January 27, 2005
'Gayo Mountain' coffee
If trade is ultimately the best form of support for developing countries - including the Tsunami disaster region - we should be buying from them. Here is an opportunity!
‘Gayo Mountain’ coffee Photo © SCH
The excellent Highland Coffees in Crieff, Perthshire are selling coffee from Aceh and donating profits to relief funds. They have a fine organic called ‘Gayo Mountain’, grown by a cooperative originally founded with the idea of promoting ethnic harmony.
The coffee area in Aceh is inland and was safe from the tsunami (if not the earthquake), but tragically a number of the children of the members of the cooperative were at school in Banda Aceh and died in the disaster.
Posted by Simon Holledge at 12:55 AM | TrackBack
January 24, 2005
Wake-up call
Eight million dollars - not a huge sum of money - has been pledged to set up an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system.
At the conference in Kobe, Jan Egeland, UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said: “All disaster-prone people deserve to have early warning systems, not just the Indian Ocean. The tsunami was the wake-up call for all of us.”
We need one in the Atlantic as well.
www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66369,00.html/wn_ascii
Posted by Simon Holledge at 06:28 PM | TrackBack
January 03, 2005
MP/MSP donations
The SNP are proposing that MPs and MSPs donate a day’s pay to the tsunami disaster fund. Scottish Labour are supporting the idea. Excellent! Now if London Labour can also join in… .
www.snp.org/index_hires.php?pageName=news/newsdetail.php?newsID=2727
www.snp.org/index_hires.php?pageName=news/newsdetail.php?newsID=2728
Posted by Simon Holledge at 12:30 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 02, 2005
Not unexpected
It now emerges that scientists in Indonesia and Australia were recommending a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean, as seismic activity off Java was causing concern. (Stephen Breen has an article in the Scotsman.)
Subduction earthquakes associated with tsunami occurred off the west of Sumatra in 1797 (8.4 magnitude), 1833 (8.7), 1861 (8.5). There was also an earthquake of magnitude 7.9 in 2000. Major earthquakes are known to occur, either singly or in pairs, on average every 230 years in this area. So the disaster was not unexpected.
earthquake.usgs.gov/eqinthenews/2004/usslav/neicslavfaq.html
www.gps.caltech.edu/~sieh/publications/a10.html
news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=3592005
Posted by Simon Holledge at 01:45 PM | TrackBack
December 31, 2004
SNP calls for more aid
The SNP is calling for more aid for the victims of the tsunami disaster.
www.snp.org/index_hires.php?pageName=news/newsdetail.php?newsID=2726
www.snp.org/index_hires.php?pageName=news/newsdetail.php?newsID=2725
www.snp.org/index_hires.php?pageName=news/newsdetail.php?newsID=2724
Posted by Simon Holledge at 10:51 PM | TrackBack
December 28, 2004
Indian Ocean tsunami
Everything seems insignificant compared to the (as yet unnamed) tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean, especially as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, India, and Sri Lanka are all countries that I know, some of them well.
The news services are now saying that more than 55,000 are dead, but there are still incomplete reports from islands near the epicentre and from much of the west coast of Sumatra. The final toll must be very high.
There has been talk of starting monitoring systems for the Indian Ocean (and the Atlantic) so that people can be warned about tsunami before they hit.
There are systems for the Pacific. I have seen how they operate in Japan. Even small earthquakes are reported immediately on television. The programmes do not stop, there is simply a news flash text displayed at the bottom of the screen. At first you are informed that an earthquake has occurred, then after a minute or two more information comes through to pinpoint the position of the quake and its intensity.
If the quake is offshore and sufficiently powerful to cause a tsunami, people are told to avoid the coast. (There are also sirens on beaches.) The amount of warning given varies. Sometimes it is only a matter of minutes. Tragedies occur when the news doesn’t reach the people in danger, but in general the system works well.
In the case of very large tsunami, like the ones in the Indian Ocean, there is more time to organize evacuations - if there is a warning given in the first place. I don’t have an accurate chronology of this disaster, but it seems the tsunami hit Phuket (Thailand) about 30 minutes after the earthquake. Sri Lanka was hit two and a half hours after that.
The Indonesians do have a system of earthquake monitoring. The Meteorological and Geophysical Agency of Indonesia have stations throughout the seismically active archipelago and projects in which the Japanese, French, and Americans are involved.
What is needed is a system of sharing the information internationally when there is a large quake. This really shouldn’t be too difficult to set up. There are issues about interpreting data - some earthquakes are followed by tsunami and some are not - but clearly the greater the magnitude and intensity, the greater the danger.