THE 2004 INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI

The tsunami that hit Asia on 26 December 2004 has killed swiftly more than
100,000 persons. Strong and fast tides swept distant populated coastlines
many hours after the generating earthquake hit the north tip of Sumatra; it is
amazing that a human life loss of such biblical proportions was reached in the
age of world-wide satellite surveillance! The death toll is expected to rise as
millions remain homeless without adequate food, water, sanitation, or medical
care. The problem is exacerbated by geography, politics, and economics.

This document contains a short introduction on the mechanics of this particular

tsunami (3 slides from Le Monde), NOAA’s view from the sky and futile warning
from the West, followed by impact photos (from Le Monde, La Liberation, the
New York Times), and articles (from the New York Times) on the secondary
effects of the tsunami on the survivors, related primarily to water scarcity and
the onset of epidemics. The appendix discusses the Pacific Ocean roots of
tsunamis and ends with a USGS tutorial about their formation.

1. TSUNAMI MECHANICS

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2. VIEW FROM “ABOVE”

This QuickBird satellite

image of the southwestern
coast of Sri Lanka, just
south of Colombo in a
resort area called Kalutara,
was made shortly after the
moment of tsunami impact,
at 10.20 a.m. local time on
Sunday, slightly less than
four hours after the
earthquake. The tsunami
took an hour to reach the
coast of Indonesia and two
Indian islands, another hour to hit Thailand and Sri Lanka and a full
six hours to reach Africa. That provided ample time for many of the
victims to have been warned of its approach and to have taken action
to get to higher ground and save themselves.

BUT THE WARNING NETWORK WAS NOT THERE….(the following is

from NOAA’s site)
Dec. 29, 2004 — NOAA scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii went to
work within minutes of getting a seismic signal that an earthquake occurred off the west
coast of Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. NOAA issued a bulletin indicating no threat of a
tsunami to Hawaii, the West Coast of North America or to other coasts in the Pacific Basin—
the area served by the existing tsunami warning system established by the Pacific rim
countries and operated by NOAA in Hawaii.

NOAA scientists then began an effort to notify countries about the possibility that a tsunami
may have been triggered by the massive 9.0 undersea earthquake. The Pacific Basin
tsunami warning system did not detect a tsunami in the Indian Ocean since there are no
buoys in place there. Even without a way to detect whether a tsunami had formed in the
Indian Ocean, NOAA officials tried to get the message out to other nations not a part of its
Pacific warning system to alert them of the possibility of a tsunami. However, the tsunami
raced across the ocean at speeds up to 500 mph. Below is the timeline of agency's actions
once the undersea earthquake was detected by the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in
Hawaii.

(All times listed below are Hawaii Standard Time or HST.)

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At 2:59 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time (HST) on Christmas Day a large earthquake occurred in
the Indian Ocean near Sumatra, Indonesia.

At 3:07 p.m. the resulting seismic signals received at the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning
Center (PTWC) from stations in Australia triggered an alarm that alerted watchstanders.

At 3:10 p.m. PTWC issued a message to other observatories in the Pacific with its
preliminary earthquake parameters.

At 3:14 p.m. PTWC issued a bulletin providing information on the earthquake and stating
there was no tsunami threat to the Pacific nations that participate in the Tsunami Warning
System in the Pacific (ITSU). These member nations are part of the UNESCO
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) and the International Coordination
Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific (ICG/ITSU). India, Sri Lanka and the
Maldives are not part of the Pacific system.

At 4:04 p.m. PTWC issued bulletin No. 2 revising the earthquake magnitude to 8.5. That
bulletin stated no tsunami threat to the Pacific but identified the possibility of a tsunami
near the epicenter. No additional information regarding the formation of a tsunami was
available.

At approximately 4:30 p.m. HST PTWC attempted to contact the Australia Met Service with
no luck but were successful in contacting Australia Emergency Management. They confirmed
they were aware of the earthquake.

At approximately 5:30 p.m. Internet newswire reports of casualties in Sri Lanka provided
PTWC with the first indications of the existence of a destructive tsunami. Indications are
that the tsunami had already struck the entire area by this time, although we have not been
able to obtain arrival times.

At approximately 5:45 p.m., armed with knowledge of a tsunami, PTWC contacted the U.S.
Pacific Command (PACOM) in Hawaii.

At approximately 5:45 p.m., PTWC received a call from a Sri Lanka Navy Commander
inquiring about the potential for further tsunami waves from aftershocks.

At approximately 6:00 p.m. the U.S. Ambassador in Sri Lanka called PTWC to set up a
notification system in case of big aftershock. He said they would contact Sri Lanka Prime
Minister's office for such notifications.

Continuing news reports gave increasing and more widespread casualties.

At approximately 7:25 p.m. the first reading from the Australian National Tidal Center
gauge at Cocos Island west of Australia gave a reading of 0.5m crest-to-trough.

At 7:25 p.m. the Harvard University Seismology Department reported its preliminary
Centroid Moment Tensor solution that indicated a magnitude of 8.9.

At approximately 7:45 p.m. PTWC contacted the Australia Bureau of Meteorology and
advised them about the increased earthquake magnitude and the 0.5m reading at Cocos
Island, as well as the possibility of a destructive tsunami impact on Australia's west coasts.

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At approximately 8:00 p.m. PTWC re-contacted PACOM to advise of increased earthquake
magnitude and potential for further tsunami impacts in the western Indian Ocean.

At approximately 8:15 p.m. Australia Bureau of Met called PTWC to advise they had issued
an alert to their west coast.

At approximately 8:20 p.m. NOAA National Weather Service Pacific Region director
contacted PTWC to report PACOM said no tsunami was observed at Diego Garcia in the
Pacific.

At approximately 10:15 p.m. PTWC spoke with U.S. State Department Operations and
advised them about the potential threat to Madagascar and Africa. They set up a conference
call with the U.S. embassies at Madagascar and Mauritius, and PTWC advised them of the
situation.

At 5:36 a.m. on December 27 PTWC issued a third Tsunami Information Bulletin for this
event informing the Pacific that small sea level fluctuations from the Indian Ocean tsunami
were being observed in the Pacific, probably from energy that wrapped around south of
Australia.

The Pacific Warning System

Pacific warning network is comprised of (1) hundreds of seismic stations worldwide; (2)
coastal tide gauges and sophisticated Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis
(DART) buoys in the Pacific Basin capable of detecting a centimeter's difference in ocean
height.

However, it is important to note that without similar gauges and buoys in the Indian Ocean
PTWC officers were not in a position to detect a tsunami there.

Furthermore, the development of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS)
led by the United States, Japan, South Africa and the European Commission—with 53
nations currently participating at the ministerial level—should help fill the sensor gap for
other regions of the world. Two key focus areas of the GEOSS initiative are addressing
"reducing loss of life and property due to disasters" and "monitoring our oceans."

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December 31, 2004
GAUGING DISASTER

How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly

Agence France-Presse

Tourists try to rush to safety before the tsunami hit the Hat Rai Lay Beach in Thailand. The water had
receded before the deadly wave struck.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

It was 7 p.m. Seattle time on Dec. 25 when Vasily V. Titov raced to his office, sat down
at his computer and prepared to simulate an earthquake and tsunami that was already
sweeping across the Indian Ocean.

He started from a blank screen and with the muted hope that just maybe he could warn
officials across the globe about the magnitude of what was unfolding. But the obstacles
were numerous.

Two hours had already passed since the quake, and there was no established model of
what a tsunami might do in the Indian Ocean. Ninety percent of tsunamis occur in the
Pacific, and that was where most research had been done.

Dr. Titov, a mathematician who works for a government marine laboratory, began to
assemble his digital tools on his computer's hard drive: a three-dimensional map of the
Indian Ocean seafloor and the seismic data showing the force, breadth and direction of
the earthquake's punch to the sea.

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As he set to work, Sumatra's shores were already a soup of human flotsam. Thailand to
the east was awash. The pulse of energy transferred from seabed to water, traveling at
jetliner speed, was already most of the way across the Bay of Bengal and approaching
unsuspecting villagers and tourists, fishermen and bathers, from the eight-foot-high
coral strands of the Maldives to the teeming shores of Sri Lanka and eastern India.

In the end, Dr. Titov could not get ahead of that wave with his numbers. He could not
help avert the wreckage and death. But alone in his office, following his computer model
of the real tsunami, he began to understand, as few others in the world did at that
moment, that this was no local disaster.

With an eerie time lag, his data would reveal the dimensions of the catastrophe that was
unfolding across eight brutal hours on Sunday, one that stole tens of thousands of lives
and remade the coasts of the Asian subcontinent.

For those on the shores of the affected countries, the reckoning with the tsunami's
power came all but out of the blue, and cost them their lives. It began near a corner of
the island of Sumatra, and ended 3,000 miles away on the East African shore.

For the scientists in Hawaii, at the planet's main tsunami center, who managed to send
out one of the rare formal warnings, there was intense frustration. They had useful
information; they were trained to get word out; but they were stymied by limitations,
including a lack of telephone numbers for counterparts in other countries.

For Colleen McGinn, a disaster relief worker in Melbourne, Australia, the developing
crisis would send her off on an aid mission that she could not have comprehended and
that United Nations officials have projected to be the greatest relief effort ever mounted.

For others like Phil Cummins, an Australian seismologist, what was happening made all
too much sense. He had grasped the dangers a year earlier, and in 2004 had delivered
a Powerpoint presentation to tsunami experts in Japan and Hawaii.

"It really seems strange now to see the title," Dr. Cummins recalled yesterday. "Tsunami
in the Indian Ocean - Why should we care?"

Hawaii: Helpless Warners

He wore two beepers, in case one failed. Both chirped.

It was a languorous Christmas afternoon, with his girlfriend away and nothing to do, and
Barry Hirshorn, 48, was asleep. As a geophysicist, he was used to having his rest
interrupted. Almost daily, earthquakes announced themselves somewhere, usually
modest nuisances, and off went his pagers.

It was just after 3 p.m. in Honolulu, nearly halfway around the globe from where the
earth was trembling. Mr. Hirshorn worked at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, a

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stubby cinderblock structure set in a weedy plain in Ewa Beach. He was one of five staff
scientists entrusted with the big task of alerting Pacific countries and the United States
military to deadly tsunamis.

"I knew it wasn't tiny," he said. "Probably over a 6." The messages on his beepers
indicated alerts from two far-apart seismic monitoring stations, meaning the quake had
power.

Shrugging into a shirt, he hopped onto his "duty bike," and pedaled the several hundred
yards to the center, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Stuart Weinstein, 43, was already at a terminal in the windowless operations room,
staring at the thick blue seismic lines that signaled an "event." "This is a big
earthquake," he recalled thinking. "Maybe a 7."

Dr. Weinstein began pinpointing the location. Sliding into the seat beside him, Mr.
Hirshorn waited to calculate the magnitude. Within minutes, they concluded it was a
quake of 8.0 magnitude.

More data arrived, and they reworked their calculations. But they stayed with 8.0.

At 3:14 p.m., 15 minutes after the earthquake struck, they issued a routine bulletin
announcing an event off Sumatra with a magnitude of 8.0. It added, "There is no
tsunami warning or watch in effect." This referred to the Pacific.

The bulletin alerted perhaps 26 countries, including Indonesia and Thailand, though it
did not go to other coastal areas of the Indian Ocean, for they were not part of any
warning system.

Next, the men tackled a slower but more precise means to measure an earthquake,
using waves that pierce the earth's mantle rather than simply the initial waves. They got
an 8.5, a marked difference in possible threat. "Uh oh," Dr. Weinstein said.

It was 3:45 and time to call the boss: Dr. Charles McCreery stood in a friend's living
room a few miles away, delivering a gift after a brunch at his sister-in-law's. His 4-year-
old twin daughters were hoping that he would soon assemble their new bicycles.

Dr. McCreery, 54, said a fresh bulletin should go out, reporting the higher magnitude
and mentioning the chance of a tsunami near the epicenter. But he and his colleagues
doubted that an 8.5 quake would unleash a far-ranging "teletsunami" that could traverse
an ocean and wipe out villages.

Once the second bulletin left, at 4:04 p.m., there was little more that their machines
could confide, unless tsunamis crossed the Indian Ocean and entered the Pacific. They
had no sea monitors in the Indian Ocean.

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Dr. Weinstein scrolled the Internet. They tuned in CNN on television. Only in the same
way that most of the world learned, from news reports, did the three men come to see
the ghastly reality, the widening tsunami paths and the lethal coastal destruction.

A wire dispatch at 5:30 told them that Sri Lanka had been pounded. Their spirits
drooped. "More are going to die," Mr. Hirshorn said.

Their instinct was to somehow tell more, to warn the region that it would continue, to
reach people who could clear beaches. But how? Mr. Hirshorn recalled a tsunami
expert he knew in Australia, called and got an answering machine. He left a message.
Someone phoned the International Tsunami Information Center, asking if they knew
people in the stricken region. The center simply had no contacts in this distant world.

At 7:25, an e-mail message from Harvard's seismology group reckoned the earthquake
at 8.9. Now they understood why such a monster tsunami had been unleashed.

They continued to scramble to reach countries that could still escape death, but they
were reaching into a void. Around 10:15 p.m., they did speak to the United States
embassies in Mauritius and Madagascar, which promised to warn Somalia and Kenya,
not yet hit, but it is unclear what came of this.

Their day ended, engulfed in gloom. "Part of me said I wish it had occurred in the
Pacific, because we could have saved an awful lot of people," Dr. Weinstein said. "We
felt terrible that we couldn't get the messages to where they were most needed."

Japan: Looking On

The seismograph at the Matsushiro Seismological Observatory, about 110 miles

northwest of Tokyo, is buried inside a mountain tunnel. The tunnel had first been
created as an alternative headquarters for the country's imperial military during the final
years of the war in the Pacific, and scientists saw it had advantages for recording as
precisely as possible tremors in the earth: protection from the effects of temperature
and wind.

"Our job is to identify the epicenter and the size of earthquakes all over the world," said
Masashi Kobayashi, an official at the observatory. "There are many observatories
recording the earthquakes in the vicinity of Japan, but this observatory is the only one in
Japan for observing the earthquakes of the world."

And Mr. Kobayashi said he did not mistake the significance of what got recorded deep
inside the mountain on Sunday.

"I got surprised," he said.

The recording showed an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.

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"In the vicinity of Japan," he said, "that size is recorded only once in several years to 10
years."

Mr. Kobayashi said he had calculated the location, as well as the magnitude of the
quake. "I reported it is west of Sumatra island, including the latitude and longitude," he
said.

And with that, he said, he realized something else.

"When I found it was in the ocean," he said, "I thought the first thing to worry about was
a tsunami."

There has been over the last several days, as the death count from the earthquake and
tsunami has steadily climbed to more than 100,000, much discussion of whether
enough was done by scientists and government officials around the world to relay word
of the possible peril millions of people suddenly faced.

There have been accounts in newspapers of officials in Indonesia and Thailand and
Malaysia struggling to comprehend the threat and get out warnings. All agree that,
whatever people's intentions or capabilities, no sufficient warnings were transmitted that
might have limited the toll at some of the hardest-hit places.

What Mr. Kobayashi did with his information, and concern, is not entirely clear. In an
interview, he said he had made his reports to headquarters. It is not clear what, if
anything, his superiors did.

Asked directly if he thought his reports led to any movement toward issuing a warning
about a tsunami, Mr. Kobayashi said, "My job is to decide the size and the location of
the earthquake epicenter, so it is beyond my job to answer that question."

Indonesia: First Losses

As deputy mayor of Banda Aceh, Aceh Province's most bustling town, Muhammad
Kadir was about the closest thing the townspeople had to an alarm bell when the
tsunami hit Indonesia.

Elected to office as an elder statesman of sorts, the 76-year-old Mr. Kadir had hurried
Sunday morning to a seaside market at the tip of the island of Sumatra for emergency
supplies after the initial earthquake struck. It was at the market, a few minutes later, that
he said he had looked far out to sea and noticed something strange: the waterline was
dipping off to the sides and rising furiously in the middle.

"The water separated, then it attacked," he said. "I've never even seen anything like it in
the movies. I couldn't imagine anything like it."

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After spotting the raging waters, Mr. Kadir raced through the town banging on doors and
shouting into a local mosque. "I told people the water was getting higher and higher -
get out," he recounted.

His mad dash was the closest many people on Sumatra would come to an early
warning system. Before the waves subsided, more than 43,000 people in the Aceh
region alone - many of them women and children unable to resist the violent waters -
would perish.

"The water was coming too hard, too fast," Azwar Muhammad, a local resident, said.
"This was God's destiny."

As a separate set of mammoth waves hurtled across the Indian Ocean in the opposite
direction, due west, Amir Khan, a strapping 30-year-old off-duty police officer, relaxed in
his home in the town of Kalmunai on the east coast of Sri Lanka.

Mr. Khan, like every other local government official, was enjoying a day off and
completely oblivious to the walls of water surging toward Sri Lanka when he heard what
sounded like a low-flying helicopter. Some in Kalmunai remember the ocean's abruptly
changing colors from green to a dark, menacing black, as if it were filled with oil. Others
remember the water turning white with foam. All recall the first wave's shape: a 10- to
12-foot-tall wall of water.

Mr. Khan shouted, "Run! Run!" to his parents and siblings and bolted out of his house,
sprinting as fast as his strong, young legs would carry him. His 68-year-old father and
50-year-old mother stayed in the house. As water engulfed them, they grabbed onto a
ceiling beam and were able to survive.

His three sisters-in-law were less lucky. Two ran but drowned in the water. A third
remained in the house and drowned as well.

Three subsequent waves, each larger and more powerful than the last, obliterated the
neighborhood and reached 700 yards inland. The waves ripped sturdy, one-story brick
homes off their foundations, snapping four-inch-thick brick walls into small chunks. It
picked up cars and swept them hundreds of yards inland. It reached the rooftops off
one-story buildings, ripping off gutters as it surged passed.

Kalandar Umma, a 60-year-old grandmother, was found clinging to the upper branches
of a tree. She had no memory of the waves or how she got there. Nineteen members of
her family died, including one son, five granddaughters and two grandsons, including an
18-month-old boy.

Local officials, unsure what had happened, ordered people to go to high ground. Groups
of stunned municipal employees, schoolteachers and retirees began searching for
bodies. In the first day alone, 1,824 bodies were recovered and buried behind a local

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mosque. Local government officials quickly lost control of the process, with families
burying relatives as soon as they discovered them.

Advance notice of the wave's approach would have saved thousands of lives, according
to officials and residents. Baheera Sahariban, a waiflike 25-year-old mother, said she
had easily been able to carry her 18-month-old son to safety from her house, which sits
only 15 yards from the ocean. The reason: a warning.

"Someone helped me," Ms. Sahariban said, as she gently cradled her son. "Someone
said, 'Run away.' "

Australia: A Call to Aid

At 6 p.m. Sunday in Melbourne, Colleen McGinn was having tea in her backyard patio
with a man she had met recently in an emergency first aid class. It was a year to the
day that Oxfam, the relief organization that Ms. McGinn worked for, had gotten the call
about an earthquake in Iran that would kill 26,000.

Today, it was again Boxing Day, a national holiday in Australia, and it was her turn to be
on call. She knew anything could happen. She hoped nothing would. But she kept her
cellphone near. Then the phone rang.

"I hate to bother you," the caller said. It was Marlene McIntyre, one of the bosses at
Oxfam, who also happened to be her friend. "But there has been an earthquake."

"Very funny, Marlene," Ms. McGinn said, chuckling. "Merry Christmas to you, too."

"No, this is real," Ms. McIntyre said. "There has been an earthquake and a tsunami. Sri
Lanka was hit, we were hearing."

It was six hours after an undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra had
set off one of the worst natural disasters in recent decades. Ms. McGinn, who was born
in Indonesia but raised in Athens, Ohio, had worked previously in Sierra Leone, the
Balkans and Afghanistan, dealing with war victims and refugees.

Those were man-made disasters. This would be different. This was nature, and the
marathon of tackling people's misery had just begun.

"I need a ride," she told her friend, instantly enlisting the young man, a potential date,
into a relief aide. Off they went, on his motorcycle, along the beachside highway, driving
as the sun set to the nearby home of her boss at Oxfam, Chris Stewart. The global
Oxfam emergency response machine needed to be put into motion. It was up to these
two women to start the engine. Now.

Out came the emergency contact list, and the chain of calls began: East Asia regional
manager, South Asia regional manager, the agency executive director. The list went on.

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But even while they were working the phones, the news coming from the television and
Internet started to turn darker and darker.

The would-be date turned into a decent assistant.

"We need a better map," she told him. "We need another map."

The telephone calls continued for hours, fueled by pizza and coffee that was ordered.
Day had become night. But as darkness fell, what had at first appeared to be a probably
deadly, but at least isolated incident - impacting perhaps just Indonesia and Sri Lanka at
first - was turning into a incomprehensible catastrophe.

"This is unbelievable," Ms. McGinn said, pausing to look up at the television. "All the
countries in the Indian Ocean have been hit. This is massive. Oh my God."

Across the world, in New York, there was a similar growing sense of dread.

Jan Egeland, the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator and under secretary for
humanitarian affairs, is a 46-year-old Norwegian whose boyish looks and shock of
chestnut hair falling across his forehead would become familiar to millions of television
viewers around the world as he reported on the global relief effort.

He had been lying in bed in the midtown Manhattan apartment where he lives with his
wife and two daughters when his telephone rang at 7 a.m. New York time, bringing him
the first word of tsunami. Mr. Egeland and his colleagues at the United Nations offices in
Geneva sent emergency relief teams to the Maldives, Sir Lanka and Indonesia, the first
countries to request help, right away and began to consider additional countries as they
learned more about the geographical extent of the damage. Teams would soon be
added for India, Thailand and Malaysia.

"We were not even close to understanding the true enormity of it," he said. "The initial
indication was that a few hundred were affected."

Ms. McGinn and Ms. Stewart would wrap up their initial round of calls sometime before
midnight in Melbourne. Monday would be another day of telephone calls, as work was
now under way by different Oxfam offices to prepare an IL-76 cargo plane, packed with
27 tons of emergency supplies that would soon take off for Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
Water tanks, pumps and taps to set up emergency drinking water would all be included,
as would latrine slabs to build emergency bathrooms.

Ms. McGinn would soon be boarding a plane herself to fly to Sri Lanka, leaving
Melbourne on Tuesday, for the trip across Asia to the dead zone. Her father had been in
Indonesia at the moment of the earthquake, although not near the affected part of the
country. Still, she had not heard from him.

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It was not long after she landed at the airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka, that it was clear
what that phone call on a gorgeous day after Christmas had spelled: fields of misery
and devastation unlike any she had ever seen.

First, as she approached the seaside community of Batticaloa, it was simply the crowds
of people standing outside schools and other government buildings, which had been
transformed into shelters. Then it was roads clogged with emergency vehicles and
trucks. And then it was a stretch of coastline where there was such utter chaos it was
unclear how and where the work should begin.

Boats sitting upturned on land, far from the shore. A major bridge had been lifted off its
supports, twisted and then thrown like a toy. Whole swaths where houses once stood
were now flat, wide-open land, the ground strewn with debris. People milled around,
eyes glazed over with fear and despair. To top it all, this was the rainy season, so it was
pouring.

"I never seen anything like this," Ms. McGinn said.

The only option was to begin work, unloading trucks that had arrived with relief supplies,
everything from clothes and instant noodles to soap. It was quite a distance she had
traveled from that lazy evening sipping tea on the patio in Melbourne.

California: A Scientist Explains

As soon as Kerry Sieh, an earthquake expert at California Institute of Technology in

Pasadena, heard the reports on Sunday of the earthquake and tsunamis in the Indian
Ocean, he knew exactly what had happened.

He was preparing for his next trip to Sumatra, the island hardest hit by the tsunami. He
had spent a decade there and on nearby islands, cutting slices out of coral heads with a
chainsaw to read traces of past seismic upheavals, and to look for hints about future
quakes.

Most of his colleagues who study undersea earthquakes were focused on even more
violent fault lines closer to the developed world, those off Japan and the Pacific
Northwest and the island arc of the Aleutians in the far North Pacific.

Like them, Dr. Sieh was consumed with what he could learn about the dynamics of the
earthquake factories called subduction zones. But the archives he mined existed only in
the coral off Sumatra. "It's tucked away in a corner of the world that just doesn't have
much scientific traffic," he said.

In the calcium carbonate coral layers, he could read the seafloor's history. Deformations
of the layers showed when the seabed beneath had been shoved upward, plunged
down or tilted.

15
So the mechanism of the earthquake that had just occurred was familiar. The offshore
plate of rock underlying the Indian Ocean normally slides relentlessly under Indonesia,
like the disappearing belt on an airport walkway, descending into the earth's mantle to
be consumed and recycled.

In places, this process was smooth. The junction between that ever-shifting India plate
and the plate under Southeast Asia was "greased," he said. But there were places
where it was stuck.

In 1797, 1833, 1861 and now again long stretches that were stuck sprang free. In each
case, the rock had built up tension in the intervening decades, as the greased sections
continued to shift, leaving the stuck part behind, just as an archer's bow flexes when
drawn.

At some point, the force is too great. Friction is overcome. The stuck section gets to
catch up, in seconds making up for a century of lagging behind, and if the plate is
moving up or down, that energy is transferred pistonlike to the incompressible water
above.

The energy unleashed in a 9.0 quake, as this one would ultimately come to measure, is
roughly the amount that would be unleashed if it were possible to create a bomb made
of 32 billion tons of TNT and set it off.

As the news media calls began flooding in, Dr. Sieh began to recount the mechanism
he knew so well. It would be two days and nights before he would have time to turn on a
television and witness the consequences of the upheaval. It was likely that a fresh
distortion would be etched in the corals. It was certain that a region and people he had
grown to love had been ripped asunder.

Australia: International Inertia

The possibility of tsunamis arising in the Indian Ocean had not completely escaped
international attention. During the 1990's, an obscure United Nations group, the
International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific,
periodically considered the extension of tsunami alert systems to parts of the globe
outside the Pacific, including the Caribbean and Indian Ocean.

At a meeting of the group in Lima, Peru, in September 1997, for example, its members
had considered proposals to expand the network to the Indian Ocean, particularly
because of Indonesia's tectonic activity. Nothing concrete happened.

Among the scientists who kept up a restrained but insistent pressure was Dr. Phil
Cummins, a seismologist with Australia's geosciences agency. He continued to gather
and present evidence that an Indian Ocean tsunami was inevitable, although
unpredictable in terms of timing, and posed a grave threat to many countries. He met
with no ill will, but with considerable inertia, he said.

16
"Just look at the name," he said. "The international body designed to coordinate
international tsunami-related activity is mandated as a Pacific entity."

Dr. Cummins cited details from dusty records kept by the Dutch colonists in Indonesia
and from Dr. Sieh's coral studies that great 19th-century earthquakes in the 1,200-mile
arc of faults west of Sumatra had generated destructive ocean-spanning waves.

He made his case in October 2003, at a meeting of the international tsunami group in
Wellington, New Zealand, when he pushed for formal expansion of the international
network into the Indian Ocean.

The group rebuffed him, saying, in the stiff language of meeting minutes, that any such
expansion could occur only if an overarching governing body dealing in global
oceanographic issues formally redefined its "terms of reference."

In the meantime, it voted to establish "a sessional working group to prepare a

recommendation to establish an intersessional working group that will study the
establishment of a regional warning system for the Southwest Pacific and Indian
Ocean."

Dr. Cummins prepared a position paper at that meeting laying out his arguments. He
used a computer model similar to that used by Dr. Titov in Seattle to study how
tsunamis spread from the great Sumatran quake of 1833.

He simulated the quake in a mathematical simulacrum of the ocean, and simulated

waves radiated until they struck as far north as eastern India and all around western
Australia. The Sumatran shore east of the fault was devastated, and a directional pulse
of energy, resulting in higher waves, splayed westward like a shotgun blast.

At the time, the images of those reconstructed virtual waves must have seemed like yet
another computer analysis, predicting yet another potential disaster that might or might
not occur in this, or the next century.

Now, the reconstructions, so similar to what happened last Sunday, carry a disturbing
weight.

Kenya: A Last Victim

Capt. Twalib Hamisi was sitting in his office at the Port Authority in Mombasa, Kenya,
when word of the curious water first reached him. A staffer had phoned to report
unusual movements in the main port there.

"The tide was supposed to be falling, but it was rising," Mr. Hamisi, the harbor master,
recalled. "I went to the water, and we saw it moving really fast. I thought a pipe might be
broken in the port."

17
It was about 1 p.m. Sunday, and he decided to call other ports in Malindi and Lamu,
where workers reported similar water movements. "It was like seeing the sun setting in
the east," he said. "The tide was crazy. The water wasn't following the rules."

Then, Mr. Hamisi said, the minister of foreign affairs phoned to report the heavy
damage in Asia.

After realizing the direction the waves were headed, Mr. Hamisi called the Port Authority
director. "I said: 'We have a problem. We have to institute our emergency plan.' "

The emergency plan was intended for things like oil spills or fires, not tsunamis. But it
was all they had. The police were informed to evacuate beaches. The news media were
called to spread the word. The local authorities were mobilized up and down the coast.
Radio messages were sent to commercial fishing vessels and ships. For the wooden
dhows that are so common in Kenya and that lack radio communication, the looming
danger was spread by word of mouth.

At Jomo Kenyatta Beach in Mombasa, there were thousands of people packed on the
sand. The police made announcements at first, and then armed riot policemen moved in
to relocate people away from the water.

"It was Sunday, so the beaches were full of holiday makers," Mr. Hamisi said.

At Hemingway's Resort in Watamu, a plush seaside hotel, employees who heard of the
storm on television began working the phones. They called the Port Authority, but the
person who answered the phone there did not seem overly alarmed. They called the
Kenyan Navy, where someone agreed to investigate. They tried to track down a British
professor who someone said was an expert on the wave patterns off the Kenyan coast.

Frustrated and fearful, Hemingway's staff began evacuating guests to a parking lot half
a mile from the coast.

Further north, Mabeya Mogaka, the district commissioner in Malindi, was spreading
word of the dangerous seas as well. "I ran out and told people not to panic but to be
aware," he said.

The beaches were virtually deserted, he said. But not everybody got the message that
danger was near. There were still people swimming when the waves began to churn
with more force.

One of them was Samuel Njoroge, 20, a mechanic from Nairobi who was in the water
with his uncle and was swimming for the first time. He was about 10 feet from the sand
when the waves became rough. His relatives describe what happened next: Samuel
was pulled under. His uncle grabbed him but was also pulled under. Eventually, Italian
tourists who were swimming nearby got both men to shore.

18
But Samuel had already taken in too much water. More than seven hours after the
tsunami hit land in Indonesia, some 3,000 miles away, Samuel became Kenya's only
confirmed storm-related death.

"We are in shock," said Peter Mwanji, a relative who visited the mortuary on Thursday
to claim Samuel Njoroge's body. "We are still trying to understand how this storm could
have taken him. He was so excited to see the ocean and to swim in it. He was so
happy. Then he was gone."

Seattle: A Final Picture

Back in Seattle, around the time that the beaches of East Africa were being swept by
the great pulse of waves, Dr. Titov was close to finishing his fresh-minted model for
simulating Indian Ocean tsunamis.

He hit enter on his terminal keyboard, and the computer began calculating numbers.

As the real tsunami was spending its last destructive power, his virtual tsunami began. It
burst out like a shotgun blast from the epicenter of the quake, focused due west from
the fault line.

By 4:28 a.m. Sunday morning, the simulation had run its course, and Dr. Titov posted
his work on the Web and stumbled home, knowing, but still not knowing since he had
seen no news, what had happened.

Like everyone else, he became transfixed by television images of heaving seas and
devastation, with one difference, he said: "It feels like I have already seen it."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Eric Lipton in Washington, Eric Lichtblau in
Indonesia,Marc Lacey in Kenya, N. R. Kleinfeld in New York, David Rohde in Sri
Lanka,Yasuko Kamiizumi in Japanand Michele Kayal in Hawaii.

19
2. THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia (“Ground Zero”)

20
Sri Lanka

Andaman Isles (India)

21
3. IMPACT ON HUMANS
3.1 Water Is Key to Averting Epidemics Along Coasts
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and DENISE GRADY

Published: December 30, 2004

Darren Whiteside/Reuters
Bodies near Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Since Sunday's tsunamis, experts are worried about diarrheal
diseases.

Tens of thousands of tsunami survivors are at risk from diseases spread by dirty water,
mosquitoes and crowding, and the best medicine is large quantities of clean water,
officials of the World Health Organization said yesterday.

While no epidemics have been confirmed in the vast coastal areas devastated by the
tsunamis on Sunday, the officials said they were most worried about diarrheal diseases
- cholera, typhoid fever and shigellosis - as well as liver diseases like hepatitis A and E.
Those diseases are caused by bacteria or viruses in contaminated drinking water or
food, in sewage and among people who lack clean water to wash their hands.

Health organizations like the W.H.O. and Unicef recommend that each person be given
about five gallons of clean water a day. Dr. David Nabarro, the director of crisis
operations for the W.H.O., said in a telephone interview from its headquarters in
Geneva that water shortages had already occurred in the Maldives and Sri Lanka, and
that tanker trucks would be needed to provide clean water.

In addition, water-purifying tablets are being rushed into the affected countries, along
with medicines to treat the dehydration that can result from diarrhea.

22
Another hazard to drinking water is contamination of wells by salt water from the
tsunamis. Martin Dawes, a regional spokesman for Unicef in Colombo, Sri Lanka,
estimated that 1,000 drinking-water wells in the country's hard-hit eastern region had
been contaminated and would have to be pumped out.

"At the moment," he said, "the water people don't have the right kind of pumps to rescue
the wells." He added that his agency was seeking pumps or money to buy them.

Mr. Dawes said Unicef had also bought about 20 million gallons of drinking water in
1,500-gallon barrels, enough for 100,000 people, and was expecting them to be
delivered to the affected areas on Thursday.

Dr. Nabarro also said there had been unconfirmed reports of measles in Sri Lanka.
"That does give me cause for concern, because we would have expected a pretty high
level of coverage by immunization in Sri Lanka," he said. The disease is caused by a
virus that spreads through the air when patients cough, particularly in overcrowded
conditions like shelters set up for people whose homes were destroyed.

Although influenza can also spread rapidly in such conditions, the areas hit by the
tsunamis have not reported flu outbreaks, and are unlikely to experience them, officials
said.

Among the diarrheal diseases, cholera, typhoid and shigellosis are caused by bacteria.
In cholera, the bacterium produces a toxin that causes severe fluid loss and can kill
quickly, and the key to treating it is to replace fluids. Typhoid can also be fatal and
requires antibiotic treatment. Shigellosis causes severe dysentery but usually goes
away in about a week.

Dr. Nabarro said relief workers would provide antibiotics to treat these infections, but he
said the health organization recommended against using the drugs prophylactically, to
prevent illness. Widespread use of the drugs in healthy people would contribute to the
emergence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

Hepatitis A and E, caused by viruses, infect the liver and can cause jaundice, fever and
abdominal discomfort. Hepatitis A usually causes a mild illness, but can become
disabling. Hepatitis E can be fatal in pregnant women.

Dr. Pino Annunziata, a member of the W.H.O. emergency team, said that within a few
weeks, there could also be increases in mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and
dengue fever, unless insecticide-spraying starts immediately.

23
3.2 Amid Chaos, Sri Lankans Are Struggling to
Survive
By SETH MYDANS

Published: December 30, 2004

NILAVELI, Sri Lanka, Dec. 29 - His home gone, his family shivering and hungry,
everything he owned swept out to sea, Velu Kannan wandered down a lonely road on
Wednesday looking for a pen.

Stagnant salt water lay in the fields around him, reflecting a gray sky. In his hands he
carried a piece of cardboard he had found among the debris.

"I need somebody to help me write 'Refugee Camp,' " he said. "All the cars drive past
us. Nobody knows we are here."

Mr. Kannan and his family fled their fishing village when it was destroyed on Sunday
and took refuge with 10 other families on a hillside where they hoped to be safe if giant
waves crashed in again from the sea. Now he needed to survive.

All along the shoreline here in Trincomalee district on the hard-hit eastern coast of Sri
Lanka, small groups have found shelter in schools, temples, vacant buildings or
makeshift tents, kept alive by small donations from private convoys of trucks and vans.

"What we need is clothes," said Wasantakumari Sridhar, 35, who was camped by the
side of the road under a tarpaulin with two other women, three men and nine children.
"Our homes have become mud. Everything we had is gone."

Not far down the road, in the shelter of a half-built gasoline station, Pasida Muhamad
said: "We only want food and milk. We are not asking for everything. But our babies
have no milk to drink."

The death toll in Sri Lanka continued to climb Wednesday past 22,000 as more bodies
were pulled from debris or floated ashore with the tides, to be quickly buried. At the
same time, a new potential disaster approached as up to two million people remained
homeless without adequate food, water, sanitation and medical care.

Some, like the families along the road here in Nilaveli, were receiving small handouts.
Others, like the villagers north of the broken bridge at Kuchchaveli or farther south on
the sand bars near Batticaloa, remained beyond the reach of aid.

"It's a mess," said Patrick Walder, who heads the office of the International Committee
of the Red Cross here in Trincomalee. "The problem is disorganization. There are many

24
agencies and they are not coordinated. The government is not coordinating. Some of
the district offices are wiped out so we have nothing to work with."

Private banks are running out of money, he said. Fuel and medicine are running short.
There is an immediate need for the basics of food and shelter. If disease begins to
spread, as many people fear, medical care will become urgent.

In the initial division of labor, he said, the government is responsible for food
distribution; standard emergency stockpiles will soon run out. The government has also
begun chlorinating contaminated wells. Large areas must have electric power restored.
Scores of bridges need to be rebuilt.

Red Cross agencies will provide survival kits that include sleeping mats, plastic
sheeting, plates, cups, buckets, cooking pans, soap, washing powder and sheets. The
first trucks of supplies began heading here from the capital, Colombo, on Wednesday.

"The question is, are there enough supplies to meet the demand?" said John Punter,
another official with the International Committee for the Red Cross. "Are there a million
plastic buckets in Sri Lanka?"

Soon, planeloads of aid will start arriving in Colombo from abroad, he said. "The first
thing is, where do you start? It's everywhere. It's the whole country. And not only is it
one country, it's six or seven countries over a massive area."

Sri Lanka's challenges - from survival to subsistence to the avoidance of epidemics- are
only the beginning. In this poor country of 20 million people, as many as a million or
more now have no way to earn a living.

"What we need is boats," said the men sheltering on the hillside with Mr. Kannan. Like
most of these coastal refugees, they were fishermen and like most of them, their boats,
nets and motors were swallowed by the ocean that once fed them.

Once the world has spent millions of dollars on aid to the victims here and around the
region, it is hard to know how these penniless fishermen will find the means to support
their families again.

In Trincomalee, which was sheltered in a cove from the worst of the inundation, scores
of fishermen have pulled their boats out of the harbor for safety and they now line the
narrow streets like parked cars.

As a measure of the national trauma here, the disaster caused by an undersea

earthquake measuring a 9.0 magnitude is now being referred to on television as "9.0,
2004." Radio stations have begun reading out the names of the missing, just as
desperate families in America posted photographs of the missing after the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001.

25
Some people are raising the hope of a silver lining - that this calamity will help bring
together the Tamil and Sinhalese sides that fought nearly 20 years of civil war until a
fragile cease-fire was declared in 2002.

Mr. Walder of the Red Cross said the Tamil rebels have been "quite well organized" in
bringing relief to areas they control. The aid group associated with them, the Tamil
Rehabilitation Organization, has been cooperating well with the government, he said.

In Trincomalee, Sunday's natural disaster struck an area that had been torn apart by
fighting for years. Along the Nilaveli road, buildings knocked askew by the ocean stand
side by side with the rubble of buildings destroyed by war.

The turbulent waves robbed a nearby military base of its weapons just as Tamil raiders
had done in the past and scattered buried land mines back into areas that had been
cleared since the cease-fire.

On the grounds of the ruined Nilaveli Hotel, cars hung from trees along with bits of
clothing, a dead goat and a head of cabbage.

Foam hissed up the quiet beach and the ocean stretched to the horizon, placid and
glittering, almost smug after this demonstration of its power.

26
3.3 Frayed Nerves and Aftershocks Create Panic in
Southern Asia
By JANE PERLEZ
and AMY WALDMAN

AKARTA, Indonesia, Friday, Dec. 31 - Survivors lasted a fourth day on Thursday

without food, water or medical supplies as nations and aid agencies struggled to bring
together the world's largest relief effort and the tally from the week's devastation surged
to close to 120,000.

The human toll in Indonesia jumped overnight after health ministry officials said that
nearly 28,000 more dead had been uncovered in Sumatra, near the epicenter of
Sunday's enormous undersea quake. Large parts of the island's northernmost province,
Aceh, remain inaccessible and as many as 20,000 more people are feared dead in the
area.

The tally in Aceh, which contains nearly all of Indonesia's dead, made the province the
hardest hit of any place in a disaster felt as far away as Africa.

The government said it had begun dropping instant noodles and medicine to those still
stranded amid cliffs on Aceh's western coast, but even in the cities, like the provincial
capital, Banda Aceh, relief of any kind was still lacking and frustrations were growing.

"For four days now we haven't gotten any help," said Dasrizal Nyakna, 38, a leader of a
group of some 35 volunteers who crammed into a truck and drove more than 24 hours
up the coast to lend a hand, lugging boxes packed with clothing and food.

"People are still suffering," he said. "They're still waiting, and we need more help, much
more help." He lost his wife and two children on Sunday when the tsunami swept over
Aceh Province,

The toll from the devastation that swept through nearly a dozen Asian nations jumped to
close to 120,000 on Thursday, as Indonesia said at least 80,000 people had been killed
here alone.

The delivery of water and food to survivors in the worst-hit areas of the province of Aceh
remained stymied by lack of fuel and trucks, red tape, and in many cases a lack of
personnel, including drivers and medics, many of whom are presumed dead.

The threat of cholera and typhoid, and the stench of decay, had become so severe that
people burned bloated bodies exposed to the tropical sun since Sunday in the city of
Banda Aceh. A board of Indonesian Muslim clerics said they were considering giving

27
official permission for the burning of bodies, a practice forbidden by Islam except in
emergency situations.

In Nagappattinam, India, frayed nerves and a slight aftershock created widespread

panic throughout southern Asia on Thursday, as the Indian government issued a
warning of another tsunami along India's southern coast. In India and Sri Lanka, many
fled the beaches in fear of more deadly waves, muddling the relief effort and bringing
the recovery of bodies in many areas to a temporary halt.

Three aftershocks that measured just above 5 on the Richter scale ultimately led
officials in India to issue what amounted to a false alarm. The government's
overreaction reflected the sensitivity of Indian officials to criticism that they should have
given notice of the tsunami to coastal villages, which in many cases were hit two or
three hours after the earthquake on Sunday that devastated much of southern Asia.

The warning came a day after world leaders, including President Bush, promised long-
range help to Asian countries as impatience with the pace of relief efforts rose along
with the estimated toll from the week's disaster.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy called on Thursday for an emergency meeting of
the Group of Eight to discuss options for aid and debt reduction in response to what he
called "the worst cataclysm of the modern era," according to the Reuters news agency.

The Bush administration announced that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Gov.
Jeb Bush of Florida would visit the affected areas around the Indian Ocean this
weekend. The White House said that Mr. Bush, the president's brother, had been
selected for the trip because he has had experience dealing with natural disasters in
Florida.

Three United States Navy ships, part of an expeditionary strike group en route to Iraq
from San Diego with more than 2,000 marines, were expected to near the Straits of
Malacca today and could be diverted to Aceh, an American military official said.

The ships are carrying about a dozen heavy-lift helicopters, and full surgical hospitals,
he said. "These amphibious ships bring significant help to the relief effort if the decision
is made to deploy them," the official said. The marines were needed in Iraq prior to the
January elections, and whether they would be sent to the disaster area in Indonesia
was a "political" decision that would be made in the next 24 hours, he said Thursday.

The first American assistance arrived on a military C-130 cargo plane on Thursday in
Medan, a city south of Aceh, carrying food and water.

Also on board was a small group of American soldiers sent to assess how the far bigger
supplies and equipment en route by American naval ships would be distributed. But the
soldiers were not expected to get on the ground in Aceh until sometime today, an
American official said.

28
In all, the United States military was preparing a "very extensive" relief effort for the
Indian Ocean countries in the arc from India to Sri Lanka, to Thailand and down to
Indonesia, the military official said. It was likely to end up rivaling the assistance given
by the American military to Bangladesh in 1991 when more than 130,000 people were
killed by a major cyclone.

In Washington, two influential Republican lawmakers said today they would introduce
legislation in the new Congress for a sizable aid package.

"I think there will be very decisive action early on," said Senator Richard G. Lugar of
Indiana, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Mr. Lugar, speaking
on CNN, said he had drawn up a resolution anticipating "very generous appropriations."

Mr. Lugar's House counterpart, Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, said he too is
drafting legislation for action early in the new year. "The challenges of coping with
suffering on this magnitude are almost unfathomable, and we will act," Mr. Hyde said in
a statement issued by the House Committee on International Relations, which he
heads.

Mr. Hyde said a Congressional delegation led by Representative Jim Leach, Republican
of Iowa, would visit Thailand and Sri Lanka next week, and that the group's findings
would be important in shaping the aid legislation. Mr. Leach is chairman of the
Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific.

Mr. Powell visited the embassies of Thailand and Sri Lanka to offer condolences on
behalf of President Bush and the American people and to promise that "we will stand
with them in solidarity and do everything we can to assist in this time of tragedy," as he
put it outside the Sri Lankan Embassy.

Meanwhile, Secretary General Kofi Annan cut short his vacation to return to New York
to oversee the United Nations' relief effort, one of the largest in the organization's
history.

Today, Mr. Annan told reporters that world governments had donated $500 million thus
far to help disaster victims.

The Australian government, which is coordinating its relief efforts with the United States,
said Thursday it had sent four C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and a Boeing 707
carrying medical supplies, generators, shelter and water purification to Aceh. In
addition, the government said, a navy ship with helicopters will leave Australia today but
will not arrive in Aceh until Jan. 13.

At Meulaboh, a town of about 120,000 on the west coast of Aceh, about one-third of the
population perished in the succession of waves that swamped the town on Sunday,
Indonesian officials said.

29
An Indonesian soldier, Capt. Bachtiar, who is a member of the military command at
Meulaboh, told Agence France-Presse that seven successive waves from the tsunami
hit the town, about 90 miles from the epicenter of the under-sea earthquake.

He described how he had been pinned under a rock and had given up hope of living. "I
had already accepted my fate," the captain said. "My entire body was aching and I felt
there was no longer any hope. But suddenly my leg managed to loosen itself." A wave
then threw him safely onto a treetop.

A British conservationist, Mike Griffiths, who flew over Meulaboh on Wednesday in a

light aircraft said he could see thirsty and hungry survivors walking around dazed. "The
picture that comes to me is of old photos you see of Hiroshima," Mr. Griffiths said.
"There is nothing just a few odd buildings."

An Indonesian military ship sent to the town to deliver supplies on Wednesday could not
dock, and had to leave, according to an Indonesian report.

The Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who visited Banda Aceh briefly
the day after the earthquake, will return Saturday, his aides said. He plans to make a
special effort to fly to Meulaboh to stress the needs there, they said.

But criticism of the Indonesian government's efforts by Indonesians mounted Thursday.

The minister of trade, Mari Pangestu, acknowledged the slow pace of relief that left
people in the city of Banda Aceh begging for food and drinking water.

She said the government had a system but that lack of transport and lack of fuel in the
disaster area had kept assistance parked at the airports at Medan and Banda Aceh
from being delivered.

In many cases, bulldozers and other heavy equipment needed to dispose of the piled up
bodies and to clear debris had survived Sunday's destruction but remained useless
because there were no drivers. The drivers were either presumed dead or had gone
searching for family members, said Dino Djalal, an adviser to President Yudhoyono,
who visited the disaster area.

One of Indonesia's most popular Muslim preachers, Abdullah Gynastyar, visited Banda
Aceh on Thursday, and said the situation was so devastating that Indonesians should
forgo celebrating on New Year's Eve. He pressed President Yudhoyono to publicly
cancel celebrations. "Someone who dances while his brothers suffer is evil," Mr.
Gynastyar said.

Several Indonesian transport aircraft flew sorties to drop food, mostly dried noodles, on
Thursday. But an American official said that Indonesia's helicopter fleet, which should
be able to make food drops, appeared to be grounded with technical problems.

30
The extent of the red tape was dramatized when the United Nations Children's Fund
announced Thursday that enough aid to help 200,000 people, including medical
supplies, soap, plastic sheets and tarpaulins, had landed at Jakarta airport far from the
disaster scene. The aid had to await customs clearance today before it could be moved
north, Unicef said.

The tsunami warning on Thursday by the Indian government created panic and
confusion throughout India, halting the passage of relief trucks into the Nagappattinam
district, where 4,332 people have been confirmed dead, and the continuing effort to
recover bodies was halted.

Near the village of Akkarapatti, boats thrown up by the sea during the tsunami had
blocked the roads and delayed the recovery of bodies. The warning caused officials to
abandon plans to use giant rollers to clear the way.

"Everybody gets into a panic situation," said Shantha Sheela Nair, an official
coordinating relief work in the district. "If we get a warning of tsunami again, we are
hampered at every step." The warning, from the Ministry of Home Affairs, was sent out
by loudspeaker in coastal villages, where the search for bodies is still under way.

In Gharamganbadi, gloved men searching for the remains of their wives and children in
the rubble of their homes just steps from the sea began arguing over whether to
abandon their work and move away from the water whose swell suddenly seemed to
take on an ominous cast when the warning arrived.

Reluctantly, they left.

In another town, Velankanni, the site of a religious shrine where about 1,300 bodies
have been recovered so far, the announcement by the police on Thursday morning that
people should move at least three kilometers inland sent hundreds running through the
ravaged lanes of the town.

The stench of rotting bodies continued to rise from the beaches of the most affected
villages. Government agencies have moved enough machines and manpower to dig out
bodies that remain stranded in the sand and debris, but the work stalled in
Nagappattinam because of the tsunami warnings.

The tsunami alert was issued following reports that several aftershocks had pushed up
the water level, an official at the emergency control room of India's Home Ministry said,
according to news agencies.

A 5.7 magnitude underwater quake was recorded at 5:18 a.m. local time northwest of
Sumatra, Indonesia, near the epicenter of the original earthquake. That quake
registered 9.0, meaning it was 30,000 times more energetic than the aftershock. Other
quakes were felt in Thailand and Myanmar.

31
"We have issued an alert; there could be a wave attack in the next one hour," said
Veera Shanmuga Mani, the top administrator in Nagappattinam.

As police sirens blared on beaches here in Tamil Nadu, where most of India's tsunami
deaths occurred, thousands streamed inland on foot or crammed any vehicle they could
find, looking for higher ground. Some shouted: "Waves are coming! Waves are coming!"
The police ordered hundreds of vehicles carrying relief supplies not to enter
Nagappattinam. Similar warnings were issued for Kerala, a southern state, and for the
Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Later, as it became clear the government had overreacted to the aftershocks, officials
appealed for calm.

"There is no reason to panic," an official in the back of a jeep said through a

megaphone in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. "You can go back to your jobs or your
home, wherever you please. There is no imminent danger."

In Sri Lanka, the military told residents of coastal areas not to panic, but the government
advised them to move to higher ground as a precaution. The advice and the Indian
alert, heard on radio in coastal Sri Lanka, prompted thousands of Sri Lankans to panic
and flee inland, Reuters reported. At a lagoon near Arugam Bay on the island's eastern
coast, local residents jumped off a naval ship ferrying aid and waded to the beaches.

In Thailand, tsunami sirens in the south sent people dashing from beaches, but only
small waves followed.

Jane Perlez reported from Jakarta, Indonesia, for this article, Amy Waldman and Hari
Kumar contributed from Nagappattinam, India, Warren Hoge contributed from the
United Nations and Steven R. Weisman and David Stout contributed from Washington.

32
APPENDIX

Tsunami
is a Japanese word meaning "harbor wave."
The term “tidal wave” is a misnomer,
although it expresses its effect correctly. A
tsunami is a wave or series of waves that
are generated in a body of water by a
sudden disturbance that displaces water.
They are typically caused by earthquakes
and landslides in coastal regions. Volcanic
eruptions, nuclear explosions, and even
impact of meteorites, asteroids, and comets
from outer space can generate a tsunami. 80% of tsunamis occur in the Pacific
Ocean.

The photo below shows people run from an approaching tsunami in Hilo, Hawai'i, on 1
April 1946; note the wave just left of the man's head in right center of image.

DOCUMENT UPDATED ON 31 December 2004 CST

33
Life of a Tsunami (USGS) Page 1 of 3

Panel 1--Initiation:
Earthquakes are
commonly associated
with ground shaking
that is a result of
elastic waves traveling
through the solid earth.
However, near the
source of submarine
earthquakes, the
seafloor is
"permanently" uplifted
and down-dropped,
pushing the entire
water column up and
down.
The potential energy that results from pushing water above mean sea
level is then transferred to horizontal propagation of the tsunami wave
(kinetic energy). For the case shown above, the earthquake rupture
occurred at the base of the continental slope in relatively deep water.
Situations can also arise where the earthquake rupture occurs beneath
the continental shelf in much shallower water.
Note: In the figure the waves are greatly exaggerated compared to
water depth! In the open ocean, the waves are at most, several meters
high spread over many tens to hundreds of kilometers in length.

Panel 2--Split: Within

several minutes of the
earthquake, the initial
tsunami (Panel 1) is
split into a tsunami that
travels out to the deep
ocean (distant tsunami)
and another tsunami

http://quake.usgs.gov/tsunami/basics.html 12/30/2004
Life of a Tsunami (USGS) Page 2 of 3

that travels towards the

nearby coast (local
tsunami).

The height above mean sea level of the two oppositely traveling
tsunamis is approximately half that of the original tsunami (Panel 1).
(This is somewhat modified in three dimensions, but the same idea
holds.) The speed at which both tsunamis travel varies as the square
root of the water depth. Therefore the deep-ocean tsunami travels
faster than the local tsunami near shore.

Panel 3--
Amplification: Several
things happen as the
local tsunami travels
over the continental
slope. Most obvious is
that the amplitude
increases. In addition,
the wavelength
decreases. This results
in steepening of the
leading wave--an
important control of
wave runup at the
coast (next panel).
Note also that the deep ocean tsunami has traveled much farther than
the local tsunami because of the higher propagation speed. As the
deep ocean tsunami approaches a distant shore, amplification and
shortening of the wave will occur, just as with the local tsunami
shown above.

Panel 4--Runup: As
the tsunami wave
travels from the deep-
water, continental
slope region to the
near-shore region,
tsunami runup occurs.
Runup is a

http://quake.usgs.gov/tsunami/basics.html 12/30/2004
Life of a Tsunami (USGS) Page 3 of 3

measurement of the
height of the water
onshore observed
above a reference sea
level.

Contrary to many artistic images of tsunamis, most tsunamis do not

result in giant breaking waves (like normal surf waves at the beach
that curl over as they approach shore). Rather, they come in much like
very strong and very fast tides (i.e., a rapid, local rise in sea level).
Much of the damage inflicted by tsunamis is caused by strong currents
and floating debris. The small number of tsunamis that do break often
form vertical walls of turbulent water called bores. Tsunamis will
often travel much farther inland than normal waves.

Do tsunamis stop once on land? After runup, part of the tsunami energy is
reflected back to the open ocean. In addition, a tsunami can generate a
particular type of wave called edge waves that travel back-and forth, parallel to
shore. These effects result in many arrivals of the tsunami at a particular point
on the coast rather than a single wave suggested by Panel 3. Because of the
complicated behavior of tsunami waves near the coast, the first runup of a
tsunami is often not the largest, emphasizing the importance of not returning to
a beach several hours after a tsunami hits. For more information on tsunami
preparedness, see tsunami links.

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last modified June 28, 1999
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http://quake.usgs.gov/tsunami/basics.html 12/30/2004