Expecting the Unexpected:
Reflections on the 26 December 2004 Indonesian Tsunami
David Alexander
catastrophe@tiscali.it
The pen, in our age, weighs heavier in the social scale than the sword
of a Norman Baron.
G.H. Lewes 1847 (consort of Mary-Ann Evans, George Eliot)
The terrible aftermath of a major, historic tsunami1 in the Indian Ocean leaves
one with a sense of inadequacy and the feeling that, however mightier than the
sword the pen may be, it is far less potent than the seismic sea wave.
As I write, eleven countries are counting their dead and suffering the effects of
an event for which they were totally unprepared--or at least they were prepared only
in general terms, not for this specific sort of disaster.
Major tsunami occur at least once a decade in the Pacific Ocean basin, which
is covered by a warning system that 23 different countries subscribe to. The tsunami
risk is not absent from the other ocean basins. The east coast of Scotland still bears
the deposits of the massive tsunami that engulfed it when a meteorite created the
Silverpit Crater in the midst of the North Sea about 60-65 million years ago. The
Minoan war fleet was devastated by the tsunami that in BC 1625 resulted from the
eruption of Santorini (Thera) volcano in the eastern Mediterranean basin. The
seismic sea wave which overwhelmed approximately 20,000 inhabitants of Lisbon in
1755 when they fled to the waterfront to escape the effects of earthquake and fire
also reached the Caribbean basin. However, major tsunami in the Pacific basin occur
at least once a decade, whereas those in the other oceans are rare enough that civil
protection authorities have not taken the threat seriously.
On the edge of the Burma plate off the coast of Sumatra, at 06.59 hrs local
time on 26 December 2004, an seismic tremor occurred with a moment magnitude
8.9 and a focal depth of 10 km, which is shallow enough to indicate significant
danger. It was the largest such event since the Great Alaska earthquake of 1964 and
one of only five of such size to have taken place during the last hundred years.
In the early aftermath of this historic disaster it is "business as usual" for the
chattering classes. Western mass media are fixated by the small numbers of their
own nationals who have died in the tourist resorts of Thailand and such places, and
rather less interested in the huge numbers of indigenous people killed. In the time
honoured manner, news reports perpetuate the myth that unburied dead bodies
constitute a health hazard for the living and will cause disease epidemics. Foreign
rescue teams cross the globe, only to arrive after the end of the "golden hour" during
which victims can be rescued alive. Local authorities hurriedly bury dead bodies in
1Tsu'nami--Japanese
for 'harbour wave', plural tsunami; these waves can be
termed seismic sea waves but they are definitely not tidal waves.
mass graves: it seems that mass fatality planning is the Cinderella of civil protection,
yet it is a topic that has many important ramifications for the living. 2 In line with the
tenor of public debate, the international community reacts to the event, not its wider
significance or the trends it demonstrates.
Despite these wearying aspects, there are some glimmers of hope. For
example, major political figures have talked of a tsunami warning system for the
Indian Ocean, in line with that which has existed in the Pacific basin for half a
century. The idea deserves further examination.
Not all undersea convulsions--earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides-give rise to tsunami. However, a significant tremor should lead to a state of alert, for
example where earthquakes have a magnitude of at least 6.5 and a hypocentral
depth of less than 25 km. Tsunami waves are high-energy elliptical oscillations of a
deep column of seawater that travel at speeds which are proportional to the depth of
the water, but in open ocean can exceed 800 km/hr. In such conditions they are long,
low waves that cannot be detected without instruments. However, the
instrumentation and technology necessary to create a viable warning system is tried
and tested. The real problems are financial, logistical, political, organisational and
social.
A functioning warning system requires that standard instrumentation be
deployed over a vast expanse of oceans and coasts, and that it transmit data to a
central point of analysis in real time by satellite. This is expensive: maintenance
alone would necessitate periodic visits over enormous distances to, for example, a
sea-bottom pressure transducer in the Andaman Islands, or a recording taut-wire
buoy positioned near Mauritius.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning System has had its share of political problems.
In the mid-1970s Canada withdrew its subscription in order to save a few million
dollars. It soon rejoined when damage in a tsunami, of which it had received no
warning, exceeded the cost of paying for the warning service. Nevertheless,
countries that are poor in relative or absolute terms would have qualms about paying
for a service which is used only extremely rarely, as would be the case away from the
Pacific Ocean.
The advantage of a tsunami warning system, however rudimentary it may be,
is that some hours may elapse between the moment the waves are generated-tsunamigenesis--and their arrival time at a distant coast. The fact that on 26
December 2004 the tsunami travelled more than 1700 km from Sumatra to Sri Lanka
and was still able to devastate coastal regions on the far side of the island is
indicative of its extreme power, but also points to a time delay which could have been
used for warning. But if it had been, would the outcome have been significantly
different?
A warning system consists of technological, organisational and social
components. The technology of warning against tsunami is well-established. The
organisation needs to be established, but the social side is the most problematic. In
2Autopsies,
death certification, transfer of pension rights, religious and funeral
rites, morale, and impact accounting, for example.
essence, a warning is only useful (a) if it is fairly distributed and the people at risk are
thoroughly acquainted with it, (b) recipients fully understand what is going to happen
and what they need to do to safeguard themselves, (c) it is physical possible to reach
safety before the waves arrive. Tsunami warnings are most effective where there is
nearby high ground (or substantially constructed high buildings) for people to retreat
to: this is not always the case on the coastal plains of south Asia. Rare events are
difficult to warn against because lack of familiarity with the threat, and with protective
strategies, hampers people in their decision-making. Moreover, the "syndrome of
personal invulnerability", as psychologists call it, causes some people to take
unnecessary risks. In the case of tsunami, people's curiosity and failure to appreciate
the threat may lead them to go to the beach, rather than the refuge areas, as has
happened in Hawaii and California. This is a potentially a severe problem for tourist
resorts.
Ignorance of what tsunami involve is common in areas at risk. It can even
assume historic dimensions. In the 1964 Alaska earthquake, Aleut native American
fishermen were killed because they harboured a belief, sent down through the
generations, that there are only two waves in a tsunami sequence.3 They were
drowned when they returned to the shore before the third, and largest, wave in the
sequence. In other cases, people remain unaware of the coming flood when they see
the waters withdraw out to sea (about one third of tsunami first reach the shore with
the 'trough' rather than the 'peak' of the wave).
As they are usually only short-term visitors, tourists are even less likely to
understand what is going on and how to react. Often termed the world's largest
industry, tourism is particularly susceptible to disasters. It is a fickle source of
sustenance for economies in the throes of growth. However, the international tourist
industry and its promoters in the tropical host countries have not devoted sufficient
attention to disaster prevention in their plans for expansion and growth. This amounts
potentially to a huge lack of resilience when calamity strikes. On the other hand,
governments cannot easily justify spending money on safeguarding tourists rather
than safeguarding their own nationals.
A pan-Indian Ocean tsunami warning system is feasible in technical terms,
possibly feasible in organisational terms, and would probably be infeasible in social
terms, though it would doubtless save some lives and allow sensitive processes
associated with power generation and transportation to be shut down along coasts
under imminent threat of inundation. When one thinks of the battles that were fought
to make the Pacific Tsunami Warning System operative, one wonders whether the
political will is likely to be sustained enough to achieve anything in the Indian Ocean
area. The greatest potential for warning probably exists in those places, such as the
Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, which suffer relatively frequent hurricane landfalls,
and where tsunami warning and evacuation could be combined in creative ways with
cyclone warnings. As hurricanes involve flooding with storm surges, the threats are
similar, even if the window of time available for warning is quite different.
3It
appears that in the Indonesian tsunami of 26 December 2004 the second
wave may have been the largest, which was unfortunate for the 1500 people
drowned in southwestern Sri Lanka when they fled from the first wave onto a train
that was swept off the tracks by the second one. Tsunami can include up to half a
dozen major waves.
This leads to the question of general trends in disasters and the catalytic role
of the exceptionally large event. Even allowing for inflation due to changes in how
disasters are measured, the cost of catastrophe is moving rapidly towards
unsustainable levels. The world socio-economic system is well attuned to relief after
disaster has struck: in the case of the 2004 tsunami, the relief effort may well become
the largest ever mounted. However, it has not made the progression to equal
emphasis on disaster prevention. The last disaster to generate the same sort of
debate as the Indonesian tsunami was probably Hurricane Mitch, which damaged
eight countries in Central America and the Caribbean in October 1998. In parts of
Honduras and Nicaragua development was set back by decades, while the world
donor community proved to be less than generous with its aid, and little was done to
build in resilience to the next major disaster. One can only hope that lessons have
been learned since then, but the signs are not good.
Large natural catastrophes usually cost about 0.2 per cent of the annual GNP
of highly developed countries and perhaps 10-16 per cent of that of countries which
are struggling economically (occasionally the cost can even exceed a year's GNP).
As investment and financial speculation can both easily be switched from one
country to another, costs are usually not passed on through the world financial
system. However, sooner or later a disaster will occur with magnitude and
ramifications so great that this will no longer be true. At that point in time the world
community will cross the threshold to a new and more responsible approach to
disasters.
At the time of writing it is not apparent that coastal devastation in eleven Asian
countries is enough to cause the change of state described above. It seems highly
likely that the change will occur within the next 15-20 years, though it may take
something like a gigantic volcanic eruption, a regional nuclear holocaust or a vast
regional earthquake to provoke it. Perhaps not even the very high earthquake death
tolls expected in megacities such as Tehran and Istanbul would be enough to cause
the economic chain reaction that would lead to major alteration of the world's
counter-disaster strategy. Nevertheless, the constituents of the drama are slowly,
inexorably being assembled: increased vulnerability, social and technological
complexity, economic fragility, and popular discontent.
Given the threat to security that large catastrophes such as the Indonesian
tsunami represent, will we see a sudden accession of disaster diplomacy? The need
is self-evident, given the problems of supplying aid to regions in a state of conflict,
such as the Indonesian province of Aceh and the Jaffna Peninsula of Sri Lanka. The
event was well-timed in relation to the Kobe conference of the UN's International
Strategy for Disaster Reduction. The ISDR, however, is not a particularly powerful
force in global political arenas. The measure of whether the world has woken up to
the significance of future disasters for vulnerable humanity lies, I believe, in whether
the ISDR Conference merely reacts to current events or whether there is enough
common political will to commit large resources to a purely hypothetical use: avoiding
or reducing the impact of major disasters that have not yet occurred--"And therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."4
4John
Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), XXVII.