WHEN THE EARTH MOVES

WHEN THE EARTH MOVES
Why Thais avoided
tsunami warning
Meteorologists decided against it
'out of courtesy to tourist industry'
Posted: December 30, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern


© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com Thailand's foremost meteorologists, meeting in a crisis session before the tsunami hit, decided not to issue a warning out of courtesy to the tourism industry, according to a report in the Thai paper The Nation. Minutes after the earthquake in the Indian Ocean Sunday morning, Thailand's top meteorological experts met to consider the danger posed to the coast. But the economic impact on the nation's tourism industry dissuaded them from warning those most in danger.

According to the report, the experts considered the fact that there had not been any dangerous floods in 300 years. There was a consensus that the Indonesian island of Sumatra would be a cushion for the southern coast of Thailand. The experts also reportedly believed the quake was an 8.1 on the Richter scale, rather than a 9.0. A similar sized quake hit the same area in 2002 with no flooding at all, according to the report. Among the meteorological experts, only four had expertise in earthquakes, according to The Nation. We finally decided not to do anything because the tourist season was in full swing, a source told the paper. The hotels were 100 percent booked. What if we issued a warning, which would have led to an evacuation, and nothing had happened. What would be the outcome? The tourist industry would be immediately hurt. Our department would not be able to endure a lawsuit.


All Planets lined up to pull on Mother Earth
See Five Planets in the Sky at Once From Dec. 18 to early January, you can see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the sky just before dawn. You'll have to wait until 2016 to see them together so easily again. Get a chart and more info. -

Plus pull of the full moon the Full Moon
Full Cold Moon on Dec. 26

Restoring MangrovesTo Know It for the First Time – Place, Environment and Ecology Coastal forests are key to preventing future disasters and restoring life and livelihood around the Indian Ocean
A half-century ago, if you approached a point on the shore along the rim of Indian Ocean, you probably would have come upon endless acres of mangroves. Swampy rainforests hugging the edges of both land and sea, Indo-Pacific mangroves are storehouses of biodiversity, home to the world's richest variety of salt-tolerant trees, ferns, and shrubs. Hundreds of different birds live in the trees, which also shelter migratory species. Mangroves are rich in sea life - from plankton, to mollusks, to shell and fin fish - and well-populated with crocodiles, monkeys, wild cats, lizards, sea turtles, and more.
Mangroves also insulate coastlines and coastal communities from the abuses of the ocean - erosion, storms, and waves.
Fast forward 50 years: on December 25, 2004, if you approched the shore along the rim of the Indian Ocean, you would have been much more likely to come upon a shrimp farm, urban landfill, or tourist resort than a rainforest. In the past half-century, over half the world's mangroves - estimated to have covered 22 million hectares (54,340,000 acres) of tropical and subtropical coastlines in the middle of the last century - have been lost to development, oil exploration, pollution, inland irrigation, and especially shrimp aquaculture, an export industry frequently underwritten by international development lenders like the World Bank and the Inter-Asian Development Bank.
From Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta to southeastern India's Goadavari-Krishna mangroves, to the Sundarbans mangroves along the India-Bangladesh coast (hometo nearly 700 endangered tigers), small pockets of mangroves have hung on, sometimes as protected areas, all highly endangered.
But in this terrible time after the tsunamis, place, environment, ecology and economics have combined to illuminate the simple sense of reforesting the mangroves.
(more...)
Continue reading "Restoring Mangroves"
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