Tsunami energy 390 times power of atomic bomb

Stepping up to speak, Robbie Ali, a visiting assistant professor at Pitt, reflected on his… Stepping up to speak, Robbie Ali, a visiting assistant professor at Pitt, reflected on his choice of accessories.

“I am wearing my Steelers tie,” he said. “We’ve had our own disaster recently.”

“But it doesn’t really compare,” he added.

The tsunami that devastated Indian Ocean regions all the way from Indonesia to the coastline of East Africa struck one month ago today. One of the worst natural disasters in centuries has, according to the most recent reports, claimed more than 228,000 lives.

Yesterday, the University’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs held a free policy forum titled “Tsunami: Causes, Impact and Response.” The aim of the meeting was to present the challenges facing government and nongovernmental agencies in response the Dec. 26 tsunami.

Ali, who is also director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, warned that the redevelopment of regions affected by the tsunami could take as many as 20 years.

He emphasized that the poverty rates in many of the countries were bad before the tsunami hit.

“The point is a little goes a long way. A donation of 10 cents would pay for a blood test for malaria,” Ali said.

William Harbert, chair of the Department of Geology and Planetary Sciences, explained the geological angle of the event.

“Tsunamis occur when an earthquake or a similar disturbance displaces a large amount of water,” Harbert said, adding, “The power of the displacement results in kinetic energy — that is, the energy of motion.”

There was not one large wave, he explained, but instead an “edge wave.” This is a series of waves that move back and forth from the shore. The total energy of the tsunami, he said, was around that of five megatons of TNT.

To put that in perspective, five megatons is roughly 390 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.

The seismograph at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Harbert added, was off the scale for three hours.

“My own work,” said Harbert, “is focused on mapping inundation zones, the areas of coastline which are most at risk from tsunamis.”

Through this effort, he hopes to construct maps of the ocean floor topography, which will assist projects to create an early warning system for the most vulnerable regions.

Louise Comfort, GSPIA professor of public and urban affairs, spoke about efforts to coordinate relief. In one of the most devastated regions, the Aceh province in Indonesia, it is difficult to provide aid and support because many of the locals do not trust the central government, she said.

“It is hard for them to trust when the government was shooting at them the week before,” she said, referring to the separatist movement in the region, which has been fighting for independence for 25 years. The organization GAM, or Free Aceh Movement, has re-emerged after a tenuous ceasefire was reached in the wake of the tsunami.

The tsunami affected so many different countries that the response to aid has also been different, Comfort said. For instance, India has rejected international assistance. After recent earthquakes and cyclones, it had accepted foreign aid, but then discovered that the financial support furthered the country’s debt.

Paul Nelson, GSPIA assistant professor of international development, also raised concerns about foreign aid.

More than a billion dollars has been pledged across the world, and yesterday, a spokesperson for the International Federation of the Red Cross announced, “We have sufficient funds to cover the relief and recovery program, and fundraising will now wind down around the world.”

But Nelson pointed out that “good citizens” in this country and around the world should insist that the countries “pay up pledges they have made.” In the week after the tsunami, the United States pledged $350 million.

But the record of countries giving development aid in the aftermath of natural disasters is “shameful,” Nelson said.

“$1.2 billion was pledged around the world after the Iranian earthquake, a year before this tsunami,” he said, referring to the Dec. 26, 2003, earthquake that killed 43,000 and left 75,000 homeless.

“Only $17 million of that money has been spent.”

Nelson raised the question of whether it is appropriate to forget the debt many of these countries owe.

“I don’t know the answer,” he said. “But it should be a matter of attention.”

Ali, the last of the four speakers, discussed the possibility of city adoption as a way to help the hardest-hit regions

“Once the media attention goes away,” he said, “people will go back to thinking, ‘Yeah there’s a problem, but its removed from us’. Maybe if we can adopt a city, a sister city for Pittsburgh, we could help. This idea could prove to be a model for sustainable development.”