Acehtsunami

US President Barack Obama, joined hands with former presidents Bush and Clinton and initiated a national hurl to raise funds for Haiti earthquake relief on 19^th January 2010. President Obama, who has already, promised a $100 million earthquake relief fund said, “Former Presidents Bush and Clinton will assist the American people to do their part; because retort to a disaster is the work of all of us.” Former President Bush requested all Americans to “just send us your cash,” to help Haiti earthquake victims who are struggling without basic needs.

UNICEF is arranging for clean water and sanitation supplies, remedial foods, medical supplies and temporary shelter to Jacmel and Port-au-Prince. UNICEF is also focusing on children who have lost .their families to protect them from mistreatment.

CARE has planned to start food distributions using stocks of high protein biscuits from CARE warehouses in Haiti. CARE has 133 staffs. These people are coordinating with U.N. agencies and other organizations to collect more detailed information about the destruction and will quickly start the recovery process based on that estimation.

Now after a week since the destructive earthquake in Haiti and the aid is finally reaching the victims, many groups and nonprofits organizations have gathered to raise money for recovery as relief efforts goes on.

Music for Relief is contributing a collection of unreleased music, accessible for free download on MusicForRelief.org. This site supports donations, which will be divided equally among the Habitat For Humanity, United Nations Foundation, and Dave Matthews Band’s BAMA Works Haitian relief program.

The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude of 7.0 Mw earthquake. Its epicenter was near Léogâne, about 25 km west of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. The earthquake happened at 16:53:10 local time (21:53:10 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010, at a depth of 13 km. The United States Geological Survey confirmed a series of at least 33 aftershocks, fourteen of them were having a magnitude of 5.0 and 5.9. The International Red Cross predicted that about three million people would be affected by the quake, and the Haitian Interior Minister, Paul Antoine Bien-Aime, deems that up to 200,000 would have died because of this disaster.

The earthquake has created major damage to Port-au-Prince. Most of the important landmarks of the city were extensively destroyed including the Presidential Palace, the Port-au-Prince Cathedral, the National Assembly building, and the main jail. Due to this major earthquake most hospitals in the area were shattered. Since the organizational structures like hospitals and schools in Haiti had been destroyed, Elisabeth Byrs of the UN called this earthquake as the worst disaster the UN had ever been faced.

The UN World Food schema has been dispensing out the aid packages containing food, while UK charity Oxfam has been distributing water. But many sufferers are still not receiving any aid, as the airport remains a restricted access. UN Humanitarian Coordinator Kim Bolduc says getting supplies to the victims from the planes is still a major difficulty. The port is badly smashed, and many roads are still blocked by dead bodies and debris.

The destruction by the tsunami has been terribly evident on land, but what about under water marine life and coral reefs? After tsunami coral reef communities may have been tattered into pieces in some areas and throttled by heaps of mud and garbage in other places. The direct impact of severe wave energy on near shore habitats like coral reefs, sea grasses and mangroves will be extensive.

Various species of coral reefs, algae and other marine invertebrates are really fragile and cannot resist turbulent soaring force .Consequently; these species are mostly vulnerable to the destructive wave energy created by this tsunami. Nurseries of young fish and turtles in mangroves and marshland will be shattered probably endangering the future fishing crops for decades.

While most of the large aquatic animals possibly escape to deeper waters as the gigantic waves hit the land, garbage such as fishing gear and sharp, rusting metal creates risks for the animals on future. Amongst them most affected vital marine lives are coral reefs. These complex communities are made up of limestone, made by camp of coral cysts and algae. This arrangement bears more species per unit than any other aquatic environment, counting endless species of fish, sea horses, sea turtles and sponges. Coral reefs will start recovering from damage caused by high intensity waves called tsunami in a span of four years

Disaster managers and calamity officials are in burning need of equipped tools that will afford accurate tsunami forecast as direction for speedy, significant decisions in which lives and possessions are at risk. The more apt and accurate the warnings are, the more efficient proceedings can local disaster managers can take so that many lives and more possessions are saved.

Recent proceedings in tsunami forecast and numerical modeling expertise are being incorporated to build an efficient tsunami forecasting system. Neither equipment can do this job alone. Collective measurement and representation methods can give consistent tsunami forecasts. To forecast outpouring from early tsunami waves, seismic stricture estimates and tsunami size are used to classify through a pre computed propagation forecast database and select an apt one (linear) This creates estimates of tsunami distinctiveness in deep water which can then be used as early conditions for a site-specific (non-linear) outpouring algorithm.

A numerical tactic has been developed to foresee the utmost height of later on tsunami waves that can menace rescue and mending operations. The outcomes are made accessible through a user-friendly interface to support hazard estimation and decision making by disaster managers. The MOST model performed calculations of generation situations for the forecast database.
This method is the basis of the next cohort forecast tools for tsunami caution and enhancement that are being developed in close up association with Tsunami Warning Centers and academia. These fresh tools will give site and incident precise forecast of tsunami amplitudes to help disaster managers during tsunami warning and improvement actions.

In the Pacific Ocean the Tsunami Warning System (ITSU) has been set up to provide Pacific basin countries with surveillance and monitoring of tsunamigenic earthquakes, and for providing warnings to member countries when tsunamis are expected to be generated. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) in Hawaii has overall responsibility for issuing tsunami advices and warnings to ITSU members. It is operated by the National Weather Service (NWS) of the USA. It advises appropriate authorities of the occurrence of an earthquake, and indicates whether or not a tsunami has been confirmed and provides estimates of travel time across the Pacific. It is not however in a position to predict actual run-up heights for the eventual landfall of a tsunami in Australia, as this depends on the complexities of coastal geography and offshore bathymetry.

International arrangements for tsunami warnings in the Indian Ocean are currently being developed.

In Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology has responsibility for issuing tsunami warnings. For areas covered by the PTWC the warnings are issued by the Bureau under guidance from the PTWC. At the present time the Australian Tsunami Alert System (ATAS) has been established by the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia (GA) and Emergency Management Australia (EMA).

The ATAS provides tsunami warning services to all Australian coasts. GA provides the seismological expertise (earthquake detection and analysis). The National Tidal Centre of the Bureau of Meteorology provides sea-level monitoring expertise (tsunami detection). EMA provides expertise in community education, human communication and disaster management liaison. The Bureau of Meteorology provides communications, scientific support and warning provision/dissemination.

On Monday, November 18, 1929, the earth rumbled and the waters rose on the Burin Peninsula in southern Newfoundland. A tsunami (a Japanese word meaning ‘harbour wave’), struck the peninsula’s shores. It was caused by an underwater earthquake offshore on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The tsunami came as a complete surprise to the residents of the Burin Peninsula. Most tsunamis occur in the region that encircles the Pacific Ocean.

The underwater earthquake originated at 44°69′ north latitude and 56° west longitude, along two fault planes about 250 kilometres (153 miles) south of the Burin peninsula. The tremor measured 7.2 on the Richter scale.

The disaster began around 5:00 p.m. as a violent earth tremble that lasted five minutes. Everyone was instantly both baffled and alarmed. People in St. John’s, 402 kilometres (250 miles) from the epicentre, thought the rumblings were the result of an accident in the shafts at the Bell Island mines in Conception Bay. Recovering from their initial fear, most inhabitants tried to put the tremor out of their minds as they continued their dinner preparations.

At around 7:30 p.m. a tsunami swept ashore on the Burin Peninsula. The waves, travelling at the astounding speed of 129 km/h (80 mph) from the epicentre, hit the peninsula at a speed of 105 km/h (65 mph). It affected more than 40 coastal communities. The November 22, 1929 editorial in the St. John’s Daily News described the event as follows:

Suddenly without warning, there is a roar of waters. Louder than that of the ordinary waves on the shore, it breaks on their ears, and then, with a shuddering crash, a fifteen foot wall of water beats on their frail dwelling, pouring in through door and window and carrying back in its undertow, home and mother and children!

All communication was cut off with the outside world. Moreover, there was at the time no road connecting Burin Peninsula to the rest of the province. Once the wave receded, overwhelmed survivors were forced to invent their own rescue plans.

Three days after the tsunami, on Thursday, the coastal steamer Portia made a scheduled stop at Burin’s altered port. An SOS message to St. John’s resulted in the arrival of the SS Meigle, filled with doctors, nurses, blankets and food.

The loss of property, originally estimated between $150,000 and $250,000, reached over $1 million in the aftermath. The boats, fishing gear, supplies and other industrial equipment of half of the wage earners were destroyed. Tsunami victims were not reimbursed for lost foodstuffs or winter fuel. Compensation was allowed for house repairs and lost boats.

The first official disaster fund for the emergency was established by a committee in St. John’s on November 25, 1929. The value of donations to the South Coast Disaster Committee, from the rest of Newfoundland, Canada, the United States and Britain, totalled more than $250,000.

The tsunami did irreparable damage, affecting 10,000 people in over 40 settlements. In the Burin Peninsula, 27 deaths were attributed to the tsunami; another victim died in 1933 from injuries sustained during the disaster. A tsunami generated by the same earthquake was also reported to have struck Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, drowning one individual there.

 Tsunamis act very differently from typical surf swells; they spread at high speeds and can travel great transoceanic distances with little energy loss. A tsunami can cause damage thousands of miles from its origin, so there may be several hours between its creation and its collision on the coast, more time than it takes for seismic waves to arrive.

Tsunamis have extremely long periods, 2 minutes to over one hour, and long wavelengths, in excess of 100 km. (Compare a typical wind-generated swell one sees at a surf beach, which might be spawned by a faraway storm and rhythmically roll in, one wave after another, with a period of about 10 seconds and a wavelength of 150 m.)

Typically undersea earthquakes give rise to between 3 and 5 distinct waves (crests), the second or third of which are usually the largest.

In instances where the leading edge of the tsunami is its trough, the sea will recede from the coast half the wave’s period before the wave’s arrival. If the slope is shallow, this recession can exceed 800 m. People unaware of the danger may remain at the shore due to curiosity, or for collecting fish from the dry sea bottom.

In instances where the leading edge of the tsunami is its first peak, low-lying coastal areas are flooded before the higher second wave reaches them. Again, being educated about a tsunami is significant, to realize that when the water level drops the first time, the danger is not yet over.

A wave becomes a shallow-water wave when the ratio between the water depth and its wavelength gets very small. Since a tsunami has a large wavelength, tsunamis act as a shallow-water wave even in deep oceanic water. Shallow-water waves move at a speed that is equal to the square root of the product of the acceleration of gravity (9.8 m/s2) and the water depth. For example, in the Pacific Ocean, where the typical water depth is about 4000 m, a tsunami travels at about 200 m/s (about 712 km/hr or 442 mi/hr) with little energy loss even for far distances, while at a water depth of 40 m, the speed is 20 m/s (about 71 km/hr or 44 mi/hr), much slower, but still difficult to outrun.

In deep water, the energy of a tsunami is constant, a function of its height and speed. Thus, as the wave approaches land, its height increases while its speed decreases. While in deep water a person at the surface of the water would probably not even notice the tsunami, the wave can increase to a height of 30 m and more as it approaches the coastline and compresses. Tsunamis can cause harsh destruction on coasts and islands, even at locations remote to the source event, where that event itself is not even noticable without instruments.

Tsunamis propagate outward from their source, so coasts in the “shadow” of affected land masses are regularly fairly safe. However, tsunami waves can diffract around land masses (as shown in this Indian Ocean tsunami animation as the waves reach southern Sri Lanka and India). They also need not be symmetrical; tsunami waves may be much stronger in one direction than another, depending on the nature of the source and the surrounding geography.

 A tsunami (pronounced soo-nahm-ee) is a series of huge waves that happen after an undersea trouble, such as an earthquake or volcano eruption. (Tsunami is from the Japanese word for harbor wave.) The waves travel in all directions from the area of disorder, much like the ripples that happen after throwing a rock. The waves may travel in the open sea as fast as 450 miles per hour. As the big waves approach shallow waters along the coast they grow to a great height and crash into the shore. They can be as high as 100 feet. They can cause a lot of destruction on the shore. They are sometimes mistakenly called “tidal waves,” but tsunami have nothing to do with the tides.

Hawaii is the state at greatest risk for a tsunami. They get about one a year, with a damaging tsunami happening about every seven years. Alaska is also at high risk. California, Oregon and Washington experience a destructive tsunami about every 18 years.

Did you know:

In 1964, an Alaskan earthquake generated a tsunami with waves between 10 and 20 feet high along parts of the California, Oregon and Washington coasts.

In 1946, a tsunami with waves of 20 to 32 feet crashed into Hilo, Hawaii, flooding the downtown area.

 
DAMAGE TO BOATS