Tsunami & After

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Numb in grief, village awaits loved ones

     Chinnaneelangarai Kuppam: Unfazed by fresh tsunami alerts, a tiny fishing village in India's southern Tamil Nadu, amongst the worst hit by the disaster, has refused to move from the coast, waiting for the unforgiving sea to take them as well. Numb in grief, the entire Chinnaneelangarai Kuppam village sits huddled together at the seashore, staring blankly into the watery grave of dozens of its own. Mothers grieve for their infants while ageing fathers wait in vain for lost sons. Rehmana Bi had been widowed last year. Alone with no relatives to support her and her two little children, the gutsy woman fought illiteracy and near total bankruptcy, to open a small eatery. It was just this month that she was hoping to make a 100 rupees of profit, barely enough to pay for two months schooling of her children. Her livelihood gone, Rehmana is shattered woman with little strength left to begin another fight against fate. "I survive by selling idlis (rice buns) on the shore. I lost everything. That day I was about to open my shop, which I run from my house near the shore, when the killer wave struck and took everything. I have lost everything. I lost the utensils in which I made the idlis, my sole possession. I have two children but I see no future for them," she said.

     The village is known for its expert net makers and women, who are the majority population here. The damaged, unfinished nets, overturned boats lying scattered on the beach with many still holding on to them as reminders of what was once a flourishing landscape, give a chilling display of the unspoken and unbearable misery of the people. "We people make fishing nets and that day too we were sitting here making the nets when the waves came and took away everything, not just the nets but our future. Nothing is left," said Hemavathy, a village head. Asia's tsunami death toll has soared above 125,000 on Friday as millions struggled to find food, shelter and clean water, while the world began what may prove to be the biggest relief effort in history.

     UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the disaster that has displaced 5 million people was "an unprecedented global catastrophe and it requires an unprecedented global response". He said a half-billion dollars had been pledged so far. Aid agencies and experts warned a second wave of death from contagious diseases could hit Indian Ocean areas devastated by Sunday's tsunami, with children especially vulnerable. Officials estimate Sunday's tsunami killed at least 13,000 people in India, although only 7,000 deaths have been confirmed. Many villages are now little more than mud-covered rubble, blanketed with the stench of rotting corpses after a 9.0 magnitude underwater quake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered the tsunami.
- Dec 31, 2004

Tsunami has tilted Earth, sped up its rotation (Go To Top)

     Washington: The devastating earthquake that struck the Indian Ocean on 26 December was so powerful that it has accelerated the Earth's rotation, geophysicists have declared. They estimate that the shockwave shortened the period of our planet's rotation by some three microseconds. According to Nature, the change was caused by a shift of mass towards the planet's centre, as the Indian Ocean's heavy tectonic plate lurched underneath Indonesia, the researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California have found. This caused the globe to rotate faster, in the same way that a spinning figure-skater accelerates by tucking in her arms. The blast literally rocked the world on its axis, tilting the Earth by an extra 2.5 Richard Gross and his NASA colleagues say. The shortening of Earth's day is no cause for consternation, but the change will nonetheless be relevant to physicists charged with keeping the world's official time, which since 1967 has been based on a battery of around 250 highly accurate atomic clocks in 60 labs throughout the world. These labs report to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris, which sets the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
- Dec 31, 2004

A teenaged girl survives on a wooden plank (Go To Top)

     Warangal: It's a story of hope, survival and despair. Meghna Rajshekhar, a 13-year-old girl's life got shattered when the Tsunami waves hit Car Nicobar in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands last Sunday morning. While she was luckily saved, her parents were washed away by the killer waves. Meghna's father, an Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel worked at an air force base on Car Nicobar, near the epicentre of the 9.0 magnitude quake, which got submerged by giant waves. At least 100 air force personnel and family members from the base are dead or missing. Meghna rode the rough seas on a wooden plank for 48 hours before she was rescued by the IAF. But, there is no news of her parents. Meghna thanked her god-given ability to swim that saw her through the ordeal.

     "I was in the water in the middle of the sea, I didn't have anything with me. My pants were gone and I was just in my nightshirt. I started swimming. I have the god given gift, swimming. So I started swimming with the hope that I might find someone. My father might be there, my family might be waiting for me in tension," she said. Meghna is hoping against hope that her parents could be alive. "I still hope that my parents are alive, searching for me in tension. I am right papa, mom, please come back again," Meghna said. Car Nicobar is 1100 km off the southeast coast of the mainland, where more than 6000 people have been confirmed dead. Officials were not immediately available for comment.

      In the Andaman and Nicobar chain, home to more than 350,000 people and closer to Myanmar and Indonesia than the Indian mainland, bodies still litter the islands. Officials estimate 13,230 people were dead or feared dead in the country although only 7330 deaths have been confirmed so far. All presumed dead are in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Meanwhile, bodies are still being collected in the islands and on the mainland, where authorities have stopped counting in some areas. The tsunami, triggered by a massive undersea earthquake off nearby Indonesia, killed almost 87,000 people across the Indian Ocean coastline from Thailand to Africa.
- Dec 30, 2004

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