Word: thailander
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...bloody insurgency has made travel and the provision of emergency services desperately hard. Whole fishing villages in Aceh have probably been wiped out, with nobody left to count the human cost. With estimated death counts of almost 9,000 in India, 29,000 in Sri Lanka, 5,000 in Thailand and smaller numbers in seven other countries, the immediate death toll attributable to the disaster was well over 123,000 by late Saturday. And stalking behind the water and toppled rubble that had drowned or crushed so many, death was ready to arrive in the form of disease. The waters...
...face of its tragedies to the outside world. Few places are like that today. What made last week's disaster so extraordinary was the way in which it was a truly global event. The tsunami placed a girdle of death around half the earth. In Sri Lanka and Thailand, tens of thousands of tourists fleeing the northern hemisphere's winter were enjoying Christmas vacations, some in swank hotels, many more in cheap rooms for rent along the beaches. According to the Swedish Foreign Ministry, 20,000 Swedes were celebrating Christmas in Thailand alone. Six days after the earthquake, 60 were...
...people to stay in touch with their loved ones. And by some miracle of technology for which many were grateful, even when mobile circuits were overloaded, text messages got through. Sam Nicols, an engineer who researches nanotechnology at a Swedish university, was on a rock-climbing expedition in Tonsai, Thailand, when the tsunami hit, and he promptly used his Swedish cell phone to message his father John, a professor at the University of Oregon. "Just had a big tidal wave hit," read the first message. "I am not injured but lost some climbing gear, my camera and [my Thai] mobile...
...ubiquity of personal technology distorted the early news of the disaster. Because the first indications of its scale came from Sri Lanka and Thailand, it was easy to forget that the real devastation was not in well-heeled tourist enclaves but in dirt-poor Indonesian fishing villages. In any event, the earthquake reminded us--had we been foolish enough to forget it--that there are primal forces of nature that no amount of our wizard technology is able to confine. Yet technology can help. For decades, a sophisticated early-warning system has helped limit catastrophic damage from tsunamis...
...moreover, have a trick up their watery sleeve, one that can trap the unwary. If the trough of a wave hits the shore before a crest, the first thing that anyone on shore notices is not water rushing onto the land but the opposite. That is what happened in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In the Sri Lankan town of Trincomalee, a hotel manager remembers the sea rushing out so the beach became magically full of gorgeous, colorful, stranded fish. "Men ran down to the shore with gunny-bags and stuffed them full of fish," he says. On Phuket, Tiina Seppanen...