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Monday, December 27, 2004Tsunami Death Toll Nears 24,000(from FoxNews) It is simply amazing the kind of force Mother Nature can work up when things get out of synch. There are, of course, questions about whether warnings could have been delivered better, but I think that even the first world would have had a hell of a time with this. I was a bit surprised by the declaration (reprinted on Instapundit yesterday) about responsible nations having warning systems in place. I've lived in California close to two years and could not tell you if he have a warning system for tsunamis, how it works or what to do. My first impulse would be to head for home, not because of any sentimental reasons but because I live about 5,000 feet above sea level three-quarters of the way up a good sized mountain in the Sierra Azul range and you can't get much further inland without actually going through the mountains into the Central Valley (where Gary Condit and Scott Peterson lurk, so how scary is that!). Whether such a course was wise or stupid depends on whether the mountain joined in the tumble or stood against it. The house I live in is over a hundred years old, so I'm hoping we're on a pretty solid rock. Anyway, my point is that tsunamis are not like fires, hurricaines or even tornadoes. They come rarely and require very rapid responses from people who are not really prepared for them. Should we be? With 24,000 dead, it's hard to say "no," but who was writing about the need for better tsunami warning systems last week? Anybody not in the tsunami response biz? Not likely. Like 9/11, there are certain things that come out of the blue. In retrospect, there are plenty of fingers to point about warning signs missed, officials who should have done more and so on. And when you're done, you discover that the people who were the most closely connected to the thing were muttering about nameless fears. But until you have a 9/11 or a Sumatra, these dangers don't gain enough traction in the public consciousness for effective civil action to be possible. After all, if every person who was deeply concerned about the lack of attention to his/her area of expertise were listened to, our kids would be doing math, English, foreign language and science 24 hours a day each, our cars would be made of nerf and have governors limiting them to five miles per hour and then our kids would die from fatigue while heart attack victims perished unable to get to a defibrillator in time. Now is a time to notice what we can do better next time. This does, of course, involve figuring out what was done and where it went wrong. But the emphasis must be on the future, not the past. Every one of these things brings out an ugly sort of person who is deeply wounded and personally affronted that the guvmint and the broader society didn't make life perfect, perfectly safe and preferably at no cost. It also brings out the failed heroes who tried so hard to save us but were thwarted by their uncaring superiors. But at the end of it all, the uncaring superiors are a broader public that can only think about so many threats and pay so much in taxes before they are safer than they can afford to be, mentally, emotionally and fiscally. And the heroes uncaring superiors are, however much they aspire to be otherwise, underlings both of ours and of a universe of amazing complexity. In the next few months, there will be a lot of talk about what tsunami warning systems can do, how many lives they can save and why it was so bad of governmental and other authorities not to have done more to start with. Before we join in the orgy of recriminations, we need to ask ourselves, for example, whether six months ago we would not have been among those leery of spending big bucks on some fantastic tsunami warning system even as the children's hospital down the street was closed for lack of funds. A week ago, tsunamis were not a big priority. Not for me, not for you, not for India nor Indonesia. If only we'd known... but we didn't, not enough of us to create a social movement to be better prepared for tsunamis at any rate. Such is life. And so the TurkeyBlog sends out prayers for the lost, for the survivors, for those who have lost loved ones. And especially prayers for those to whom we look for our safety, forever called upon to have been better prepared for the last unforseeable disaster, to be alert to the next unforseeable disaster and to do it all in such a way that we're prepared for everything without becoming so fearful of life's dangers that we can't do anything. Glad I'm not in that job. In the meantime, if you want to do the best thing possible, you can help those who have found themselves on fate's bad side this time. Dan Drezner has links to places to help (link found at Instapundit). 
posted by gbarto at 4:05 PM |
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