Needed: Tsunami warnings,
not environmental posturing

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Once more the power of nature demonstrates the puniness of manÕs endeavors. The power of the earthquake off Sumatra is said to have been so great as to have rocked the earth on its orbit, moved the island by a hundred feet. That it could send huge destructive waves across the Indian Ocean to Africa at the other end of the world was beyond imagination. The fact that we still know so little about the phenomenon is important to progress in solving this riddle; an old adage says the beginning of wisdom is knowing what one does not know.

Of course, its magnitude precluded avoiding a great loss of life and the incredible damage to many of the worldÕs poorest regions. And as so often happens in natural calamities, as the death toll grows exponentially from the Great Indian Basin Tsunami, there will be enough blame all around for what could have done even to partially mitigate this natural catastrophe.

But the fact that a tidal wave warning system for the Pacific Basin headquartered in Hawaii with some 40 nations plugged into it suggests there is no excuse for not having established one in the Indian Ocean Basin. Even traveling at 500 miles per hour, there was theoretically time to warn some of the riparian countries of the possibility of tidal waves hitting their shores.

True enough, the isolated fishing villages on the Indian coast or in Somalia would probably not have shared in any warning system no matter how simple. Alas! decades after Mohandas Gandhi called for pure drinking water and minimum food as the aim of his revolution, they are no more a reality in most villages than in British-run India. Why that is true is a topic for another day, but suffice it to say New DelhiÕs fashionable adherence to Soviet planning for more than three decades is pertinent.

What the tragedy in the Indian Ocean does make clear writ large is priorities are badly skewed. How does one excuse the fact that an international warning system was not in place? That the Indian Ocean Basin is less prone to tsunami than the Pacific is certainly true. That local conditions militated against setting it up ø from Sri LankaÕs civil war now in abeyance to the incredible poverty of coastal villages where even a single satellite wireless telephone is beyond reach.

But it adds insult to injury when United Nations officials charged with humanitarian aid comfortably ensconced in New York City should be floating charges the U.S. as ÔstingyÓ when Washington immediately preliminarily allocated $35 million to relief. Where were the UN officials who, if they have any reason for drawing high, tax-free salaries failed to coordinate just the kind of warning system which might, at least, have saved a few thousand lives? Instead of that, millions of UN dollars [not a small part from the American taxpayer] have been squandered on environmental conferences run by Canadian and Scandinavian dilettantes. Were it not long past the stage of comedy, it would be ludicrous that some of these professional environmentalists have already tried to attach this tragedy to their campaign against Òglobal warmingÓ. The Kyoto Protocol on which they have spent millions promoting, a treaty based on bogus science and unenforceable rules and regulations, is all we have for wasted time and money. Some of our European allies are ready to sign on with the obvious intent of not living up to its impossible stipulations to appease the chattering classes.

Rather they ø and we ø should be looking to more such catastrophic events which still surely wait us. There is no predicting when another giant earthquake will rock Japan, or when China ø as in 1998 ø experiences record-breaking floods and earthquakes like that which cost 30,000 lives in Hom in Iran [and still awaits restoration while the mullahs in Tehran chase expensive nuclear weapons]. Such calamities are unpredictable possibility in a dozen places around the world. There is a great deal of talk on reform at the United Nations. Getting at the root of the oil for food scandal which may turn out to be the largest fiscal malfeasance in history is obviously a part of such an effort. Whether the conundrum of membership and voting in the Security Council can be solved is more difficult: why France and not Germany, and why China and not India, as permanent members with a veto?

But somewhere in the UN sorting out is a high priority for officialdom to take the responsibility of coordinating institutions and systems already in place ø like the Pacific tsunami warning system ø and those areas to which it should have been applied. That rather than a bogus search for utopian environmental concerns should be the order of the day.