The Big One

I wasn't going to post this week due to my vacation (I'm sitting in a rented house in Running Springs as I write this), but the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunamis that have killed an estimated 42,000 people is too big a story not to talk a little bit about. Drudge Report has the best coverage I've found so far with a great many links to stories coming from the survivors.

Some of the stories are just amazing :
The entire nation of Sumatra (larger than California) moving over 100 feet;
A man diving 50' below the surface ends up on a hotel roof surrounded by the ocean;
Honeymooners barely surviving and vowing to change their lives.

This type of event was considered by many, even in the scientific community, to be almost impossible. Most experts thought only an asteroid strike could generate these kinds of waves. A lot of science will be rewritten after this one.

The scary thing is, it could happen to any coastal area in the world. A large quake in Alaska in 1964 killed several people in Crescent City, CA when a tidal wave struck the area. Think of all the low lying parts of the California coast, and should something like this happen on a busy summer day, the loss of life would be inestimable.

Maybe, instead of pouring money into "global warming", a threat which no one can even prove exists, we should spend a little money on tsunami warning devices that could give coastal areas a fighting chance in the event of another subsea quake. We now know that a disaster of Biblical proportions is possible and likely to occur again.