Philippine Daily Inquirer Editorial

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Act of God
An excerpt of the December 29, 2004 editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

JUST when the world thought that it had seen the worst of a year of disasters, the worst catastrophe in living memory struck 10 countries, mostly in South Asia, last Sunday, dwarfing everything that came before it in terms of death and destruction. An earthquake of magnitude 9 near Sumatra left at least 5,000 people dead in Indonesia, most of them in the state capital of Banda Aceh. Worse was to follow in a matter of a few hours as tsunamis unleashed by the powerful earthquake raced across the Indian Ocean and then crashed on coastal villages and towns as well as some of the more popular island resorts in the region, leaving a wide arc of devastation extending from Indonesia and Thailand to India and Sri Lanka all the way to Somalia in Africa.

As of midday yesterday, international relief agencies placed the number of dead at about 25,000, almost half of them in Sri Lanka. But the count could double as relief workers reach remote villages that have had no contact with population centers since Sunday. One Thai official said the final death toll in his country could be more than twice the 990 confirmed deaths as of yesterday. Indonesian Vice President Yusuf Kalla said between 21,000 and 25,000 Indonesians could have been killed.

But whatever the final count may be, it is already clear that what happened was an international catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions. Geologists have to reach as far back as 1883 to find a tsunami of comparable violence and destructiveness. That was when the volcano Krakatoa, located on the opposite side of Sumatra, exploded and caused the deadliest tsunami on record, killing an estimated 36,000 people.

What makes this horrendous tragedy doubly sad and frustrating is that it was purely nature's handiwork, an act of God. Unlike the landslides and floods that claimed 1,800 lives in Quezon and Aurora early this month, for example, nature didn't get any help from loggers and others who abuse it to wreak havoc on hundreds of villages and towns. There are no engineers to blame for poor design and construction, no government planners to call to account for allowing communities to rise in places that are risky. Unlike storms or earthquakes, human knowledge and science seem completely helpless in mitigating the destructive capacity of a tsunami.

Scientists are now saying the death toll in the Dec. 26 disaster could have been much less had India and Sri Lanka been part of an international tsunami warning system, covering countries in the Pacific Rim. But that seems like a desperate effort to assign human responsibility for the devastation caused by a natural phenomenon. By all accounts, the tsunami hit Thailand within an hour and then struck Sri Lanka and India not more than two hours later. How does one move people numbering tens of thousands in that brief span of time? How helpful is a warning that gives people an hour or two to move to safer ground?