Word: sumatran
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...that trembled the earth's crust off the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, setting off through the oceans shock waves that were felt more than 3,000 miles away on the coast of East Africa, where at least 200 people died. Bustami, a fisherman from the Sumatran village of Bosun, is one who experienced the quake and tsunami and lived to tell about them. Sometime after 7:30 on the morning of Dec. 26, he says, he was on his boat just off the coast when he felt the sea moving around him. "That must have been...
...worth noting that the Sumatran quake wasn't the deadliest temblor in modern times. In 1976 as many as 750,000 people died in a huge quake that leveled the northern Chinese town of Tangshan. But at that time China was a closed society, a place that did not willingly present the 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...
...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 in the Pacific. So, in the aftermath of the Sumatran earthquake, it was natural to ask whether anything could have been done to mitigate the disaster. And that is a question whose answer requires an understanding of what, precisely, happened on the morning...
...hours, clinging to flotsam and catching raindrops on her outstretched tongue to slake her thirst before a fishing boat rescued her. Some 370 others perished in the disaster, disappearing under the waves along with what had been their hope for a new life, a battered 19-m Sumatran fishing vessel they had been told would ferry them the 36 hours from Tanjungkarang in Sumatra to Australia's Christmas Island. Most of the refugees on this trip were Iraqis like Rokaya, but the passenger list was a roll call of the desperate and downtrodden: Afghans, Algerians, Palestinians, Sudanese...
...daybreak, long after the Kopassus sped off, the new crew dropped the hostages with food and water on a deserted island off the east Sumatran coast near Kualatungkal. They also left the inside man so as not to arouse suspicion. Then they headed northwest, back past Singapore, skirting Melaka and Medan. Over the next seven days, while the captain sailed, the crew of 14 worked, repainting the entire ship and plastering a new English name over the Thai lettering on the bow. Off the Maldives, they rendezvoused with another tanker and the Hong Kong crime lord. The palm...