfriend, said he woke up at the beach bungalow to find water rushing in and his girlfriend is missing. They were sleeping on a futon. She’s gone now. Imagine waking up to that!
Like the Bali Island stories that came out later, the Xmas Tsunami stories will emerge later in the year, too. It makes rewatching THE BEACH a very different experience now.
[quote=“truant”]I heard on CNN last night that ‘eye witnesses’ reported seeing boats tossed 300 meters in the air.
300 meters??? that’s 1000ft…up…
I know it was bad, but I find it hard to believe that to be an accurate eye witness report.[/quote]
Alot of eyewitness reports could be inaccurate as fear may cause them to remember things differently
Of course some people may also exagerate to try and portray how frightening it was for them
Anything to fill in air time
Amazing eyewitness account from Sri Lanka beach, of how water went out first, then came back in a fury. Would be interesting to see a video of such an event.
Disaster crept up on them deceptively, the Sri Lankan villagers said…then it pounced.
“We were just relaxing here after finishing our morning work,” said one woman, whose daily work consists of cooking, washing and caring for her children. “All of a sudden the water from the sea rose up close to our houses. Then it went out again. We all stood and watched.”
It withdrew for around 1,000 yards, said a neighbor, an electrician, scraping the seabed dry behind it.
“The stones looked like elephants!” he said.
People in Phuket described similar things, with fish flapping on tidal flats in what looked like an EXTREMELY and SUDDEN low tide. Then…in it came.
Another eyewitness account:
An Israeli holidaymaker, Shabtai Majer, 65, of Tel Aviv, was moderately injured and is in the hospital after coming to Thailand to celebrate his 45th wedding anniversary with his wife Sara. Sunday morning, the couple set out to visit the small island of Phithi.
“Shortly after the boat landed, I saw that the sea was just disappearing and I told my wife something was wrong and that we needed to run,” Majer said. “We ran to a small, three-story hotel near the beach. I opened the door and we both went in. I thought we were safe. But then there was a terrible boom and a huge wave washed over us. The walls collapsed and I was buried under water. I was saved only by an air pocket there.”
Asked about his wife’s fate, Majer’s lips tremble. “I think she’s gone.” [Happy ending next graph…]
An hour later, and 14 hours after the event, Majer learned that his wife survived and is hospitalized in another hospital.
I remember we had tsunami warnings in Japan a couple of times. People went to the beach to watch it. Luckily, we never had one.
Wikipedia has already posted a very comprehensive article covering all facets of this event.
[quote=“lane119”] [But except for our obligations to help the victims in any way we can, the underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them. ]
Obviously, the editorial writer is an agnostic, or worse.
“Amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface”?[/quote]
Certainly you are not suggesting that the mechanics of the earth’s crust, and resulting earthquakes, are the products and instruments of moral functioning, are you?
OOC
Japan also has a massive Tsunami wall that stretches the whole of the Pacific coast on Honshu at least.
[quote=“OutofChaos”][quote=“lane119”] [But except for our obligations to help the victims in any way we can, the underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them. ]
Obviously, the editorial writer is an agnostic, or worse.
“Amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface”?[/quote]
Certainly you are not suggesting that the mechanics of the earth’s crust, and resulting earthquakes, are the products and instruments of moral functioning, are you?
OOC[/quote]
Not.
I heard stories that children around the world, where images of this tragedy have played on TV in affluent homes, are now playing outside playground games called “earthquake” and “tsunami.” Although it’s an old word for many people, TSUNAMI has now entered the everyday vocabulary of the non-Japanese world. And it can be spelled the same way for both singular or plural uses… one tsunami, two tsunami…
I was in Singapore, and weirdly enough, we were watching an Omnimax movie on earth quakes and other forces of nature when it happened 
It felt even weirder that though being so close, we had to learn about it from the news. Nothing in Singapore (weather or anything) would have suggested something horrible like this had happened Sadly enough, we were the ones who told the Sri Lankan friends we went out to dinner with that evening about what had happened. As most of the communication is down, they probably still haven’t heard from relatives and friends (they hadn’t when I left Singapore yesterday) 
[quote=“lane119”] Not.
I heard stories that children around the world, where images of this tragedy have played on TV in affluent homes, are now playing outside playground games called “earthquake” and “tsunami.” [/quote]
Ring around the Rosey a pocket full of posies. Atishoo atishoo… we all fall down
A child’s game supposedly derived from the Black Death (plague)
[quote=“Battery9”]
I am a bit upset that SO MUCH time is being spent on Thailand. It seems as if the foreign tourists are more important than everyone else. It must be terrible to actually stay behind and try to pick up pieces of your life… I’m just talking about CNN Asia here…thought they would have the same interest in all the areas.[/quote]Phuket has a large city with a TV station nearby, cameras, reporters, tourists themselves shooting amateur video… compared with the other locations, there’s just more news and footage coming out of Thailand. That’s what news stations do, run stories and footage. You’ll see more from the other locations soon as rescue workers and news crews are able to get in there.
[quote=“Battery9”].
I am a bit upset that SO MUCH time is being spent on Thailand. It seems as if the foreign tourists are more important than everyone else. It must be terrible to actually stay behind and try to pick up pieces of your life… I’m just talking about CNN Asia here…thought they would have the same interest in all the areas.[/quote]
Good point, Battery9. For the most part, when brownskinned darkskinned people die in Third World countries, the Western white media tends to ignore the story. But if white First World people are invovled, it’s hot news. Can you explain this?
As the Sheik himself once said;
“what makes your blood blood and our blood water?”
[quote=“TNT”][quote=“lane119”] Not.
I heard stories that children around the world, where images of this tragedy have played on TV in affluent homes, are now playing outside playground games called “earthquake” and “tsunami.” [/quote]
Ring around the Rosey a pocket full of posies. Atishoo atishoo… we all fall down
A child’s game supposedly derived from the Black Death (plague)[/quote]
Interesting. The games children play.
Question for everyone out there, especially the professional copy editors who know their p’s and q’s. Should TSUNAMI be singular and plural with no S, or should we follow CNN’s example – reports are titled “Asian Tsunamis” – and the title of this very thread, which also uses the romanized plural of the Japanese word “tsunami” (which, in turns out, means “harbor wave,” not tidal wave (s).
Should tsunami be plural with an S or is CNN and forumosa.com wrong?
According to the usage of Japanese words in English, like SUSHI, these kinds of words do not take an S. We say I ate one piece of sushi, or I ate five pieces of sushi. We do not say sushis, do we? But smarter grammarians than I might have a better take on all this?
Copyeditors of the world, is it TSUNAMI or TSUNAMIS?
sashimi or sashimis?
sushi or sushis?
shiiotake or shiiotakes? (mushrooms)
sumo or sumos?
wasabi or wasabis?
tofu or tofus?
tsunami or tsunamis?
And when you know the final answer, email it to cnni@cnn.com
CNN will be very interested to know, with egg on it(s) face.
Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe in English-speaking media, it is permissable to use rules of grammar from the home country and apply them to foreign words like tsunami and sushi. With sushi they never do it. But it appears that tsunami has been pluralized, without permission!
One copyeditor I know says: "Tsunami is a Japanese word meaning
HISTORICAL FOOTNOTE: READ last sentence below, SLOOOOWLYYY!
On Sunday, the Tsunami Warning system in Hawaii said this… at first:
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 0059Z 26 DEC 2004
COORDINATES - 3.4 NORTH 95.7 EAST
LOCATION - OFF W COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATERA
MAGNITUDE - 8.0
EVALUATION
THIS EARTHQUAKE IS LOCATED OUTSIDE THE PACIFIC.
NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS BASED ON HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI
DATA.
[quote=“lane119”]HISTORICAL FOOTNOTE: READ last sentence below, SLOOOOWLYYY!
On Sunday, the Tsunami Warning system in Hawaii said this… at first:
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 0059Z 26 DEC 2004
COORDINATES - 3.4 NORTH 95.7 EAST
LOCATION - OFF W COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATERA
MAGNITUDE - 8.0
EVALUATION
THIS EARTHQUAKE IS LOCATED OUTSIDE THE PACIFIC.
NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS BASED ON HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI
DATA.[/quote]
maybe they were just talking about within the pacific (if you read the last sentence with the one before it). It is the Hawaii Tsunami warning system after all.
[quote=“deano”]As the Sheik himself once said;
“what makes your blood blood and our blood water?”[/quote]
Good quote, deano. It’s like the big news on CNN and in the papers tomorrow, worldwide, the little blond blue-eyed Swedish kid in Phuket and Bangkok hospital, who made front page of the UK newspapers today, huge photo, of 2 year old kid, with caption WHERE’S MUMMY?
Ofificals in Bangkok at that time could not find his relatives and were trying to ID him. Finally, they located his father and grandfather at another hospital and they are okay. He will be given to them this afternoon.
But his mom and grandmother are still missing and presumed dead.
It’s a sad story all around. But one does wonder, why all the fuss over this cute little blond child, and nothing about all the little orphans with dark skin in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand who lost their mums and dads?
One wishes the world was colour blind but it aint. Yet. But I guess this is the way the Western media works. We like to read/see about people who look like us I guess…
I notice, too, here in Taiwan, most Taiwanese I have spoken with the last 3 days, don’t give a shit about this tragedy in south Asia. Far Away. Dark skinned poverty level bumpkins. Shoganai, that’s life. I ever hear people laughing when they watch the news images on local TV of the tsunami hitting the beaches. Doesn’t concern them in the least, it seems. I wonder if same holds true in Japan?
I had a peek into Singaporean and Taiwanese newspapers on the plane yesterday, and guess what their headlines were:
Head counts of possibly affected Singaporeans/Taiwanese
Same on German news, of course