A major motion picture – The Impossible
– is now in theaters eight years after the devastating Indian Ocean
earthquake and tsunami. When you see this movie, watch it with the knowledge that nothing the scientists at Honolulu's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did that day saved any lives.
(For a detailed description of the breakdown in the Warning Center's warning, read the December 27, 2007 post immediately below this one.)
The key word in the name
of that agency is Pacific. Because the PTWC had not planned and implemented any
media-contact protocols for massive earthquakes outside the Pacific, they had no way to
send a useful alert – i.e., one that alerted people to the peril of the
onrushing waves.
There were no warning
protocols in place to efficiently tell those coastal populations what PTWC
officials knew in the first hour after the massive earthquake devastated Banda
Aceh, Indonesia.
They knew an earthquake of
magnitude 9.0 and greater would most likely produce a killer tsunami. Knowing
that, however, they realized within half an hour of the quake that they had no way to send an alert to the
countries endangered by the rising water that soon would arrive.
This blog was created one
week after the event as our reaction to the “We did everything we could”
talking point the PTWC adopted in that first post-quake week. Had they prepared
adequately, the international news media – CNN, BBC, Reuters, AP and others –
could have sent warnings to the Indian Ocean region using their globe-circling
networks.
Scores of thousands of coastal residents and holiday travelers died for the lack
of a warning, many of them hours after the tsunami was
generated in the eastern regions of the ocean. It took that long for the waves to reach Sri Lanka and other nations, hundreds or thousands of miles from the epicenter.
We invite you to read our third anniversary post, below, for a summary of what we had learned and
concluded about the crisis response by the time Christmas 2007 rolled around.
And if you’re intrigued enough to continue reading, please start with our first post on January 2, 2005 and continue reading as the days and weeks unfolded
while the world was still trying to make sense of the tragedy and what could
have been done to prevent it – to the degree that anything could have saved those unfortunate people.
We attended a showing of The Impossible today. The first half of the movie is difficult to watch. The tsunami was the greatest tragedy of modern times. The second half is exceptionally emotional, as well. We urge anyone interested enough to read this Tsunami Lessons post to see the movie.
