Word: sumatra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rickety boat emitted signals of distress from the Sunda strait, a body of water sandwiched between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Local authorities had no vessels in the area, and called on Australia for assistance. When H.M.A.S. Armidale, an Australian naval ship, approached the troubled craft, they found 78 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers heading for Australia. Unsurprisingly, their wooden boat was not seaworthy, and those on board were transferred to the Oceanic Viking, an armed patrol vessel used by Australian customs to track poachers of the highly endangered Patagonian toothfish in these waters...
...shadow of a volcano, under a nightfall that cannot hide the rising stench of death, Pariaman official Yuen Karnova recounts his district's toll from the earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Sept. 30: at least 400 people believed dead, just some of what will probably be thousands of casualties from the quake; more than 10,000 buildings collapsed or condemned; a dozen or so villages wiped off the map by landslides. Pariaman, Karnova notes, is hardly a stranger to calamity. "Every natural disaster you can think of, it has happened here," he tells me. "Landslides, floods...
...what a multitude of challenges has been unleashed upon the Asia-Pacific region in just a week's time. In late September, tropical storm Ketsana killed more than 160 people in Vietnam and nearly 300 in the Philippines, submerging 80% of Manila. Just hours before Sumatra was jolted, another earthquake triggered a tsunami that inundated the Samoan islands and Tonga, extinguishing some 180 lives. In the latest catastrophe, southern India was ravaged by some of the worst torrential rains in decades, killing around 300 people and leaving some 2 million others homeless. (See pictures of tsunami striking South Pacific...
Earthquake Shakes Sumatra...
...magnitude earthquake struck Padang, a city of 900,000 on the northwest island of Sumatra, cutting power and telephone lines and trapping thousands of people underneath collapsed buildings. The initial death toll of 75 is expected to rise as victims are pulled from the rubble. Aftershocks triggered landslides and were felt as far away as Malaysia and Singapore. Hours earlier, a quake in the Pacific had sent a tsunami crashing into Samoa and American Samoa, killing at least...