Accord­ing to the TOI today, around 24000 words have already been writ­ten about the tsunami tragedy and I prob­a­bly shouldn’t add to the count. I have been at a loss for words. Switch­ing on the tele­vi­sion after com­ing back from a trip to Hampi on Sun­day and watch­ing the pic­tures and hear­ing the news head­lines about the death and destruc­tion, espe­cially so close to home, was devastating.

Iron­i­cally, stand­ing amongst the ruins of Hampi, I won­dered at the beauty of Mother nature, while else­where, she showed her enor­mous fury by destroy­ing every­thing in her path.

It’s heart­en­ing to see all the Chen­nai blog­gers doing so much. I have been vis­it­ing most of them to get updates on news and accounts. Kiruba, Lazy Geek, Suman; Ravi Kumar and Prince Roy.

A post from Mad­man: At times like these, I’m glad I’m an athe­ist. I’d find it very dif­fi­cult to accept that a “God” would cause some­thing like this.”

It’s dif­fi­cult really. How does one jus­tify this kind of a scale of destruction?

Some excerpts:

Opin­ion Jour­nal: “The prin­ci­pal vic­tims of the tidal waves in Sri Lanka and else­where Sun­day were the poor peo­ple liv­ing in coastal shanty towns. The wealth­ier coun­tries around the Pacific Rim have an estab­lished early-warning sys­tem against tsunamis, while none cur­rently exists in South Asia.”

Dilip D’Souza writes about how the Pacific Tsunami Warn­ing Cen­ter in Los Ange­les detected the quake that caused these killer waves, at least an hour before they hit Thai­land and Malaysia. They issued an alert for the Pacific coun­tries. Charles McCreery, direc­tor of the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion in Hon­olulu said this about the pos­si­bil­ity of warn­ing the other coun­tries in the region. “We tried to do what we could but we don’t have con­tacts in our address book for any­body in that part of the world.”

This is indeed unfor­tu­nate, espe­cially since we boast of liv­ing in a con­nected world these days. And they were not able to con­tact other coun­tries, when all it would have taken was prob­a­bly a phone call.

It also brings into focus a moot point. That while we have ade­quate aid (accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment, at least) that is flow­ing in after the event, unfor­tu­nately, we did not have in place what we really needed in terms of warn­ing sys­tems and detec­tion tech­nol­ogy. If not to pre­vent the event, to at least bring down the scale of the tragedy itself.

Links

- Photo Essay
– Tsunami Vic­tims
– AID India
– Red­iff Cov­er­age
– How you can help
– Tsunami Help
– World is Changing