TSUNAMIÖ
Salon ran a fascinating item on December 29th. I borrowed this rendition of it from someone's blog &, unforgivably, I can't remember whose. So please identify yourself if you recognise your research...
Dec. 29, 2004, Yala National Park, Sri Lanka
Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka expressed surprise Wednesday that they found no evidence of large-scale animal deaths from the tsunamis -- indicating that animals may have sensed the wave coming and fled to higher ground.
An Associated Press photographer who flew over Sri Lanka's Yala National Park in an air force helicopter saw abundant wildlife, including elephants, buffalo, deer, and not a single animal corpse.
Floodwaters from Sunday's tsunami swept into the park, uprooting trees and toppling cars onto their roofs -- one red car even ended up on top of a huge tree -- but the animals apparently were not harmed and may have sought out high ground, said Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, whose Jetwing Eco Holidays ran a hotel in the park.
"This is very interesting. I am finding bodies of humans, but I have yet to see a dead animal," said Wijeyeratne, whose hotel in the park was destroyed.
"Maybe what we think is true, that animals have a sixth sense," Wijeyeratne said.
Yala, Sri Lanka's largest wildlife reserve, is home to 200 Asian Elephants, crocodile, wild boar, water buffalo and gray langur monkeys. The park also has Asia's highest concentration of leopards. The Yala reserve covers 391 square miles, but only 56 square miles are open to tourists.
The human death toll in Sri Lanka surpassed 21,000. Forty foreigners were among 200 people in Yala who were killed.
With universal horror at the overwhelming scale of human deaths dominating the news stories, this aspect of the whole tsunami experience has been given little prominence. However, its implications are important in two particular respects. In the first instance, it provides telling evidence of the mass hypersensitivity of nearly all animal species to subtle shifts & variations in environmental conditions. No one who tends farm animals, works in a zoo or simply owns a dog or a cat will be surprised by the reported activity of this faculty. But that it operated here on such a scale provokes the speculation that many must have observed the aberrant behaviour, either in their domestic pets or in animals in the wild. Presumably many did & maybe when the individual stories are related, this will be a small but recurrent theme.
Another recurrent theme will be the extent to which there was prior warning of the earthquake. Already the pertinent questions are being asked. They must surely underpin the deliberations that will be made during the long aftermath of the tragedy. If through the long, slow processes of human evolution we have lost touch with those delicate & subtle sensitivities that enable animals to survive within a constantly challenging environment, we have developed to a high degree the intellectual skills to reproduce them artificially. Was there really no warning of an earthquake that measured a mighty 9 on the Richter scale? Was no data available from so potentially volatile a region? It would seem not. This instant response to the disaster from Malaysian parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang is likely to act as something of a template for the clamour of questions that will follow the immediate priorities of rescue work.
The tsunami catastrophe is the worst natural disaster in the history of the country, and although Malaysia did not suffer the brunt of the calamity like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, this is no consolation when every human life lost could have been saved if an early warning system had been in place.
The devastation in human lives and suffering yesterday could have been largely averted if Malaysia and other south-east Asian countries had taken their discussions last year seriously about introducing an early warning system for tsunamis although they happen very rarely in the Indian Ocean.
As has been pointed out by an oceanic and atmospheric expert, it took an hour and a half for the wave to get from the earthquake in Sumatra to Sri Lanka and an hour for it to get to the west coast of Malaysia and Thailand, and people could have walked inland for 15 minutes to get to a safe area. But such a tsunami early warning system was completely absent.
Instead, many people yesterday were attracted by the spectacular waves until they were swept into the water and lost their lives.
Lest this statement should be seen as little more than party politicking, an Associated Press report flags up precisely the same concerns. It states baldly that had India, Malaysia & Sri Lanka been members of the international warning system that has protected all the major Pacific Rim nations since 1965, wave stations would have registered both the direction & the intensity of the tsunami. Thailand is a member, but, tragically, its West coast has no wave sensors mounted on ocean buoys. Indonesia seems to have been equally unprepared for the disaster. Budi Waluyo, an official with Indonesiaís Meteorological & Geophysics Agency said: "Unfortunately, we have no equipment here that can warn about tsunamis. The instruments are very expensive and we don't have money to buy them."
Only one priority prevails now &, whilst global response has been heartening, itís overwhelmingly evident that the work of rescue & reconstruction will be massive & protracted. However, it wonít be too long before somebody within the firing line utters that most chilling of post-disaster sentences: ìClearly there are lessons to be learned from thisî.
pic 1 from: library.thinkquest.org/.../
pic 2 from: www.niwa.co.nz/rc/ prog/chaz/news/tsunami
10:23:44 PM 
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