Sunday, January 02, 2005

No animals dead in Sri Lanka tsunami?

An interesting article: in Sri Lanka (at the very least) there are no dead animals being found in the wake of the tsunami. People are speculating that animals know when these things are going to happen. I wonder if there's truth in that, or if people just aren't looking hard enough to see if there are dead animals about. They probably don't stand out as much as human corpses.

There's at least one good political article on Znet about this disaster. Shocked to read the following paragraph:

According to a Reuters report on December 28 from Los Angeles the wall of
water set off by the earthquake was in fact tracked by U.S. seismologists
who said they had no way to warn local governments of the danger. In this
age of instant messaging, email, mobile phones, spy satellites and 24-hour
television it is difficult to believe that claim.

Also, we discover that

government seismologists in Thailand did soon after they detected the quake on December 26, but failed to issue appropriate warning because they were afraid of scaring off tourists!! As an anonymous government official explained to a Bangkok newspaper, a day after disaster struck, “Six years ago a similar warning that turned out wrong brought great recrimination upon us”. Well, that was a typical Thai/Asian ‘Risk Ass but Save Face’ hesitation that cost precious lives.


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