March of the Death Toll

And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers,
But all that lives is born to die
--Led Zeppelin

CNN Japan is going crazy with their coverage of the tsunamis and the rising body count......There is some anxiety amongst the Japanese as earthquakes are a daily reality here, and yesterday on the Northern point of Honshu a quake registering over 4.0 was recorded. That, and the annual Luminarie display in remembrance of the 3,000 who died in Kobe from a massive earthquake are chilling reminders to Japan of the island's raison d'etre (this country's on a fault line, and was created by volcanic and seismic eruptions).

Something of interest: apparently, the US did have buoys in the water that detected the earthquake but did not have contacts in the many of the countries affected by the quakes...that's too bad. There were hours and hours for contact to be made.

Also, there is probably going to be some fallout over this:

In a pathetic story reported in Sweden, bureaucratic meteorologists in
Thailand actually had enough information to issue a warning within an hour of
the first wave but decided against it. They managed to rationalize that the wave
wouldn't actually hit Thailand. "We finally decided not to do anything because the tourist season was in full swing. The hotels were 100 percent booked. What if we issued a warning, which would have led to an evacuation, and nothing had happened. What would be the outcome? The tourist industry would be immediately hurt. Our department would not be able to endure a lawsuit." There is a translation of the original Swedish news report on this blog.

Wow. CYA gone wrong. But wait...there's more:

The second thing, cited mostly by bloggers, is that the U.S. experts who knew this was happening made no real effort to call anyone. They used the excuse that
they had no numbers to call. Some bloggers used Google to prove that there were plenty of numbers to call. There was enough time for sure.

Oh boy. This isn't an attempt to pick on the US, either. Obviously several countries and their respective experts failed to prevent this disaster. These things will certainly be fixed because of the intense criticism.