Tsunami prone nations learn from disasters to prevent future ones
By Margaret Besheer
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On Dec. 26, 2004, a magnitude-9.1 earthquake in Indonesia set off a massive tsunami which killed more than 230,000 people across four countries and cost an estimated $10 billion in damage.
Nov. 5 is World Tsunami Awareness Day and at the United Nations Wednesday, disaster risk reduction was high on the agenda.
“What I can tell you is that the tsunami wave cannot be stopped,” said Bulgaria’s U.N. Ambassador Georgi Velikov Panayotov, who with his wife was on vacation in Thailand in 2004 and survived the tsunami. “What we can do is build early warning systems and of course, educating the population about the devastating power of the tsunami wave,” he said.
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake rocked northeastern Japan triggering a fierce tsunami that also damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, south of Sendai.
“When the big earthquake hit Japan in 2011, people thought that we were prepared for it,” said Japan's U.N. Ambassador Koro Bessho. “We had embankments, we had drills, however, we had been counting on something the size of which that hits every 100 years and the earthquake was of the size of possibly every 500 years or thousand years,” he said.
These two events sent the countries of the region into overdrive to review and improve disaster preparedness. In 2015 the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was born. It aims to help create a better understanding of disaster risk and enhance preparedness for an effective response.
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