It's A Crying Shame--Part II

I’m such a nerd. Really, I am. My favorite web sites are places that most Internet users never have even heard of much less ever visited or thought to do a Goggle search for information about.

Places like Spaceweather.com where you can go to find out about asteroids approaching the Earth’s orbit and Solar Flares leaping off of the sun to scorch our collective butts. What about the Microsoft Terraserver site that allows you to look at your neighbor’s driveway from satellite orbit to see if they were home on a given day? Or maybe Volcano live, Australian Volcanologist John Seach’s site giving you up to the minute accounts of the misbehavior of most of the world’s active volcanoes.

I hit these sites sometimes once every day or so just to see what is going on “in and around the world.” Moments after I learned that the earthquake occurred in Indonesia yesterday (immediately after it happened,) I said out loud that everyone should look out in the countries with facing ocean shores for the possibility of catastrophic Tsunamis. And I’m just a dumb old mechanical engineer, but boy was I ever right.

It’s a crying shame that there wasn’t someone out there that could have used what I consider to be amateur “geo-hobbyist” knowledge to save a few tens of thousands of these poor people killed as a result of this latest earthquake. I say that this task should have fallen on the shoulders of the United Nations.

But, Nooooo. These feckless, useless, mindless, bureaucratic, bunch of morons are too concerned with worrying about a one degree F increase in world wide temperature that they call “Global Warming” and shoving the Kyoto Treaty down our throats (or up our rear ends) to actually do something that might save lives in the foreseeable future.

Let me lay this out for you. We here in the United States started a Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in 1947 after a giant wave killed 147 people in Hawaii. We own it, operate it, and pay for it with your and my tax dollars. We also offer the results of our efforts to anyone that will listen. Operated under the auspices of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), they saw the earthquake on their seismographs as it happened, but they didn’t have anyone to notify in the Indian Ocean basin, resorting instead to random, frantic phone calls. Even our ally, the Government of India, lost most of an Air Force base and a number of military personnel.

They had, in many cases, two or more hours of time to get a warning out. Unlike a hurricane, the danger was generally limited to the immediate coastal area, not dozens of miles inland. Can you say INTERNATIONAL QUALITY SCREW-UP?

The death toll is in the low to mid-twenty thousand person range right now, but with the thousands of little islands and the remoteness of this area, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the final numbers in the fifty to one hundred thousand range. The long term economic and political toll will take years to ascertain.

As I said earlier, just watch the media begin to place blame, complain about the American response, and listen for the UN to start bitching about how it is somehow our fault or that our financial contributions are not enough. Anything to avoid acknowledging the fact that such a simple thing as a network of emergency management personnel like we have here in the US, an evacuation plan, and dissemination of available information in a timely fashion could have possibly saved tens of thousands of lives.

NOAA knew…Just like NOAH knew...