More Than A Gift Union Nj
More Than A Gift Union Nj - Copyright © 2004-2023 Yelp Inc. Yelp, and related marks are registered trademarks of Yelp. The tsunami that hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia on December 26, 2004, washed a 2,600-ton ship about five miles (eight kilometers) inland into the city. The site is now a park and memorial.
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More Than A Gift Union Nj
After a catastrophic tsunami killed almost 170,000 people in Indonesia in 2004, is the country ready for the next one? More than a decade ago, one of the deadliest natural disasters in history killed 227,898 people in 14 countries around the Indian Ocean - nearly 170,000 of them in Indonesia.
This morning's report of a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that shook the central city of Donggala on the island of Sulawesi prompted tsunami warnings like the one that killed hundreds of thousands in 2004. It started on the morning of the 26th, 150 miles (240 kilometers) off the west coast of Sumatra
when a magnitude 9.1 earthquake - the third largest since 1900 - tore through the ocean floor. In eight minutes, the rupture stretched over 700 miles (1,127 kilometers) and released 23,000 times more energy than the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan. Parts of the seabed moved 30 feet (9 metres) to the west-southwest.
Will Indonesia Be Ready For The Next Tsunami?
But that wasn't the worst part. Some parts of the fault also rose tens of feet, raising an entire column of seawater above them. On the surface of the sea, a wave - a tsunami - started and flew around the Indian Ocean. It was 100 feet (30 meters) high along parts of the northwest coast when it hit Sumatra.
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Three months after the tsunami, the rebuilding of Banda Aceh has barely begun. Here, a man searches the rubble for scrap metal. When the next tsunami hits the Indian Ocean — and scientists are sure another big one is inevitable, probably within the next few decades — will the region benefit?
The hardest hit on that terrible day ten years ago was the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. More than 60,000 of its 264,000 inhabitants died - about 35 percent of Indonesia's total lost. Vivi Yanti, an English teacher in the city, remembers the water as warm, black, greasy and full of debris.
In the streets crowded with fleeing people, Yanti saw a woman running, holding a little boy's hand, knocking on the windows of passing cars, begging for a ride. No one stopped. "I escaped by riding with my uncle on the back of his motorbike," said Yanti.
Looking Back
I remember looking back and at first I didn't know what I was seeing - the water was carrying a big boat down the street. I said to my uncle, 'Go faster'." A decade later, Banda Aceh was rebuilt and its population climbed back to 250,000, almost what it was before the disaster.
Thanks to smooth new highways and lively night cafes, the city has been transformed. Apart from a series of perfectly manicured mass graves and a few deliberate reminders of the disaster - such as the presence of a large ship abandoned in a city park - most signs of tsunami damage have been removed.
Source: cdn0.weddingwire.com
Like other countries devastated by the 2004 tsunami, Indonesia is now linked to the Indian Ocean Tsunami Detection System. Once an earthquake occurs, this system of seabed sensors and surface buoys will transmit signals via satellite to government warning centers around the world, warning them that a tsunami may be on its way.
Ten years ago, such sensors only existed in the Pacific. If they had been located in the Indian Ocean in 2004, some of the 51,000 people who died in Sri Lanka and India would have been spared: The tsunami took two hours to cross the Indian Ocean, and there would have been early warning - or any
Looking Back
warning at all - saved thousands of lives. But Indonesia - the fourth most populous country in the world - is in a less fortunate position. It borders a series of dangerous seismic faults, most notably a long arc-shaped one called the Sunda Megathrust, which corresponds to the islands of Sumatra and Java.
The 2004 tsunami, which started on this fault, hit the coast of Sumatra within 30 minutes of the earthquake. Even with an almost immediate tsunami warning, many residents would not have had enough time to reach higher ground. Many locals attribute the survival of the Rahmatullah Mosque on the outskirts of Banda Aceh to divine intervention - but the open ground floor of the mosque may have helped by allowing the tsunami to pass through.
Nine days after the disaster, a US Marine Corps helicopter delivers supplies. Faced with such a ruthless line between life and death, Indonesia is trying to improve public awareness and preparedness. A handful of evacuation shelters - three or four story buildings, some with open ground floors - were built in Banda Aceh and other threatened cities to allow the wave to pass through.
Source: imageio.forbes.com
There is a network of sirens to warn residents that a tsunami is imminent. However, there is still much to do as the response to the recent earthquake has been painful. On 11 April 2012, when an 8.6 magnitude earthquake struck Banda Aceh, Indonesia's National Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami warning within five minutes of the first tremors.
A Practice Run Goes Badly
The national early warning system worked perfectly, but the local response to the warning does not bode well for future disasters. Officials in Banda Aceh have failed to establish clear emergency guidelines for the city. Although the earthquake did not produce a tsunami - the plates slid along the fault in this case horizontally, not suddenly upwards - those with a frightening first-hand experience expected it and panicked.
The conditions were completely chaotic," said Syarifah Marlina Al Mazhir, a lifelong Banda Aceh resident who worked for the Red Cross during the 2004 tsunami. "Instead of evacuating to safe areas, people were returning home or picking up children at school, and creating traffic jams." Even worse, he said, the staff responsible for operating the tsunami sirens had fled and three floors of the city's tsunami shelters were locked to
down. "In Banda Aceh, everything was paralyzed very quickly," said Tom Alcedo, head of the American Red Cross in Indonesia. "The roads to the high ground were blocked. All those people in their cars would have been swept away. It was a wake-up call." Ardito Kodijat, director of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Information Center in Jakarta, says Banda Aceh and other coastal cities in Indonesia must create well-marked evacuation routes and conduct regular tsunami drills. There were few
of people in Banda Aceh, he said, were aware that evacuation centers had been set up. Others who saw the fury of the 2004 tsunami thought the structures would be unsafe and tried to escape inland instead." People could have been much better prepared if there was clear and strong leadership from the local government," said Kodijat. However, Banda Aceh is probably not the one of Indonesia's cities most at risk. "The
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