Great Earthquake-Generated Events - Tsunami - page 116

Table 6.6 Death tolls for the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean

11, 2001. Death tolls for other nationals included 552
Germans, 179 Finns, 150 British, 106 Swiss, and 86 Aus-
trians. Up to five times these numbers were holidaying in
the region and affected by the event.
The economic destruction was just as great (Kawata et al.
2005 ). Unless a building was built of concrete—and few
were—structures were bulldozed flat by the force of the
initial wave (Fig. 6.14 ). Because the water had picked up so
much debris and mud, its density had increased significantly.
Such flows of dense slurry are best modeled as a debris flow,
one of whose characteristics is the deposition en masse of
sediment (Kain et al. 2012 ). Such transport makes it easier to
transport boulders than through water flow alone as assumed
in Eq. 3.3 , and gives to tsunami deposits some of the char-
acteristics of a dump deposit. Along the west coast of
Sumatra, little sign of human habitation was left behind as
the wave swept across a coastal plain several kilometers
wide and smashed into the backing hills, leaving a tide mark
10 m or more above sea level as the most visual sign of
recent inundation (Fig. 6.15 ). Migrant workers returning to
their homes from southern cities told of walking through
more than a 100 flattened villages without seeing a sign of
life. The livelihoods, economic foundations and social fabric
of a whole generation were destroyed: crops, homes,
schools, police stations, and hospitals together with farmers,
extended families, teachers, police, nurses and doctors. The
destruction and death toll in Aceh were staggering: 1 million
homes, 35,000 hectares of agricultural land, 240 markets,
300 primary schools, 27 police stations, 450 km of roads,
1,057 teachers together with 30,000 schoolchildren, 517
soldiers, and 1,404 police officers with 8,000 members of
their families. Over 700 surviving police were so trauma-
tized by the disaster that they did not report to work. Sur-
vivors refused to visit the sites of the devastation after dark
because they could hear ghosts calling for help. Aceh was
left without any established civilian government capable of
handling the crisis. Estimates of the socio-economic impact
ranged from $15 billion to $80 billion. On December 25,
2006, anyone in Sri Lanka or Thailand who said that their
country could be devastated by tsunami would have been
treated as a pariah. On December 27th they were champions.

Tsunami
Country Fatalities Missing Total

Indonesia 130,736 37,000 167,736

Sri Lanka 35,322 - 35,322

India 12,405 5,640 18,045

Maldives 82 26 108

Thailand 8,212 - 8,212

Myanmar 61 - 61

Malaysia 69 6 75

Somalia 78 211 289

Tanzania 13 - 13

Seychelles 2 - 2

Madagascar 2 - 2

Bangladesh 2 - 2

Kenya 1 - 1

Total 186,984 42,883 229,867

Source United Nations ( 2006 )

weeks beforehand about tsunami and managed to convince
her parents and others to flee from the beach because the sea
was showing all the signs of such an impeding wave (Mu-
rata et al. 2010 ). In Sri Lanka and India, the wave arrived
between 9 and 10 AM. In India, many Hindus were taking a
holy dip in the ocean, while Christians had travelled to the
seaside town of Vailankanni seeking a religious cure at a
local shrine. Hundreds of pilgrims from both religions
drowned. Whole villages lost all their children who had
raced down to collect fish from the seabed in the drawdown
that preceded the arrival of the first wave. Fishing com-
munities were badly hit because fishermen and their fami-
lies lived on the ocean. Fifteen thousand fishing boats were
destroyed. In India, the death toll was 18,000, which is
underestimated because India refused foreign assistance and
in doing so virtually ignored the plight of its citizens on the
Andaman Islands. In Sri Lanka, 35,000 were killed
including nearly 2,000 passengers, who were drowned on
the Queen of the Sea, which was washed from its tracks as it
travelled near the coast on the morning the tsunami struck.
This is the greatest death toll in any rail disaster. Overall,
seventy percent of the deaths were women and children.
More men knew how to swim and could climb trees, while
women were more likely to be carrying children or trying to
lead the elderly to safety. One and a half million people
were made homeless in Sri Lanka alone.
Table 6.6 does not indicate the world impact of the
tsunami. It became the greatest natural disaster for Sweden
with 543 of that country's nationals killed while on holidays
in the region, mainly in Thailand. Sweden proportionally
lost 4 times as many citizens in the tsunami as the United
States did in the World Trade Center attack on September

6.6 Japanese T ¯ hoku Tsunami March 11,

2011

At 2:46:23 PM Japanese Standard Time (5:46:23 UTC), on
March 11, 2011, one of the largest tsunamigenic earthquakes
recorded with a M w magnitude of 9.0 struck the Sanriku
coastline of Japan with an epicenter 70 km east of the Oshika
Peninsula at a depth of approximately 30 km (Fig. 6.16 b)
(Earthquake Engineering Research Institute 2011 ; Kanamori
2011 ). Both the United States Geological Survey and the