Phuket
In 1998 Michelle and I spent the first five days of our honeymoon in Phuket. Now, more than ever I want to go back. We stayed at the Katathani resort, which was the resort farthest south of Patong. The resorts on Kata Beach seem to have been largely sheltered by the uninhabited ‘hat’ island just offshore. This is the most comprehensive report about Phuket I’ve found so far, in many cases contradicting much of what the cable networks were reporting for the first several days. A remarkable number of hotels in Phuket escaped damage.
Thais in Phuket are cleaning up.
Most big trash has now been removed, the electric is back, the water is back [by Dec 30] (everybody needs it to clean the mud!)… Car wrecks have been removed, Some boats are still on the beach and will probably be removed later as it take special machines. Anyway they became the local attraction for tourists.
Hundred of people have join the cleaning effort, all construction companies have been reassigned to the cleaning. Every single shop is doing its own cleaning and all together the amount of work already done is amazing!
If you want to help Phuket and the people living here… come for holidays!
From all that I’ve read, Phuket did not seem to get nearly the worst of the wave. Not that things weren’t bad, but other, poorer places are incomprehensibly worse. Third-world poverty is very difficult to understand, even after having witnessed it firsthand. The effect on those populations was beyond catastrophic.
Hardest hit
Many of the other hardest hit places have also been sites of ongoing violence and unrest.
- Indonesia – The destruction on Sumatra, hit by the original earthquake and could have grave effects for all of Indonesia since the island is responsible for 70% of the country’s income. In the worst hit areas, GAM Separatists have been fighting the Indonesian government in the ethnically distinct northern Aceh province since 1976. Recently local Islamist groups, an outgrowth of Aceh’s more fundamentalist flavor of Islam have also been in the news, being responsible for inflaming the Islamic Insurgency affecting three provinces in southern Thailand. The entire Aceh province has been under martial law for most of 2004.
- Sri Lanka – A two decades old civil war has only recently cooled between the island government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who have achieved notoriety for recruiting children as soldiers. The government also suffers from rampant corruption though there seems to have been recent progress on that front as well.
- Maldives – In August 2004 there were riots to overthrow their government. The country only recently eased that political state of emergency.
The eastern coast of India has especially high population density, and appears to have a very flat coastline. These firsthand NGO reports from the area near the coastal city of Cuddalore are extremely disturbing.
Sumatra did not move 100 feet.
Visual Media
The most telling and often gruesome source for images is GettyImages Most of the major newspapers often source images here.
There is a certain perverse irony in using bitTorrent to distribute tsunami videos. Jordan Golson has finally gotten torrent files up for the disaster videos he’s been keeping track of. Here are the direct torrent links: TsunamiTorrentV1 (164MB) and TsunamiTorrentV2 If you have downloaded these, keep BitTorrent open, the way this works is for everyone to contribute to the download pool. (torrents updated Jan 4, both are working)
DigitalGlobe has an extensive gallery of Tsunami material, including two highly informative PDFs analyzing their satellite imagery. Space Imaging only has a few IKONOS images online even though I’ve seen others pass on the newswires.
US Aid
The US has increased our contribution tenfold to $350 million. When combined with private and corporate donations, America has so far donated well over half a billion dollars to the relief effort.
U.S. Pacific Command has mobilized a remarkable aid force, very little of which was intially reported in the mainstream media. I’m finding it a little difficult to tell exactly how many ships are actually going to the Andaman sea, mostly because I have no idea if Maritime Prepositioning Ships are counted as part of the carrier and expeditionary strike groups. Three Marine disaster relief assessment teams were on the ground by the 30th, in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Thousands of Marine ground troops are attached to the deployed strike groups. News reports of direct US military aid are starting to filter out.
Deployed forces:
I found this astounding:
The [USS Bonhomme Richard] squadron also has 43 Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Units, each of which is capable of producing 600 gallons of potable water per hour from sea water. Five of the ships are also capable of making 25,000 gallons of fresh water a day using the ships’ evaporators. The ships can pump water from ship to shore from up to two miles away using an Amphibious Bulk Liquid Transfer System of floating hoses.
I couldn’t find the story which mentioned this, but I read that the crew of the USS Bonhomme Richard is foregoing freshwater showers and other non-essential water use so the ship’s evaporators can get the maximum possible amount of fresh water to shore.
We donated to the relief effort through AmeriCares, a four-star charity whose institutional commitment to high-efficiency and local NGO cooperation is reflected in a remarkably low operational overhead.
Amazon’s Red Cross Donation page should go over 13 million sometime Monday.
