RING OF FIRE - LOTS OF JERKS

Feb. 12, 2013

A Ring of Fire – and Lots of Jerks
alias

A Day in December: Dec. 26, 2004

“This day of infamy will stay in memory of human been.”

„Dieser Tag wird als Tag der Schande im Gedächtnis der Menschheit fortbestehen“

(US-Präsident Roosevelt)

There should be, always and everywhere, long-term preparedness. Monitoring systems crucial for early warnings of an impending tsunami onslaught must be appropriately supervised round the clock and ready to respond adequately in the case of an emergency. When a mega seaquake occurs it is necessary to issue urgent warnings to the broad public and red alerts to everybody in areas threatened by the waves on all available communication channels. And all threatened beaches must immediately be cleared.

We were always aware that those countless incompetents who could and should have issued a warning to tourists and locals on the hotel beaches of Thailand on Dec. 26, 2004 were a bunch of government-financed jerks. There were two hours between the triggering of the tsunami waves off Sumatra, the Nicobars and the Andamans and their arrival on the west coast of Thailand. There were thousands of experts around the globe whose job it was to do just that. They had the training, the equipment and sufficient time. 

But nothing worked as it should be. And nothing happened to warn people, who might have been warned. So thousands of locals and tourists had to die. It was a man-made disaster.

The case of Indonesia, where hundreds of thousand were killed, is a different story. There the time was too short for an effective warning. The hinterland of northern Sumatra was flat and wouldn't have offered any protection anyway. In Indonesia the fault lies mainly with the politicians who had done nothing to prepare the people along the coasts for the event of a tsunami, although from time immemorial the country had been familiar with the phenomenon and had been experiencing these disasters every few years. Indonesia is just a dumb and hopeless case. We can't do anything about it and refuse to discuss it any further.

The case of India is more or less similar. The Andamans and the Nicobars belong to India. They have a busy airport and they have a navy and an air force base with all their respective means of communication. There should immediately have been an alert to all the coasts of the Indian Ocean.

The other parts of East and Southeast Asia aren't really much better. Fukushima, seven years later, and other disasters have again confirmed this pattern. Everywhere the same picture of Asian sloth. They fancy themselves to be tiger states and the future centre of the universe, poised to overtake North America and Europe. By the evidence of what happened in connexion with the tsunami of Christmas 2004 and of their behaviour since then, nobody in the West has to be worried of ever being overtaken by them.

Not only had they signed all kinds of international agreements in the framework of the UN for the event of a tsunami, a maritime emergency or a nuclear threat to the international community (either as an accident or in the shape of an unauthorized test). None of these agreements were ever honoured. PTWS of IOC/UNESCO (a tsunami warning system), GMDSS of COMSAR/IMO (a maritime warning system) and the IMS of CTBTO (this expensive and highly sophisticated network of wired sensors around the world shouldn't only be used to register atomic blasts but also as a global seismological monitoring systemto to detect the most strong and the most tsunamigenetic quakes).

The world's busiest shipping lane runs across the area affected by the tsunami of 2004. Again there were provisions and treaties to guarantee that sea-traffic was safe and that there would be warnings of possible risks over the GMDSS (Global Maritime Distress Safety System).

The list of omissions and failures is long.It would be too tedious to mention all of them here.

And what was done after the catastrophe? Did any of these countries do any follow-up work? Did any of them re-examine what had happened or analyze and learn from the mistakes? No culprit was ever named or brought to account. If the Asians are unable or unwilling to protect their own people, why should we in the West get involved? There was a reason. Let's remember that there were thousands of tourists from the richer countries holidaying on the affected beaches. Though the host countries were making good money out of them, they didn’t feel obliged and were too dumb to take proper care of them and protect them adequately. Therefore America and Europe should have kept a closer watch. Of course, we all know that the U.S. navy has a tight grip on the Indian Ocean. It maintains a base on Diego Garcia right in the middle. Nothing that ever happens in that part of the world goes undetected by the Americans. Unfortunately, George Bush was U.S. president at the time. His brand of Republicanism and his ideology foresaw that in such a case all branches of the Federal government ought to stay out. He repeated this behaviour months later in and around New Orleans (Katrina). He probably felt there were local authorities and private institutions that could step in.

Was he entirely wrong? No, of course not. Countries like Thailand and India had all the wherewithal to handle the crisis. Why didn’t they do it? Because, in spite of all their bravado, they are too dumb. We are not just talking of gross negligence but of general indifference and paralysis and a prevalent lack of concern or sense of responsibility, so pervasive and endemic and generally accepted that one cannot imagine how these countries will ever be able to catch up with anything. There would have to be changes so profund that we doubt they are up to them.

However, the fact remains that scientists in scores of countries around the planet could have registered and located the quake, the third most powerful ever registered. Thousands of seismologists could have established that it was a shallow seaquake of a type that can trigger a tsunami. Experts that monitored observation satellites could have watched how destructive waves raced across the Nicobars and the Andamans and devastated them so badly that the effects could clearly been seen. Some new islands were created, others disappeared and others again had their contours completely changed. Northern Sumatra was so visibly devastated that the effects can be seen to this day. 

So why weren’t there any warnings?

The same waves that hit the Nicobars rolled on and needed another two hours and more until they arrived at the tourist beaches of southwest Thailand. We know from the official Finnish investigation that from any spot on the coast, even in the most unlikely places, higher ground could have been reached by a slow walk in ten minutes or less. There could have been warnings from all kinds of people. They were either interconnected or could easily have established communications between themselves.

As far as the seismologists are concerned, they had all the means that would have allowed them to gain a general picture. Originally we assumed they were just a bunch of ineffectual jerks. But now we positively know they are downright morons. They had only a superficial grasp of their own profession. You don’t believe it? Here is the proof:

If you’ve followed the debate that’s recently been going on among them you’ll see they’ve at last (but how late!) discovered the world “communication”. Cut out the jargon and it means: Experts, who at a critical moment, are seen by the public, as authorities, have to be aware of how crucial it is what they say and how they say it. If those three sapheads in Honolulu (McCreery, Hirshorn and Weinstein) who, minutes after the quake of Dec. 26, 2004, issued their

Tsunami Bulletin # 0001: 

"There is no danger of a tsunami" 

had immediately been put in jail by a courageous independent judge, it would have had a wholesome chilling effect and lots of human lives would have been saved in the meantime, e.g. in Italy April 2009 (L’Aquila).

The term "communication" should, of course, also mean: making full use of all the networks and the interconnectedness that are nowadays available. But even here failures all down the line.

After some painful mental effort (considering how small their brains are) they are now able to state that, as seismologists, they can only make long-term predictions and not short-term ones. They are reasoning: When a quake does occur there’s nothing they can do. Wrong! Completely wrong! More than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is ocean. The most active tectonic faults lie under the ocean’s bottom. And the most seismic region of the world is the Ring of Fire (including the Sunda Trench) - about 90% of the world's earthquakes, about 80 percent of the world's largest earthquakes and over 80 percent of tsunamis occur along this earthquake belt. So at least maybe 80 percent (or probably more) of quakes are seaquakes and some of them generate tsunamis. Seaquakes can, if they are shallow and strong ones, often cause destructive tsunamis. Whether a quake belongs to this category can be measured by thousands of interconnected stations (networks, so called seismic arrays) around the globe. And tsunamis can be measured and observed by satellites and sea level gauges. But, as we have said, we’re dealing with morons. And it’s hopeless to point out to morons what their responsibilities are.

(...)

Jerzy Chojnowski

Chairman-GTVRG e.V.

www.gtvrg.de

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