Hard News: The new wave
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Interesting twitter stream from a NOAA scientist, including a graph of the 12 foot surge at Pago Pago: http://twitter.com/brianshiro
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Quick review of the Indonesian tidal wave of 2004 is a good reminder that it is not so much the height of the wave as the volume of water behind it. Unlike your normal beach breaker, it just keeps on surging around, past or through anything in its way. A couple of metres of tsunami (sp correct this time I hope) can do vastly more damage than your average 2m breaker at the beach.
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You're right that the final death toll will grow for a while yet, but it's unlikely to grow ten-fold.
Predictions like that are made to be broken. First report I heard was of 14 dead. A lot of the lag is around 'confirmed dead', rather than just 'missing'.
Samoa was fortunate in that the changeover from driving on the right to the left has meant the widespread deployment of police officers across the islands, so evacuation could be handled promptly.
I'm glad to hear that there is at least one happy coincidence.
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Predictions like that are made to be broken.
Yes, they are. But the reports just don't sound as dramatic as the ones that were coming after the '04 tsunami. I could be wrong, but it sounds like, fortunately, evacuations took place fairly swiftly in a lot of areas.
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What I find odd / disappointing is that using GeoNet, it's clear NZ has been getting the waves for the last 6 hours or so (7:15pm now), and we're still getting unusual fluctuations on the East Cape & Northland, yet all the TV News reports I saw were making out like the whole thing was over by midday.
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I hope once we help deal with the tradgedy in Samoa, there are some serious questions raised about how this panned out in New Zealand.
I'd like to hear other's opinions, but from Sydney, like JP Hansen says above, the news and CD appeared to be saying the waves had passed, when it was pretty damn evident that they hadn't arrived yet.
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I'm just worried about my kids' families.
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Te Papa is very crowded today being a wet day in the school holidays. Awesome Forces section particularly busy with people examining the giant tectonic plate globe.
I often think that when the Big One comes odds are somebody will be in a the earthquake house at Te Papa and they're going to think blimey, this thing is AWESOME.
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I'm just worried about my kids' families.
Shit Jackie, hope they're OK.
Strange in these days of the global village, when it goes down it seems so much more alarming than in the days of letters posted.
Thoughts with you.
I often think that when the Big One comes odds are somebody will be in a the earthquake house at Te Papa and they're going to think blimey, this thing is AWESOME.
Surely in some monkey - typewriter scenario that house would be dead still?
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A Peace Group recently asked for more naval capability at the Defense Review so that we can assist at this, the hour of need.
Following the counter intuitive truth of Politics. Can John Key reinstate Samoans with Permanent residency?
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There's some interesting study in here about being first to a story and the order in which reporting unfolds.
Because even well after it became clear that hundreds of people were killed and villages destroyed in a country which is pretty "close to home" for NZ, the leading points of discussion still centred around ZOMG I WONDER WHAT THE SURF AT GIZZY WILL BE LIKE?
And I really don't believe that as a whole we are that self-centred and shallow.
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Looking at photos from the smh.com.au website and there's four from the north shore in Auckland - all featuring people being warned by police who came down to Takapuna beach to watch the tsunami......
sigh.....
That's not to make light of the very serious situation further north in the pacific
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Twitter, an hour ago, from Simon Grigg:
this Padang earthquake is looking like something pretty bad. Thousands under buildings they say
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Bloody hell. Those poor bastards. As if they haven't been through enough, already.
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@Gareth Ward:
Because even well after it became clear that hundreds of people were killed and villages destroyed in a country which is pretty "close to home" for NZ, the leading points of discussion still centred around ZOMG I WONDER WHAT THE SURF AT GIZZY WILL BE LIKE?
And I really don't believe that as a whole we are that self-centred and shallow.
To be fair, Gareth, I'd find that preferable to causing needless -- and potentially extremely dangerous -- panic when there was no need to. I's actually say the local response was just about right, and if the local fuckwit population were lucky not to be taken out of the gene pool permanently? Well, sorry if this sound callous but I'd rather direct my sympathy towards people who actually deserve it.
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Thanks Russell, I was wondering how close Simon was to that one.
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this Padang earthquake is looking like something pretty bad. Thousands under buildings they say
From an alert email I've seen, the population density in the area is 36 people/km^2. For comparison, Dunedin has a PD of 37.1 people/km^2. And if I'm reading it correctly (the formatting is all screwed up) the population of the affected area is in excess of 5.5 million.
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Dunedin is enormous - the city itself is much denser than that (for the longest time South Dunedin was the densest place in NZ - before all the high rises went up) - but we're talking about the area way up to Middlemarch and North through the Silver Peaks
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the leading points of discussion still centred around ZOMG I WONDER WHAT THE SURF AT GIZZY WILL BE LIKE?
And I really don't believe that as a whole we are that self-centred and shallow.
I don't either, and I wonder why you formed that impression. Most of the leading points of discussion I've seen have been "how bad is it in Samoa and the other islands", and "how bad could it be in NZ?". Where were these "leading points of discussion"? I've been pleasantly surprised by how switched on the leading papers, TV news and radios have been about actually trying to help, connecting people with concern for their relatives to officials, giving useful advice, linking to charity efforts, and keeping us up to date as the tragedy unfolds.
There's always going to be tasteless jokes, sure. But being concerned about what's actually going to happen here is not outrageous, and taking an interest in an approaching tsunami is pretty natural, especially if you have a lot to do with the beach, as a large proportion of NZers do.
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Ben, certainly agree that the various news types switched pretty quickly to the tragedy as they knew about it and well done.
But it struck me that a variety of online and "offline" discussions I was having still revolved around waves in NZ, well AFTER it was clear there was no serious risk here and the impact in Samoa had become widely reported.
I genuinely meant it when I said people aren't that self-centred and think there is something about setting the theme of a story early on that drives discussion well after events have overtaken it. Less of a criticism, more of an observance. -
OT, but this has highlighted just how stupid the Greater Samoa set-up is. Must be the most illogical post-colonial legacy outside of Africa.
Splitting a people in half for the purpose of what exactly? So the USA can have a Guam in the South Pacific?
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well AFTER it was clear there was no serious risk here and the impact in Samoa had become widely reported.
I give you that a lot of people don't much care about foreign disasters, rating them less interesting than local weather conditions. A tsunami is certainly a very interesting thing, something most of us don't get to see even once in our lives. I've wanted to see one since I was a small child, after seeing a Japanese children's film about one. It was a cartoon, and the depiction of the wave was fanciful, but it looked incredible, and extremely important. Not something that you would want to miss.
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But being concerned about what's actually going to happen here is not outrageous
Well, yesterday I certainly put off my visit to the library (which is literally one minute away from Takapuna Beach) for a few hours. And I was seriously pissed off to see the photos in the SMN referred to up thread -- if the swell had turned out to much higher than expected, those idiots would have been (to use a technical term) fucked. And despite what Roland Emmerich-style disaster porn may lead you to believe, deadly walls of water don't move in exquisitely rendered slo-mo...
You can't legislate against stupidity, but you sure don't have to feel any sympathy for people who suffer the consequences of their idiocy.
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Quoting Ben Wilson
Predictions like that are made to be broken. First report I heard was of 14 dead. A lot of the lag is around 'confirmed dead', rather than just 'missing'
Does anyone remember the first news bulletin of the Boxing Day Tsunami said that there was "1 dead"? Then 9 then...300....
The odd order of magnitude later.......
Searched high and low for "1 dead" but these are just as "good".
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2004/12/26/1272422.htm
This one is interesting because 3 hours earlier they said:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2004/12/26/1272406.htm
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-103741073.html
Final count??? 280k 290k??? Dunedin + Wellington. Gorn.
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I can relate to your fascination, Ben. When I was a small child growing up in Opotiki, our primary school used to practice tsunami evacuation drills, which involved walking all the children across the Waioeka Bridge and up onto high ground on the golf course. People have long been worried about tsunamis from White Island. I'm not sure what the current thinking is, but given that we now know that tsunamis typically flood up rivers and destroy bridges, the drill has probably changed.
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