Earthquake and Tsunami - the day after
Sorry for the non-technical post, but I had to post something about the earthquake and the resulting tsunami in South East Asia. I live in Chennai, one of India's largest cities on the south-eastern coast.And trust me -I don't think my city has ever seen a disaster of this magnitude. The newspapers are horrifying- people washed away as they walked on the beach in the morning, kids swept out to sea as they were playing cricket. People are still in shock- almost every conversation I had something about the quake in it.The images on TV are too terrible to describe - I cannot believe that so many people have died so close to my house - and in a placce where I've spent quite some time
Thankfully, my family and friends are safe - our house is some 15 kms from the beach and is in a residential area. We're worried about my mom's brother who lives in Indonesia - communication seems to be down, and though they live far away from where the earthquake hit, we're still worried.
If you want a sense of the scale of the disaster, you just have to look at this comment I saw from a BBC reporter this morning from some resort in Thailand - "This region has been relatively fortunate in that it has seen only around a thousand deaths". When people start saying that they're lucky 'coz only a 1000 people died, you know that things are bad.
The number right now is 12,000. That is a number I can't even begin to imagine. If you want a sense of scale, that's more than twice the number killed in 9/11. - I've no doubts this number will increase in the days to come and as communication lines are restored in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
We can only pray.
Update: Anand has posted about it too at http://www.dotnetindia.com/2004/12/earthquake_and_.html.
Scoble is posting to his linkblog (http://kunal.org/scoble)
Vivek feels the same way I do http://svivek.blogspot.com/2004/12/sunday-bloody-sunday.html