The Last Wave - in the Andamans

For those in the islands or visiting -
Here is the list of places where a copy of THE LAST WAVE would be available:
A) On Havelock Island:
1) With Barefoot Resorts
2) With Sajan Pulinchery, Ecovilla Palm Beach Resort, Govind Nagar
B) Port Blair
1) At Andaman Chronicle, Foreshore Road, with Denis Giles
2) At Tarang Trades, Middle Point
3) Hotel Sea Shells, Marine Hill
4) Andaman Book Centre, Goal Ghar
5) Sagar Rekha store, Goal Ghar
6) Outlets of ANIIDCO at Sagarika Emporium, Middle Point, the Cellular Jail, Hotel Megapode and also perhaps in Delanipur (thanks Neil Bryan)
7) Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team (ANET), Wandoor

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Jan 4, 2005; a post on andamanicobar@yahoogroups.co.in - mud volcanoes

Jan 4, 2005
(Mud volcanoes)

 There are reports of mud volcanoes erupting on the Andamans. One of the mud volcanoes is on North Sentinel Island! This is bad news. 
I'm a geologist, I downloaded topography for all of the Andamans. I'm trying to find the altitude of the islands to work out the survivability. The topography was measured by the Space Shuttle in 1999, its SRTM data. I guess that mud is erupting from a fault line I seen in SRTM data that trends SSE to NNW on North Sentinel. I'm not sure of the altitude of the island, SRTM is measured at tree the level.
The coast of North Sentinel Island seems to be 30-40 metres a.s.l. the interior is 60 to 80 metres a.s.l. but this could be due to the tree effect. Car Nicobar is the same altitude, 30 to 40 metres at the coast and 60 to 80 metres inland, but I heard that its highest point is in fact just 16 metres. The situation appears poor for North Sentinel Island.
The Andamans are part of an accretionary wedge, this occurs where two plates collide. Here wet sediment is squeezed, much like a sponge the water contained in the sediment is forced to the surface along faults. The fact that mud is erupting in a number of sites along faults indicates that the Indian-Australian plate moved west or NW at the Andamans, and squeezed the wet sedimentary wedge and water contained is now erupting to the surface. This in accordance with tsunami simulations by NOAA. The fault on North Sentinel Island is offset to the left, sinistral, this is in accordance with the expected plate movement.

Also the channels that cut the Islands were likely caused by past major tsunamis events, waves washed over the islands splitting them in two. There are reports that islands have been split in two by the latest tsunami. The fact that there were very few channels cutting the islands in the first place indicates that the phenomena of major island splitting tsunamis is very rare, perhaps once per 10,000 years or more. It could explain the language groups, that Great Andaman Island was once contiguous and populated by one group that was later split up by a major tsunami calamity.

Diamond Dave

Revisiting the tsunami of Dec 2004; a Jan 3, 2005 post on andamanicobar@yahoogroups.co.in

Jan 3, 2005

Tsunami alarm: desi model or global club?

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=78583

Ashok B Sharma analyses how technology can deal with a tsunami-like crisis

Posted online: Monday, January 03, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

Is technology the ultimate solution? Could a monitoring and warning system have prevented the large-scale destruction that one witnessed last week? Why didn’t India install a warning system so far? These are among the questions being asked, both within and outside the scientific community, post-Tsunami. Even as answers are few and far between, Tsunami has come as a wake-up call for the government. While relevance of technology in predicting Tsunami is one of the key issues being debated right now, a way forward is clearly being chalked out.

For one, the Union ministry of science and technology is planning to hold a brainstorming session sometime this month with National Geophysical Research Institute, National Institute of Oceanography and Department of Ocean Development for devising an appropriate Tsunami warning system. Also, steps are being chalked out to strengthen the Indian station in Antarctica, Maitri, to monitor seismicity in and around Antarctica and Indian Ocean.

Commitment has come from the minister for science and technology and ocean development Kapil Sibal already. He is on record saying that proper logistics for monitoring and warning will be put in place, even though Tsunami is a rare occurrence.

The initiatives that the establishment wants to roll out include undertaking deep ocean assessment and reporting system, coastal barometry, and increasing the number of data buoys in the surrounding seas from existing 20 to 30. The buoys are expected to monitor 6 km below the ocean surface, by connecting the aquatic tidal gauges to a satellite. The project cost: a mere Rs 125 crore!

Meanwhile, there’s a difference in view as far as joining the Tsunami warning system in the Pacific is concerned.

For instance, the US Geological Society (USGS) has alleged that the Tsunami-hit countries has not put in place any warning system for mitigating the disaster. USGC spokesperson Carolyn Bell is reported to have said: “We support the Tsunami warning system in the Pacific only. Of course this earthquake was not in the Pacific Ocean.” According to her, creating a Tsunami warning centre in the Indian Ocean will be a challenge. “This crosses so many countries and so many boundaries in that part of the world and the warning system would have to be so geographically diverse. We’re talking about educating people to what the warning means, what you have to do,” she says.

India thinks differently. Mr Sibal says that India will not be a member of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, a body set up exclusively for the Pacific Rim countries. “Being a member of this body will not help us as the mandate of the body is for the specific region. Our seismic zone is Indo-Australian plate as distinct from the Pacific plate. We should therefore ask for relevant data from them and construct our own model for monitoring and forecast,” he says. The minister also said that India will network with Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar in future for exchange of relevant data. Whatever the arrangement, experts argue that a suitable monitoring system could have mitigated some of the colossal damages. Though earthquakes and volcanic eruptions cannot be predicted on a short-term basis, the Tsunami effect, which takes longer time to reach distant places, can be predicted at ease, they say.

But, the Indian government insists that the country did not opt for such a system as Tsunami has not been a frequent occurrence in the region. According to Mr Sibal, the first Tsunami killed the forces of Greek invader Alexander the Great, and the second Tsunami occurred in 1883. Secretary in the department of ocean development Harsh K Gupta agrees that Tsunami is rare.

Noted geologist, Dr George Pararas-Carayannis, counters: "Destructive Tsunamis are not uncommon in the Bay of Bengal or along the Sunda Trench. On June 26, 1941, a devastating earthquake in the Andaman Sea, with a Richter magnitude greater than 8.0 generated a major Tsunami that killed more than 5,000 people on the east coast of India. However, at that time, the media incorrectly attributed the deaths and damages to storm surges rather than to a Tsunami generated by an earthquake. Many more deaths must have occurred but were not reported."

He adds that the region where the earthquake took place marks the boundary where great tectonic plates of India and Australia collide with the Sunda and the Eurasian plates. It is the same place where large catastrophic earthquakes and volcanic explosions and Tsunamis have occurred for millions of years.

Coming to the basics, the Tsunami of December 26 is the fourth largest trembler in the world since 1900 and Asia's worst earthquake since 1970. The Tsunami effect touched even the east coast of Africa on the same day. According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Tsunami effect took about two hours to reach Port Blair in Andaman & Nicobar Islands and
three-and-half hours to reach the Chennai coast.

For those who joined in late, Tsunami is a Japanese word, pronounced as "tsoo-nah'-mee". `Tsu' means harbour and `nami' means wave. The phenomena, Tsunami, is a series of large waves of extremely long wavelength or activity near the coast or in the ocean.

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US-based experts predict another tsunami

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=78412

ASHOK B SHARMA
OUR ECONOMY BUREAU
Posted online : Friday, December 31, 2004 at 0000 hours IST

NEW DELHI, DEC 30: The government has been on the horns of a dilemma after some foreign experts predicted another tsunami.

The home ministry has issued an alert to five affected states and Union territories.

It has also issued a warning to Lakshdweep, so far untouched. Following the alert notice, the affected states are evacuating people from the coast.

But Union minister for science and technology and ocean development Kapil Sibal has denounced these predictions as ‘hogwash.’

Mr Sibal told mediapersons, “An agency manned by four persons called Tera Research based in Oregon, Portland, USA sent a forecast of a fresh tsunami to our meteorological department at 6.00 am.” This was forwarded by his ministry to the home ministry without comment.

Questioned why his ministry did this, Mr Sibal said, “Our duty was to pass on the information and we did that.”

He said that he had asked the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre to confirm the forecast. Their answer: “There is no such concern”. ISRO has also been asked to stay in touch with the centre.

AK Rastogi of the natural disaster management division under the home ministry quoted a forecast of a fresh tidal wave from another agency, the Australian Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre. He said that his surfing of the net had convinced him that “there is a case for concern”.

The death toll in the country has risen to 7,368.
-----------------------------------------------
IARI to study salinity ofsoil, water in tsunami-hit states

IARI centenary celebrations begins today

ASHOK B SHARMA
OUR ECONOMY BUREAU
New Delhi, Dec 31

Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) has decided to send a team of experts to study soil and water salinity problems in the coastal states affected by the tsumani tidal wave.

"We need to find out the salinity problem and identify appropriate saline resistant seeds for sowing. Our team will also study salinity problems in potable water and suggest remedies," said IARI director Dr S Nagarajan.

Briefing mediapersons in the capital on Wednesday, Dr Nagarajan said there is a need for research on global climate change and effective management of natural resources. He stressed the need for organic farming, efficient use of energy and water and encouragement of zero-tillage of soil.

He said: "It has been field-tested that organic farming of rice and sugarcane produces the same yield or more than that done through chemical agriculture."

He that the prime concern before the country is not that of food security, but of ensuring nutritional security and management of natural disasters. He said that deaths due to natural calamity exceed those due to starvation.

"The IARI will be celebrating a year-long centenary celebration in 2005. The new focus of IARI will be on nutritional security, organic farming and management of natural disasters. The centenary celebrations will be formally launched on January 1, 2005," he said.

Dr Nagarajan also stressed on crop diversification in lieu of mono-cropping. He said that disciplines like farm laws, patents and intellectual property rights, environmental issues will be incorporated in the new curriculum of IARI. In the coming days, issues like sanitary and phytosanitary measures and other non-tariff bariers are likely to dominate global trade and hence the country needs to gear up to meet this challenge, he said.

Revisiting the tsunami of Dec 2004; a post on andamanicobar@yahoogroups.co.in dated Jan 3, 2005

Jan 3, 2005

The following letter was sent as a signed fax to the President's office and the PMO yesterday

Madhusree Mukerjee
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To Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
The President of India
Rashtrapati Bhavan
New Delhi

Dear Sir,
Half the population of the Nicobar Islands is swept away, and many smaller islands and shores remain inaccessible to this day. Bodies are yet to be disposed of. Thousands of people are living in daily contact with decomposing bodies, with little food, water or fuel, or access to news of their loved ones. Relief materials are piling up in Port Blair and at Chennai and Kolkata, but utter confusion prevails in their distribution. Ships cannot dock on any of the Nicobar Islands, so that dinghys are being used to approach the islands through rough waters, leading to woefully inadequate aid.

Even on Little Andaman, a few hours from Port Blair, where 25,000 people are living on very limited amounts of water, food and fuel, no relief materials reached for at least five days. The armed forces are doing their best, but they are not equipped to deal with a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude. A dire need prevails for doctors, experts in body disposal, water desalination, and other emergency relief providers. Injured, hungry, cold and thirsty people stranded on the Nicobars are no doubt dying by the hour. Crocodiles are feeding on corpses in Little Andaman and attacking the living. Added to this is the fact that a cholera epidemic hit the Nicobars in 2002; the bacillus exists on the islands, and for all we know is already taking hold.

Ships from Chennai or Kolkata typically take five days to reach Port Blair. Once there, materials need to be sorted and channeled onto ships and aircraft for ferrying to the Nicobar Islands. A command center has been set up, but will take days or weeks to overcome the bottleneck caused by overwhelming need and bureaucratic apathy, if it ever does. The aftermath of other disasters such as Bhopal generates little confidence that the administrators have the organizational and logistical capacity to discharge the enormous burdens they have assumed.

Mainland volunteers eager to help with expertise and materials are not being permitted to provide relief at the Nicobar Islands. They must be immediately allowed into Port Blair and also given the means to get to affected areas. We also urge you to reconsider the decision of Indian authorities not to allow foreign aid. International aid agencies are already ministering to survivors in Sumatra and Thailand, and even in Aceh the situation is coming under control. A US desalination ship is providing clean water in the Maldives; such a ship could be saving lives in the Nicobars. Materials and experts are daily flying from Thailand onto a US aircraft carrier off Sumatra for the relief effort onshore. From Thailand it would have taken-would take-no more than a few hours for international aid agencies, which are experienced in dealing with disasters, to airdrop supplies such as drinking water onto the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and to send medical help and experts for cleaning up the islands and making them habitable again.


India presumably does not want foreigners in this region because of defence concerns. But what is the point of defence if not to protect citizens? What security concern can possibly outweigh the need to save the lives of thousands?

In 1942, when a massive cyclone hit southern Bengal, killing more than 10,000, the British authorities did not send aid for weeks, and also prevented private agencies from functioning there. Their concern was security. Later, during the Bengal famine, they refused offers of grain from other countries, saying they had the situation under control; in truth, more than 2 million people died.

Today we are appalled at such callousness. Why should Indians in turn be handed the burden of similar guilt? The Nicobar catastrophe has the potential to double in magnitude. The government of India does not have the resources to deal with this crisis, and needs to put aside its pride and accept help if thousands of more lives are not to be lost.

Yours most sincerely,
Mahasweta Devi
Writer
Rupa Ganguly
Actress
Dr. Sita Venkateswar
Author, Development and Ethnocide: Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands
Dr. Madhusree Mukerjee
Author, The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders

Jan 3, 2005: a post on andamanicobar@yahoogroups.co.in; revisiting the tsunami of Dec 2004

Jan 3, 2005

Isolated islands in desperate need
Jan 3, 1140 hrs
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/000200501031201.htm
Port Blair, Jan. 3 (GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE): A deperate group of starving survivors in one of the tsunami-hit Nicobar islands kidnapped the island's top civilian official and its police chief in protest at the inadequate relief operation, it emerged yesterday.  The survivors from Great Nicobar Island spent four days without food before trekking through the jungle to the wrecked headquarters settlement at Campbell Bay.
 When they arrived they discovered the island's assistant commissioner and deputy assistant of police eating a plate of biryani, witnesses said.

The crowd of Punjabi settlers took the men hostage, demanding that they provide help to the hundreds of islanders who were starving in the jungle.  ``The assistant commissioner was eating biryani in his guesthouse,'' one witness, Lilly Ommen, said. ``The men arrived and pointed out that they were starving. They also said there were people stuck in the forest with nothing, as well as many dead bodies.''

Mrs Ommen, who is now in a church-run refugee camp in the island's capital, Port Blair, said the group had survived after finding a sack of rice floating in the sea. They had made their way to Campbell Bay with a group of survivors by jumping over crocodile-infested canals.

``I'm very angry,'' Suresh, 22, a welder from Great Nicobar Island, added. ``We saw these people eating biryani. But we had nothing but rice soaked in salt water.'' The assistant commissioner was released after promising to provide more food. The kidnapping came amid mounting criticism of the Indian relief operation in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, where as many as 20,000 people have died.

According to aid agencies very little aid has reached the people who need it, with some island communities still waiting for help. Delhi has so far refused all offers of foreign assistance to the islands.  A group of aid workers from Oxfam who managed to reach Little Andaman Island yesterday described conditions there as appalling. They also said the local administration in Port Blair had made it virtually impossible for them to join the relief effort.

``The conditions are terrible. People are living in the open. They don't have a roof,'' Shaheen Nilofer, Oxfam's east India programme manager, said.  ``There are acute problems with water and sanitation. People have the right to receive humanitarian assistance. Who are they [the local administration] to decide we will take assistance from there and not from there? More people are going to die.''

The Indian government says its rescue operation across the 435-mile-long archipelago has been hampered by the islands' remoteness, and by the fact that pontoons and jetties have been washed away. On Great Nicobar, the tsunami and subsequent landslides have destroyed the island's only road.  ``All the small boats have been destroyed. We urgently need boats with metal bottoms,'' Hoslo Jiwa, an aid worker, said, after touring Car Nicobar, the island worst affected by the disaster, on Saturday.  ``You really need teams to hack their way through the jungle or use these small boats. On the really remote islands, God knows what is happening. They have only made aerial surveys and dropped packages.'' The local administration in Port Blair puts the death toll across the 572-island archipelago at more than 3,000. But aid agencies say that figure is based on out-of-date voters' lists, and fails to take into account the thousands of illegal migrants living on the islands who are now missing.

They say that on Car Nicobar Island alone, which was 80% destroyed, as many as 20,000 may have perished. From an unofficial population of 35,000, only 15,000 are still alive.

Jan 2, 2005; a post on andamanicobar@yahoogroups.co.in; revisiting the tsunami of Dec 2004

Jan 2, 2005

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/000200501022001.htm
Jan 2, 2050 hrs
Air-strip in Campbell Bay becomes operational
New Delhi, Jan. 2. (PTI): The armed forces have succeeded in making the air-strip at Campbell Bay operational for landing of Indian Air Force aircraft to carry relief material to the southernmost tip of tsunami-ravaged Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The air-strip is only 3000 metres and IL-76 and AN-32 planes, containing loads of relief material to the area which had remained almost cut-off from the mainland for three days, are landing on it, Admiral Raman Puri, heading the control room in Defence Ministry, told reporters here.

He said besides this, there had been some sorties carried out by Dornier aircraft on this tip.

When Dr Ravi Sankaran made an appearance in 'The Last Wave'

When Dr Ravi Sankaran made an appearance in 'The Last Wave'

An excerpt 
Pgs 14-16


The rest would largely be clubbed under the category of field biologists – the dominant crowd here. There was the mercurial Dr Ravi Sankaran, one of the country’s finest ornithologists, who had made an international name studying the little-known birds of these islands. His was the first comprehensive study of the endemic Nicobari megapode, a bird that scrapes together a mound of earth and decaying matter for a nest in the low-lying coastal forests in the Nicobar Islands, and then the edible nest swiftlet that builds its nest in dark, inaccessible caves with nothing but its own saliva.

Whenever Sankaran was at the Institute, conversations would inevitably turn to birds, like they would to snakes when Gokul Mehta was around. Mehta was a man obsessed with snakes; the deadlier and more venomous it was, the greater the challenge and thrill. Unlike Sankaran for whom the study of birds was as much passion as profession, snakes were a hobby for Mehta. The only hint of what his actual profession was, lay in the thick gold chain that hung around his neck and an equally thick gold bracelet that circled his wrist. Mehta belonged to a rich goldsmith family and had inherited one of the biggest jewellery chains in Mumbai’s famed Zaveri Bazaar. He sold gold and gold ornaments for eleven months a year. In July, when the monsoons slammed his part of the world, he would pack his bags and embark on his annual, month-long pilgrimage to these islands – to the also rain-soaked, but far more interesting, slushy, leech- and mosquito-filled forests through which he trekked to bag, pickle and study snakes. His interest in the discussions in the quadrangle was aroused only when snakes, or at the very least, reptiles and amphibians were discussed. Nothing else ever seemed to excite him. If he stayed on, it was only by virtue of his innate politeness. 
 

There were women too, though only occasionally. There was one who had studied bats and owls, another, tourism in the islands and a third, a young American marine biologist, who had almost drowned while studying coral reefs in the Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park in Wandoor. The latest among the visitors was Seema Chandran, a Port Blair girl who had recently returned to the islands for her Ph.D. 

Finally, there was also the staff. The abiding presence here was that of Uncle Pame, the old Karen man from Webi, near Mayabundar on Middle Andaman Island. The Karen were a small community of people that had been first brought to the islands from Burma more than eight decades ago, and Webi was the first settlement that they had created on arrival. A majority of this community of a few thousand, Uncle Pame’s large extended family included, continued to live in Webi. Unlike most of his generation, however, Uncle had moved out to explore the larger world. He was the first man David had recruited when the Institute came into being. An islander in the truest sense of the word, Uncle was in many ways the local guide and expert, knowledgeable about both the oceans and the forests in an unparalleled manner. A calm, quiet man with a dreamy look, he would often be found sitting in the quadrangle alongside the researchers. His face was like a sheet of paper, except for a broad protrusion that passed for a nose. The two cheekbones stood out sharply, framing two narrow slits of dark eyes that were almost lost in that big round face. 

Combined with a constant look of languor, the eyes gave him a mysterious, unfathomable appearance. It was impossible to look at Uncle’s face and say what was on his mind. Unobtrusive and apparently unconcerned with what was going on about him, Uncle would sit at the table in the quadrangle with his peg of whisky or rum or whatever the drink of the evening was and listen intently, staring aimlessly into the space in front of him. For any person who was new to the setting, it would appear as though Uncle saw, heard or registered nothing; that he was floating on his drink in a world entirely his own. But those who had been around longer, even for a week, knew that was not true. Uncle spoke rarely, but his comments – suffused as they were with wit, astuteness and wisdom – said more than the most voluble among their company.

Harish took an instant liking to this old Karen man. 
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