The tsunami one year later

[southsider2k5]

Remember this was the biggest natural disaster in terms of human life that ANY of us have ever seen.

 

http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt...051227&hn=28015

[Brian]

Still hard to imagine what happened. You just see the death toll and I still can't picture it actually happening.

[Rex Kickass]

It was so big, it never really felt real to me, ya know?

[southsider2k5]

It was so big, it never really felt real to me, ya know?

 

Just for perspective's sake think of Hurricane Katrina.

 

The last number I saw was that about 1300 people died in that, about 230,000 died from the tsunami. For perspectives sake, the entire city of New Orleans had an estimated 400,000 people evacuate, in the Tsunami about one out of every two people of the entire population of New Orleans would have been dead.

 

Katrina affected only one country for all practical purposes, and only really 4 states within that realm. The tsunami had effects on the entire Indian Ocean basin, with millions of people getting zero to a few minutes worth of warning. The destruction was spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles, as opposed to a few thousand square miles for Katrina.

 

Katrina set back the US economic growth rate a couple of tenths of a percent for about a quarter. The tsunami set dozens of countries back into desparate third world conditions that many have still not cleaned up from, yet alone recovered from.

 

I really don't think any of us can comprehend what happened one year ago yesterday. It is on a scale that none of us will ever be able to appreciate.

[Queen Prawn]

Discovery had a couple good documentaries about the tsunami yesterday.