Who Dropped The Ball On This One?
 

OK, a 9.0 earthquake hits under the ocean. A 9.0 is equal to 30 Billion tons of TNT going off. Doesn't take a genius to figure out you're going to have some very huge tidal waves all over the place quickly thereafter. It took up to 2 hours for the Tsunamis to hit.

Even without a formal Tsunami warning system in place over there why didn't the US Government or US Military or other technologically advanced countries issue an instant worldwide emergency alert to all these country's governments so they could alert the tourist hotels to get people off the beach and inland fast?

Someone fucked up bigtime on this.

They'll blame the holidays....or Bush

Holidays?

Very true. Dropping the ball is nothing new for this administration.

The US Military and Navy especially is always on alert during war time.

Too far away from the USA to be considered an issue for us?
Can be one of a million things.
Maybee we dont monitor for things like this in that region?
Im sure some bullshit excuse will be comming soon :)

seems like most people dont care about anything past what they see everyday, or no one thought it was relavent or last but not least, they didnt catch on until it was too late :2 cents:

How many americans were killed ? that might answer your question . If it dosen't, then somebody fucked up

As sad as it is ...nobody really puts that on their priority list...they always care about their own intrests in that country first...if they have none it isn't prority...also the time frame probably is a major factor..Can anybody really predict what would happen in that situation?...we haven't had a 9 on the rictor scale in over 30 years

Yeah, they will blame it on the holidays or some shit.
:xmas-smil

That really is a shame. It's not like Japan, China and India are some completely backwards countries like some in Africa. They should have seen this one coming even before us.

i agree - there SHOULD have been AMPLE warning. Someone DEF dropped the ball here.

SERVERAL agencies knew this was comming 2 hours in advance, not just one.

Wonder how many ships got taken out

CNN reported that the US Gov was trying to notify the appropriate governments but couldnt get through to them or something along those lines.

We have nuclear subs cruising the Indian ocean and a base at Diego Garcia I believe among others. I would have thought we would be quite interested.

We also have seismic monitors that cover most, if not all the globe to detect nuclear detonations so we have no excuse for not knowing about it.

I would be interested to see how much it tilted the axis of the Earth as even minor shifts can have significant long term effects.

Sleazy, let's take a realistic approach to this.

How long would a warning take to go from the top of the chain of command down in a third world country?

Even if the warning could have been made within a few minutes, how would the people of these third world countries have gotten to safety in a timely manner?

Let me now apologize for having my own opinion. I'll just call myself an idiot so you don't have to.

Lets say i was about to outsource 5 million jobs and i was in negotiations for the price of the deal, and there was a way to make my offer alot more attractive. :)

I think even a five minute warning would have saved hundreds of lives as people could have got off the beaches at least.

how long would it take to open a phone book - which any disaster center SHOULD HAVE for areas it covers - and call the local TV and radio stations in the areas about to be hit. Yellow pages lists them..... they should even have those numbers ready.

if only 10% got the message and got it out - you get SOME warning....

they turned their back on purpose... they knew the waves were coming.... might have been for financial reasons..

no offense but why the fuck are we now responsible for everyone?

People bitch that we are all over the world and now its our fault...
sorry if this rubbed me raw and it sucks for those who are effected.

alot of the places that were struck have higher ground only several miles away. These places are also high tourist areas, so I cant imagine it would be very hard to make contact with certain Authorities and inform them of the dangers that may result after an earthquake. Even 5 minutes would have been better than nothing to get people to higher ground. too late now i guess

matt

your 100% correct... we arent the parents of the world...

You are probably correct. However, there are other variables that would factor into the equation.

if you CAN prevent someone from being killed - and DON'T - are you responsible?

Who says the U.S. didn't put out some type of warning? It would still be up to those countries to disburse the information, assuming they had the logistic capability to do so.

the authorities should have warned the people, but also the people must have left the beaches right away!

Everyone know that beaches must be deserted after an earthquake.

i live in Costa Rica and everyone knows it here....

In the U.S., Canada, or any other modern Country, it would almost be that easy.

here in canada it's criminal negligence

That's the key factor right there.

Hell give me 5 minutes and I will be several hundered yards away or inside the most solid building around so that when the wave hits it will hopefully have lost some of its power.

Did you hear about that guy that saw the wave coming and ran down to the water's edge to grab his five year old son. Then they started running and the wave caught up with them and carried then about fifty yards into a swamp. They were really lucky not to be hit with debris :thumbsup

In reality earthquakes happen so fast ..do you actually think all the people could have been warned in a matter of minutes what is going to hit them?Aren't we talikng about warning millions of people in a matter of 10-15 minutes?

if you CAN prevent someone from being killed - and DON'T - are you responsible?

So i guess canada is too while were at it... the countries in that area should know better.... and have known well before us as to what was to come of it.


USA is the first to be called for help and first to be blamed... one of them old catch 22's damned if you do, and damned if ya dont....

isn't that how seinfeld ended?

I'm curious as to why it's the US's responsibility. It's good altruism, but we're not the only country that can detect and monitor this stuff. Japan is much closer, and deals with far more earthquakes and tsumanis then America. Why isn't anyone trying to put this "failing" on Japan? Why is it always America's failing?

Most of these people were killed by water not the quake itself. In some of these spots these people were killed 2 hours after the quake hit.

So no, there was a lot of time to warn all these people to get the hell away from the coastline.

I'm sure there are many things that happened behind the scenes among many countries following to the earthquake. My guess is that one of the questions that came up was how to deal with this without creating panic and causing the people to kill themselves while trying to escape.

The US has some of the most advanced detection technology systems in the world. As a leader its our inherent responsiblity to use this knowledge for the benefit and protection of all, not just our country.

You don't think their governments knew there was an earthquake?

I agree that something went wrong here.

However, where would you suggest they all go in a 2-hour notice? How would they leave so fast? After all, we're talking about countries that don't quite have it together when it comes to transportation capabilities and logistics. I don't know how bad it is, but it's definitely not as easy as evacuating regions in Florida.

Japan is just as good as us in earthquake detection, and it was closer to them.

I really can't believe you think this is our fault/responsibility.

Local news and newspapers uphere report that they indeed issued a warning to most beaches but most of the warnings didn't come true or where simply ignored by the agencies upthere.

The problem is that there is no procedure in place for something like this in the indian ocean. There's an early warning system in the pacific, but not in the indian ocean.

So they tried, at least. But proper procedure is clearly needed. There are so many governments and organizations that overlooked an early warning system in the Indian ocean.

From Wikipedia:

However, if there was a very large subduction zone earthquake ( magnitude 9.0) off the west coast of the United States, for example, people in Japan would have up to 18 hours (and likely warnings from warning systems in Hawaii and elsewhere) before any tsunami arrived, giving them some time to get away to higher ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami

Well whoever knew could have done more, lets put it that way.

The good thing is this will galvanize the deployment of early warning buoys in the region.

Just heard on the news that the aftershocks could bring more waves and also that the UN is warning about epidemics within days from rotting bodies, no clean water supply etc