As of this morning the death count from the Tsunami is greater than 60 000. As usual, India got hard hit....the population is so great that ANY natural disaster takes on biblical proportions. The floods 25 years ago, the Union Carbide disaster 20 years ago, and now this. God must have wanted to fill a new sub-division in heaven to call so many people home.
Don't get too complacent just because that was down there and we are up here....the same thing could happen in the Atlantic and especially in the Pacific. The big island in Hawaii has a crack running through it which is opening at the rate of an inch a year...some day that crack will suddenly open , a large chunk of Hawaii will fall off into the west,and cause the largest underwater landslide in history. Iceland had some extra real-estate arrive in the form of a volcano only 15 years ago, and where there are volcano's there are earthquakes. Imagine a wave like the one that hit India washing onto the streets of New York. Oh yeah, there was a movie about that just lately.... Would not want to be in the subway when that happens.
Legend has it that water lapped the clap boards of that 300 year old church up on the hill in Santa Barbara...some 60 feet above sea level. Undersea charts indicate that there is a shelf of sediment built up, just ready to slide away all along the west coast, except outside Santa Barbara, where it clearly slid away sometime in the past. Cause and effect...? Likely. A little quake at just the right time and I am trying to imagine what a 60 foot wave going over Vancover would look like. It wouldn't be a breaking wave like in the movie, but a big swell.
Well, enough of that...time to get back to work. Later on today, I shall drop into the Red Cross and donate a pint of blood....I suspect the world's blood supply is a little low right now.
1 comment:
I've actually heard a lot of people say the whole "Oh, why do people live in places where that can happen?" Or to say "That would never happen here!"
First, never trust anyone, or anything, including the ground you stand on (physically, not metaphorically). Mother Nature's one of the meanest chicks I ever met.
Second, we may not get catastrophic disasters of this nature. But every winter, we incur a steady deathrate due to icy roads. People die out in the cold all the time.
Know what people in Texas say? "I don't know how y'all can handle that winter!"
I don't think there's a single safe place left on this planet, heh.
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