RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events 8.5

Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The Indonesian island of Sumatra was rocked by a magnitude 8.5 earthquake, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site. That may rank it among the 10 strongest earthquakes in the last century.

The quake caused casualties and damage, Agence France-Presse said, without giving any details. The quake was felt 950 kilometers (589 miles) away in Singapore.

The temblor, which struck about 7 a.m. local time, was centered offshore about 1,605 kilometers northwest of the capital Jakarta, at a depth of 10 kilometers, U.S. seismologists said in a preliminary report on the Web site.

The earthquake would rank among the 10 strongest recorded since 1900, if the preliminary reading isn't revised lower, according to U.S. Geological Survey data.

The Indonesian quake is the second this year of magnitude 8 or greater. Last week a magnitude 8.1 temblor was recorded in the Southern Ocean between Australia and Antarctica.

Magnitude 8 earthquakes are capable of causing severe loss of life if centered near heavily populated areas. An 8.1 quake in Mexico City in 1985 killed about 9,500 people.

Indonesia's 18,000 islands are prone to earthquakes because the nation sits along the Pacific "ring of fire," a zone of active volcanoes and faults in tectonic plates.

Last month 17 people were killed and 33 injured in a 6.4- magnitude earthquake in the eastern Indonesian province of Papua.

To contact the reporter responsible for this story:
Sue Hill in Hong Kong at shill6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this storyú»
Bruce Grant in Hong Kong at bruceg@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: December 25, 2004 22:27 EST

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years triggered massive tidal waves that slammed into villages and seaside resorts across Asia on Sunday, killing more than 3,200 people in five countries.

Tourists, fishermen, homes and cars were swept away by walls of water up to 20 feet high unleashed by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake, centered off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

A police spokesman in Sri Lanka said 1,677 people were killed in that country. Officials in India reported 1,000 dead. More than 400 were reported killed in Indonesia, 158 in Thailand and 25 in Malaysia. Hundreds were reported missing, and the death toll was expected to rise.

The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at a magnitude of 8.9. Geophysicist Julie Martinez said it was the world's fifth-largest since 1900 and the largest since a 9.2 temblor hit Prince William Sound Alaska in 1964.

The effects of Sunday's quake rippled across the region, as towns were crushed by floodwaters and helpless fishermen were swept out to sea.

In Sri Lanka — some 1,000 miles west of the quake's epicenter — police spokesman Rienzie Perera said 1,677 had died. Some 1 million others were displaced by the waters.

"The death toll is going up all the time. Two hours back it was 1,000, one hour back it was 1,300 and now I am told it is climbing to 1,500," said Lalith Weerathunga, secretary to the prime minister.

An Associated Press photographer near Colombo, Sri Lanka, counted 24 bodies in a stretch of four miles. Rows of men and women stood on the road asking if anyone had seen their family members.

Monster waves in southern India killed about 1,000 people, mostly in Tamil Nadu state, Home Minister Shivraj Patil said. Beaches were turned into virtual open-air mortuaries, with bodies of people caught in the tidal wave being washed ashore.

"I was shocked to see innumerable fishing boats flying on the shoulder of the waves, going back and forth into the sea, as if made of paper," said P. Ramanamurthy, 40, who lives in Andra Pradesh's Kakinada town. "I had never imagined anything like this could happen."

Cabinet Secretary B. K. Chaturvedi told reporters that the Indian air force would drop food packets, medicines and diesel generating sets in the affected areas.

Near the quake's epicenter, in Indonesia, officials said the death toll was 400.

Communications were down in several coastal towns nearest to the undersea quake off the western coast of the island's Aceh Province, raising fears of widespread and as yet unreported damage.

"The ground was shaking for a long time," resident Yayan Zamzani told Jakarta's el-Shinta radio station. "It must be the strongest earthquake in the last 15 years."

Thousands of people abandoned their homes and headed for higher ground after the earthquake. At least one Indonesian village, Lancuk, was nearly destroyed, witnesses said. An Associated Press reporter in the village saw several bodies wedged in trees.

Some 158 people died in popular southern Thailand resorts, the Narenthorn Center of the Public Health Ministry reported. The center said people were swept away in Phuket by a tsunami with 16-foot waves.

More than 1,900 were injured and many others were missing.

Waves reported to be up to 30 feet high crashed into beaches, where thousands of tourists were lazing on the country's renowned white sand beaches when the earthquake struck. Hundreds of bungalows, boats and cars were carried out to sea.

Police and rescue workers in Malaysia said 15 people were killed. Tens of thousands of people were temporarily evacuated from high-rise hotels and apartments in Penang, Kuala Lumpur and other cities after most of peninsular Malaysia felt tremors caused by the quake.

Indonesia, a country of 17,000 islands, is prone to seismic upheaval because of its location on the margins of tectonic plates that make up the so-called the "Ring of Fire" around the Pacific Ocean basin.

The Indonesian quake struck just three days after an 8.1 quake struck the ocean floor between Australia and Antarctica, causing buildings to shake hundreds of miles away but no serious damage or injury.

Quakes reaching a magnitude 8 are very rare. A quake registering magnitude 8 rocked Japan's northern island of Hokkaido on Sept. 25, 2003, injuring nearly 600 people. An 8.4 magnitude tremor that stuck off the coast of Peru on June 23, 2001, killed 74.

___

Associated Press reporters Dilip Ganguly and Gemunu Amarasinghe in Colombo, Sri Lanka, K.N. Arun in Madras, India, and Sutin Wannabovorn in Phuket, Thailand, contributed to this report.

Quote:

---

Captain Sammitch said:
I've read that seismologists from all over the world are converging on the area faster than ...

---

Quote:

---

Wednesday said:
They also can't decide whether the earthquake was an 8.5 or an 8.9.

---

Quote:

---

The death toll in eight nations in southern Asia — and as far west as Somalia, on the African coast, where nine people were reported lost — steadily increased as authorities sorted out a far-flung disaster caused by Sunday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake, strongest in 40 years.

Asian Tsunamis Kill Nearly 14,000 People

---

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Thousands of soldiers scoured Asia's coastlines Monday for survivors of devastating tidal waves that obliterated seaside towns in nine countries, killing more than 14,900 people. Aid poured into the region, and parents in India mourned as hundreds of children were buried in mass graves.

The death toll began climbing sharply after Sunday morning's 9.0-magnitude quake that struck deep beneath the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia, the most powerful temblor in four decades.

The waves sped away from the epicenter at over 500 mph before crashing into the region's shorelines without warning, sweeping people and fishing villages out to sea. Millions were displaced from their homes and thousands were missing.

Officials said the death toll would continue to rise and warned that disease outbreaks were possible.

Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India each reported thousands dead, and Thailand — a Western tourist hotspot — said hundreds were dead and thousands missing. Deaths were also reported in Malaysia, Maldives, Mayanmar, Bangladesh and even in Somalia, 3,000 miles away in Africa.

On the remote Car Nicobar island south of India, Police Chief S.B. Deol told New Delhi Television he had reports "that maybe 3,000 people are dead." If confirmed, that would raise the death toll past 17,900.

In Bandah Aceh, Indonesia, 150 miles from the quake's epicenter, dozens of bloated bodies littered the streets as soldiers and desperate relatives searched for survivors Monday. Some 500 bodies collected by emergency workers lay under plastic tents, rotting in the tropical heat.

"We have ordered 15,000 troops into the field to search for survivors," said military spokesman Edy Sulistiadi. "They are mostly retrieving corpses."

Refugees in nearby Lhokseumawe, many of whom had spent the night sleeping outside on open ground, complained that little or no aid had reached them. The city's hospital said it was running out of medicine.

The Indian state of Tamil Nadu was also hit hard, with 2,375 reported deaths. Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa called the scene "an extraordinary calamity of such colossal proportions that the damage has been unprecedented."

Nearby beaches resembled open-air mortuaries as fishermen's bodies washed ashore, and retreating waters left behind others killed inland. In Cuddalore, red-eyed parents held a mass burial for more than 150 children. About half of the nearly 400 who perished in the town were children, leaving townspeople in stunned bereavement.

The earthquake's aftereffects came without warning. Witnesses said sea waters at first retreated far out into the ocean, only to return at a vicious pace. Some regions reported a crashing wall of water 20 feet high.

"The water went back, back, back, so far away, and everyone wondered what it was — a full moon or what? Then we saw the wave come, and we ran," said Katri Seppanen, who was in Thailand, on Phuket island's popular Patong beach.

Sri Lanka and Indonesia had at least a million people each driven from their homes. Warships in Thailand steamed to remote tropical island resorts to search for survivors as air force helicopters in Sri Lanka and India rushed food and medicine to stricken areas.

In Indonesia, villagers near northern Lhokseumawe picked through the debris of their ruined houses amid the smell of decomposing bodies.

One man, Rajali, said his wife and two children were killed and that he couldn't find dry ground to bury them. Islamic tradition demands that the deceased be buried as soon as possible.

"What shall I do?" said the 55-year-old, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name. "I don't know where to bury my wife and children."

In Sri Lanka — an island nation some 1,000 miles west of the epicenter — about 25,000 troops were deployed to crack down on sporadic, small-scale looting and to help in rescue efforts. About 200 inmates took advantage of the chaos, escaping from a prison in coastal Matara.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake's magnitude was 9.0 — the strongest since a 9.2 magnitude temblor in Alaska in 1964, and the fourth-largest in a century. The quake was nearly 6 miles deep and was followed by a half-dozen powerful aftershocks, some in the 7-magnitude range.

The quake occurred where several geological plates push against each other with massive force. The USGS said a 620-mile section shifted, triggering the sudden displacement of water.

Countries around the world were touched. The United States said three Americans were killed. Denmark said two citizens perished, and New Zealand reported one dead. Also among the missing, injured or dead were nationals of South Korea, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Hong Kong, Britain, Australia, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, Chile, Thai media reported. Sri Lanka said 72 foreign tourists were killed there.

President Bush expressed his condolences over the "terrible loss of life and suffering." From the Vatican, Pope John Paul II led appeals for aid for victims, and the 25-nation European Union promised to quickly deliver $4 million.

Aid agencies and governments around the world began pouring relief supplies into the region on Monday. Japan, China and Russia were among the countries sending teams of experts.

Jasmine Whitbread, international director of the aid group Oxfam, warned that without swift action, more people could die. "The flood waters will have contaminated drinking water and food will be scarce," she said.

In Thailand, Gen. Chaisit Shinawatra, the army chief, said the United States has offered to send troops stationed in Japan's Okinawa island to assist. Thailand was considering the offer.

Tsunamis as large as Sunday's happen only a few times a century. A tsunami is a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near the ocean floor. With nothing to stop them, the waves can race across the ocean like the crack of a bullwhip, gaining momentum over thousands of miles.

Some tsunamis appear as a tide that doesn't stop rising, while others are turbulent and savagely chew up the coast.

An international tsunami warning system was started in 1965, after the Alaska quake, designed to advise coastal communities of a potentially killer wave.

Member states include all the major Pacific rim nations in North America, Asia and South America. But because tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean, India and Sri Lanka are not part of the system. Scientists said the death toll would have been reduced if they had been.

___

Associated Press reporters Lely T. Djuhari in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, Sutin Wannabovorn and Alisa Tan in Phuket, Thailand, and S. Srinivasan in Cuddalore, India, contributed to this report.

Quote:

---

whomod said:

Quote:

---

The death toll in eight nations in southern Asia — and as far west as Somalia, on the African coast, where nine people were reported lost — steadily increased as authorities sorted out a far-flung disaster caused by Sunday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake, strongest in 40 years.

Asian Tsunamis Kill Nearly 14,000 People

---

---

...Don Blakeman, a senior geophysicist at the survey, said the figure had been revised up from 8.9 after the study of new data during the day.

"This was a very major event, the fourth largest earthquake since 1900," Blakeman told AFP from the survey base in Golden, Colorado.

The worst earthquake since 1900 was a 9.5-magnitude quake in Chile in 1960, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). Two earthquakes in Alaska, in 1957 and 1964, and one in Russia's Kamchatka region in 1952, ranked 9.0 or above. The Kamchatka temblor also measured 9.0 on the Richter scale....

Quote:

---

Wednesday said:
They also can't decide whether the earthquake was an 8.5 or an 8.9.

---

Quote:

---

Jim Jackson said:
"All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, said Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute...

---

Quote:

---

An earthquake that unleashed deadly tsunami waves on Asia was so powerful that it made the Earth wobble on its axis and permanently altered the regional map, US geophysicists said Monday.

The temblor that struck 250 km southeast of Sumatra island on Sunday may have moved small islands as much as 20 meters (66 feet), according to one expert.

"That earthquake has changed the map," US Geological Survey expert Ken Hudnut told AFP.

"Based on seismic modelling, some of the smaller islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra may have moved to the southwest by about 20 meters. That is a lot of slip," he said.

The northwestern tip of the Indonesian territory of Sumatra may also have shifted to the southwest by around 36 meters (120 feet), Hudnut said.

In addition, the energy released as the two sides of the undersea fault slipped against each other made the Earth wobble on its axis, Hudnut said.

"We can detect very slight motions of the Earth and I would expect that the Earth wobbled in its orbit when the earthquake occurred due the massive amount of energy exerted and the sudden shift in mass," Hudnut said.

Another USGS research geophysicist agreed that the Earth would have got a "little jog," and that the islands off Sumatra would have been moved by the quake.

However, Stuart Sipkin, of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden Colorado, said it was more likely that the islands off Sumatra had risen higher out of the sea than they had moved laterally.

"In this case, the Indian plate dived below the Burma plate, causing uplift, so most of the motion to the islands would have been vertical, not horizontal."

---