Tsunami Warnings

[ladymirth]

Two tsunami warnings in 14 hours!

Granted, the first one was lifted, but I'm kinda nervous about the second one. It was issued three hours ago, so if anything were to hit, it would've hit by now. Right? 

Y' know, it's weird, but I keep forgetting that the sea is just across the street from my house. It's not visible because of the tall commercial buildings that border the highway on either side, but you can still get a strong whiff of sea air on windy days. Right now, it's making me a bit nervous. 

Which is kind of ridiculous, because we are not on the side of the island that is actually exposed to the currents from Sumatra. Furthermore, this earthquake was only 7.6 on the Richter scale, compared to the 9.0 that triggered the 2004 disaster. Even if on does hit, the South East will have been evacuated and nobody will get hurt, provided nobody takes it into their head to go surf-boarding. In which case, the extermination of such morons from the national gene pool will hardly be a loss. 

No, I'm kind of annoyed more than anything else. As a country, we have faced annual floods in the mid-lands, earthslips in the hill country and the occasional hurricane further north. But the sea has always been our friend. Most of the coastline is beautiful and just friendly enough for a good swim without being too tame and waveless. It's the life-blood of our tourist industry, which contributes an an annual to the isalnd's overall GDP. 

And now, suddenly, just as the hotel industry has begun to recover, we are faced with tsunami hysteria. 

It's irrational. Before 2004, most people in the country thought tsunami was Japanese for "fuck you". The last tsunami in recorded history had happened some 2000 years ago. And until now, when we realized it was possible for such a thing to happen to us, most of us thought it was all just a legend. 

Yes, we suffered an unprecedented disaster in 2004. Yes, we are scarred by it. Yes, we should always be safe than sorry. 

But it's this attitude that we have turned into a tsunami - zone that gets my goat. One tsunami does not a tsunami-zone make. And that one time was because it was a 9.0 richter scale earthquake. How many 9.0 earthquakes do you expect to have in the South Asian region in our lifetime? 

Okay, this sounds like Famous Last Words. But look at the probability  of the thing! 

Hey, Collective Mass Media, I'm talking to you, baby! Give your warnings, sit down and shut up without trying to milk it for all it's worth. We don't need half the South fleeing to the uplands in mass panic. Idiots. 

For those whose favourite subject in high school wasn't geography, here's a map. 



Sumatra is the big pointy baton-like island at the top of the Indonesian region. The little tear-drop like thing dangling from the teat of India is Sri Lanka. Yes, we're small. 

Close up, it looks like this. 



I live in Colombo. 

Right. So if I do find myself hanging from the nearest coconut tree by tonight, you'll know what happened. We were the victims of a nation-wide panic attack.

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[ladymirth.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm hoping and praying that I will find myself transferred to Ottawa by next Jan. So far, I'm in the process of applying to York, Carleton and McMaster. Ryerson is still up in the air. What about you?