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February 2005                                                                            Volume 8 - Number 1

Tsunami Disaster Updates...

Tsunami Statistics

By, Jacklyn Blecker

Releasing the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, the 9.0 magnitude earthquake which hit last December, 2004 is said to be the world’s strongest in 40 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The current record of 9.2 on the richer scale occurred during an earthquake in Alaska in 1964. As a direct result, the earthquake caused the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. The rupture in the seafloor was more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) long, displacing the seafloor above the rupture by perhaps 10 yards (about 10 meters) horizontally and several yards vertically, thus causing the movement of trillions of tons of rock along hundreds of miles of seafloor.

The great volume of the ocean was the direct cause of one of nature’s most deadly phenomena: a tsunami. Within hours killer waves as high as 50 feet (15 meters) in some places radiating from the earthquake zone slammed into the coastline of 11 Indian Ocean countries, causing death toll numbers ranging from nearly 158,000 to more than 221,000 with millions more missing. The greatest damage occurred in Indonesian which makes up 166,320 of the total deaths and 6,245 of the total number missing. Total tsunami damages are estimated at 0.3 percent of GDP in Thailand and 0.1 percent in India. Indonesia is estimated to spend 0.4 percent of GDP on reconstruction. Outside of Indonesia 11 other nations directly hit by the Tsunami have been affected:

Sri Lanka: 29,854 dead and 6,007 missing

India: 10,749 dead and 5,640 missing

Thailand: 5,313 dead and 3,396 missing

Somalia: 150 dead

Maldives: 82 dead and 26 missing

Malaysia: 68 dead and 6 missing

Myanmar: 59 dead

Tanzania: 10 dead

Seychelles: 3 dead

Bangladesh: 2 dead

Kenya: 1 dead

Visitors: 226,566 dead

As the many affected nations begin to recover after the deadly tsunami a key factor is the number of orphaned children. More than 1 million children -- dubbed the "Tsunami Generation" by UNICEF -- were orphaned, displaced, injured, or otherwise adversely affected by the disaster, according to the agency. Preliminary data indicates that nearly 1,000 children were orphaned as and at least 3,200 lost one parent. Additionally, of the roughly 30,000 people who died in Sri Lanka, 40 percent -- about 12,000 -- were children

Recognizing the devastation to the local areas, aid from around the world has begun to flow in. Currently over $4 billion dollars from 24 governments and international donors around the world has been contributed to the response and recovery efforts in Asia. Of the 24 nations, the largest dollar donation has come from Australia in the amount of $89,900.000 dollars. However, the U.S. Navy and Marines have delivered nearly 3.5 million pounds of aid supplies — about 150,000 pounds a day — since starting operations Jan. 1. The U.N. World Food Program has distributed 5,600 tons of food to about 400,000 people in Indonesia alone, said its director in Asia, Tony Banbury.

For more information visit: http://www.asiasource.org/news/at_mp_02.cfm?newsid=122888