geog blog #4
When you type into Google ‘boxing day
tsunami 2004’ you receive 649,000 results in 0.31 seconds. Trying to figure out what happened to achieve
global coverage like this is a near impossibility. At what point does a natural
hazard become a natural disaster? At what point does a minor issue become a
worldwide problem? At what point does the level of development in the countries
affected, become a global priority that needs to be addressed? Trying to answer
these questions requires a full analysis of the events that occurred on the 26th
December 2004.
There are over 7 billion people in the world and the theory ‘6
Degrees of Separation’ suggests that by a chain of ‘friends of friends’ people
could be connected by 6 people or fewer. Despite this the further the two
people’s lives are the less likely these connections become. Therefore when the Boxing Day tsunami
happened, proportionally is seems unlikely that if you are living in a
developed and Western country far from the troubles of the Pacific that you
would know anybody. However the same cannot be said for the people who live
there. How can one person not know a single person directly affected and yet
another only know people directly affected.
Of course when looking at the number of people affected we are not
looking only at those who felt the water and have the strap line ‘I survived
the 2004 tsunami’ with them forever, but also those who are affected by a chain
of connections, those people who sit at the very long end of a domino effect
and still suffer. The best way to demonstrate this is with my own story; I came
from living in Hong Kong and assumed that I would never be part of a vulnerable
population, I was wrong.
‘Thailand
2004 The day the water came’.
8.30am: between ordering and the food arriving my sisters
and I had run down to the beach to play and pass the time, of course we came
back exclaiming about how the beach had grown. Being aged 9, 6 and 4 we were
blissfully unaware that the unusually low tide was not something to be excited
about but rather was a death trap waiting to happen.
9am: myself, Christie and Kitty were in ‘Kids Club’
drawing, colouring in Aboriginal masks, once Kitty had exhausted all of the
fun to be had she asked to return back to Mummy and Daddy, Christie obliged and
took her back to a cafe on the beach front The cafe and the Kids Club ran
parallel to the sea along the back of the beach.
Once we had returned to the Kids Club this was the moment
that everything changed, ‘RUN.RUN.RUN’ scream the ladies in the kids club, as I
look over the small wall, about a metre high I can see the wave, the wave
filled not only with water but with screams, debris, and people. As the wave
continues to flood in it breaks the barrier designed to keep children in rather
than tsunamis out. The kids club lady pushes open a door at the back of the
room which reveals a staircase, designed to be used in emergencies leading up
to the first floor reception area. The ladies are grabbing children with as
many limbs as they can manage and try to collect us all on the stairs.
9.45am: Christie and I are standing in the open fronted
lobby looking down at the beach, the restaurant and the mass of people and
furniture. We can see what is left of the beach cafe but all we can do is
scream at the top of our lungs ‘come to the lobby’. Parts of a traumatic event
will stick by you forever and that sentence which I shouted until my lungs had
no more air will never leave me. I looked around and all I could hear is screaming.
Not the type of screaming when you break a bone or stub your toe. Not the
screaming when somebody jumps out and scares you. This is the screaming of
confusion and chaos. Nobody is sure of anything, people, places even the
direction they are facing.
Suddenly I see my mum running towards us, and in a way
that only a mother’s hug can, I was re-assured and I knew that everything would
be alright. She told us to sit on the sofa in the lobby and not move whilst she
went to find Kitty and my dad. Christie asked me, what had happened, being only
9 I struggled to come up with an answer, however Christie being 7 believed my response as if it were completely true. ‘The Moon and the Sun have had a fight,
because the Sun gets to be in the sky during the day when everyone can look at
it but the Moon only gets to be in the sky at night when everyone is sleeping.
They had a fight and the Sun won, so he pushed the Moon into the sea and it
made a big wave.’ Highly unlikely but in the state of confusion anything goes.
It was soon after this that my mum, accompanied by my dad
and Kitty came running up the stairs and the family to be re-united. The
minutes and hours that directly followed these events all seem a blur. Its hard
to remember the calm after the storm and therefore remembering the aftermath of
the tsunami is challenging. We were staying in inter-connecting rooms and at a
time we were prepared to give up one of our rooms to allow guests without accommodation to have somewhere to call home. We then found out that it wasn't even necessary, the number of guests in the hotel had inevitably decreased.
In the hours that followed anxious guests spoke to the management to try and get whiteboard with information on and bottled water and
other food from the first floor store rooms. It was like being an evacuee,
there were rations and when your rations had gone that was it. There was no
longer a state of panic but a state of uncertainty with no electricity and no
geophysical scientist the origin of the disaster we had just experienced and
the possibilities of recurrences were all completely unknown. Thats the story
that changed by life, the story that has left me with the strap line ‘I survived the 2004 boxing day tsunami’ and the story that affected millions of people
worldwide. ‘
That day and in the days that followed across 14 countries in the
Pacific more than 230,000 people were killed. The most devastating effects were
felt in Indonesia where officially 131, 028 deaths were recorded however the
un-official number could be significantly more. There are a number of factors that affect the vulnerability of a
population when looking at tsunami’s. These would include distance from the
sea, and the epicentre that sparked the tsunami, level of development i.e. a
large building vs. a beach hut, the access to warning systems so that
evacuation plans can be implemented, and the finally the people affected. The
disaster risk-equation is equalled out to hazard multiplied by vulnerability and
then divided by capacity to cope.
The vulnerability of these populations were high, and needless to say that prediction and management strategies were basic if not non-existent, furthermore a combination of the population and tectonics must be held accountable for the events of that day. Needless to say that human beings live in a progressive society, where steps are taken to protect populations in the future and therefore the possibility of a repeat of my story is unexpected. Saying that the planet is an uncontrollable and complex place and as inhabitants of this bizarre land all we can do is prepare for changes and embrace the natural experiences that will be thrown our way.
TR
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