Word: sri
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...getting unprecedented support from all countries. Right now we are unable to handle it." TILAK RANAVIRAJA, head of Sri Lanka's disaster-management team, describing the aid pouring into the country...
...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...
...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, a Finn...
...India and Sri Lanka are a different story. It took nearly two hours for the tsunami to reach those countries, but in neither country did residents receive any warning of the likely disaster. "That morning, the sea was like it always is," says Baalaramanan, 23, a fisherman in the Indian town of Akkarapettai. "Then suddenly it was on fire. Boiling. It lifted up 11 yards and paused, almost like it was surveying us below it. And then it fell. It consumed one house after another, like paper boxes." A day later, rescuers found the bodies of 300 fish sellers...
...many, of course, it will have come too late. In Sri Lanka, village after village was pounded, but in a ravaged land, one place stands out. In Kahawa, on the south coast, the cars of a train lie separated and sprawled on the ground, relief workers and Buddhist monks in saffron robes crawling over them. This is where at least 1,000 people died. Karl Max Hantke, a German with a holiday home overlooking the train station, says that shortly after the first wave hit, he saw a packed train come to a halt, perhaps because its engineer thought stopping...