The Attacking Ocean (25 page)

YEARS WILL PASS before the lessons of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami will be fully digested, for the event raises complex economic, social, and political issues. What changes will be made in building codes? Will the country continue to rely on nuclear power stations? How can
one raise tsunami consciousness among densely packed urban populations? What roles will generational memory and memories of those killed in the disaster play in the future?

The destruction and loss of life from the Tohoku catastrophe boggles the mind. But they are dwarfed by devastation caused five years earlier by the great Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004. A submarine earthquake struck early on the morning of December 26, about eighty kilometers west of Aceh Province in northern Sumatra.
¹¹
Over 200,000 square kilometers of seafloor shifted upward and displaced billions of tons of seawater. The abrupt rupture triggered a huge tsunami that sent waves hurtling across the ocean to both east and west. Enormous waves dashed eastward toward Indonesia, Myanmar, and Malaysia.

Simeulue Island off the Indonesian coast was closest to the epicenter. A nine-meter tsunami wave struck only eight minutes after the shaking ended. Directly after the earthquake began, the islanders, wise in the ways of tsunamis, ran for higher ground. Their villages were flattened, but only 7 people died out of the 78,000 living close to the island shore. Cultural traditions extend deep into the past on Simeulue. A severe tsunami had descended on the island in 1907, killing as much as half the island’s population. Oral traditions of the destruction, of the retreating, then attacking sea, passed into generational memories. The wave is known locally as a
smong
. Here, oral traditions and the wisdom of ancestors saved thousands of lives. Hardly anyone else in the path of the tsunami possessed a similar awareness.

Even as recently as 2004, there were no forecasting devices in place such as buoys or tidal gauges within 1,600 kilometers of the Aceh epicenter. This is hardly surprising, since most tsunamis occur in the Pacific, not in the Indian Ocean. Neither seismograph readings from distant India nor sightings reported by journalists were effective in spreading the word. Scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii received reports of the earthquake within fifteen minutes, but issued a report that no reasonable tsunami threat existed. They were wrong, for the tsunami had already hit Simeulue Island and would shortly arrive on Aceh’s shores.

Five minutes after the earthquake ceased, the sea retreated over three quarters of a kilometer from an Aceh coast crowded with fishing villages. The villagers flocked onto the exposed seabed to pick up helpless fish. Minutes later a deep roar announced the arrival of a 4.9-meter wave, then a 35-meter monster that cleared everything in its path within seconds. Armageddon ensued. Only 400 people out of the 7,500 inhabitants of the town of Lgoknga survived. The same wave toppled villages all along the coast, leaving barren terrain in its wake. Despite friction that reduced its height, the wave climbed as high as fifty meters up cliffs and hillsides. Survivors, who had run for higher ground when the first wave arrived, stood atop hills surrounded with swirling water, corpses, and shattered debris. In places, the second wave surged up to six and a half kilometers inland.

Harrowing scenes unfolded at Lambada, a fishing village near the provincial capital of Banda Aceh. Three booming sounds like gunfire, the retreating sea, then horrendous waves had hundreds of people and their children running frantically ahead of the water. A torrent of fugitives
flowed through the streets as the walls of water surged behind them. Tiring children were trampled underfoot. The dirty, debris-filled water pushed people’s feet out from under them as they swallowed contaminated water and were gouged by nails, fragments of cars, cycles, and other detritus. Rubble piles occasionally formed islands where bleeding, almost drowned survivors clung for safely. Then the water retreated, sweeping many of them out to sea, never to be seen again. Everywhere the destruction was epochal. About a third of Banda Aceh was leveled, leaving a denuded landscape that extended for over three kilometers. Only 636 people in the affected area survived. Just 40 were women, only 15 children. Over 220,000 people died or went missing in Indonesia. In Banda Aceh alone, 31,000 died.

Figure 10.3
Damage wrought by the Aceh tsunami at Ulee-Lei beach, Banda Aceh, taken three weeks after the tsunami. Stevens Frederic/SIPA/Newscom.

The tsunami ranged over enormous distances. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands north of Aceh suffered under huge waves that destroyed entire villages and killed about ten thousand Nicobarese, but not the descendants of the most ancient inhabitants. Five small hunting groups, some of the few surviving hunter-gatherers on earth, still flourish on the Nicobars. As soon as the earthquake struck, their elders led the bands into the hills, for their oral traditions had long spoken of shaking ground followed by large waves. The Onge group fled to higher ground when the water level in a nearby creek by their village fell abruptly. None of them perished, whereas forty-five settlers who had taken over Onge land on the flat drowned. Another form of information also helped on Teressa Island, where an employee of India’s Port Management Board happened to be an avid watcher of the National Geographic Channel, where he had learned how earthquakes can cause tsunamis. He and a colleague warned five nearby villages. About fifteen hundred people survived as a result.

Another segment of the tsunami wave moved westward and hit the tourist areas at Phuket in Thailand, famous for their beaches. Nearly seventy-five hundred people died, including many European tourists. To the west, the waves hit the east coast of Sri Lanka. Fifteen thousand people perished; eight hundred thousand were rendered homeless. The waves flowed on, doing extensive damage in India and reaching as far as Somalia, where nine-meter waves destroyed several fishing villages and
killed nearly three hundred people. Eventually much-reduced waves reached South Africa, even Antarctica.

The 2004 and 2011 disasters provide a graphic look into the future of densely populated coastlines when confronted by a severe tsunami. We’ve learned how helpless we are, crowded into cities along earthquake-prone coastlines. We’ve also learned that seawalls are no panacea. Doubtless the Japanese government will continue to erect such structures, for political reasons if nothing else. Unlike typhoons with their storm surges, you cannot provide warning of the arrival of tsunamis days ahead of time, nor will they necessarily strike where they have landed before. Elaborate tsunami warning systems now extend across the Pacific, capable of providing almost instantaneous warnings if an underwater earthquake occurs, but the lead time between warning and sea surge is often minutes rather than hours.

You can build seawalls against gradual sea level rise, as the Dutch have done for centuries, but building them as defense against sea surges and tsunamis is a form of very expensive Russian roulette, with no guarantees of success whatsoever. The Aceh tsunami also taught us that mangroves and floodplain forests reduce the effects of storm surges and tsunamis. In the Aceh case, the greatest mangrove protection came at some distance from the area of maximum impact. A hundred-meter wide stand of mangroves at a density of thirty trees per hundred square meters could reduce flow pressure by 90 percent. In Tamil Nadu, India, villages behind mangrove swamps suffered no damage, while others with cleared swamps had problems. Unfortunately farmers, fishers, and developers cleared half the world’s mangrove swamps during the second half of the twentieth century. Now those who unknowingly relied on them for protection are paying the price.

Rising sea levels enhance the dangers posed by underwater earthquakes and tsunamis. What defenses do we have against such cataclysmic events? The vanishing mangroves and tragic experiences of both Aceh and Tohoku tell us once again that the best defense against tsunamis is a human one. Ultimately our only weapon is heightened cultural awareness, something brought home by the persistent and powerful memories of victims who perished in the great tsunamis. Our heavily urbanized
societies offer little protection, unlike the ancient strategy of the Nicobar Islanders, whose oral traditions passed from one generation to the next, warning of impending danger, urging flight to higher ground. Today, millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas are like sitting ducks in the face of severe tsunamis—and there is little we can do about it, even with highly effective tsunami warning systems.

Challenging Inundations

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.

Man marks the earth with ruin—his control

Stops with the shore.

Lord Byron,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(1812–1818)

Around 1860, at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, global temperatures began an accelerating climb that continues today and shows no signs of slowing down. With warming came rising sea levels well documented by scientific measurements.

Both warming and climbing oceans are, of course, phenomena that humans have encountered before, but today there’s a new element to this familiar experience—rising coastal population. We live in the era of the megacity, of uncontrolled migration from rural hinterlands into ever-expanding urban landscapes. Many of today’s cities are chaotic and confrontational. They bristle with seemingly intractable problems of poverty, sanitation, and water shortages, just like the issues faced by our forebears two thousand years ago—but with a difference. Today cities with more than a million inhabitants located close to sea level are now routine. In the next five chapters, I journey repeatedly between past and present, for, in each area we visit, the experience of ancient societies, often our direct ancestors, form a continuity between earlier times and today. We cannot understand the dilemmas of the present without placing them in a deeper historical context. Much of this long-term historical
perspective appears in earlier chapters, especially for Bangladesh and the Low Countries, whose stories we round off in coming chapters. In the case of Arctic barrier island communities and small deep-ocean islands, the choices are stark, imminent, and unique—relocation or hugely expensive sea defenses. None of these communities or islands can afford the option chosen by the affluent Low Countries in northern Europe, which are walling themselves off from the attacking sea. These chapters are a chronicle of agonizing options as humanity faces the reality of a fundamental human right—to have enough to eat.

11
A Right to Subsistence

A couple of years ago, I heard retired Bangladeshi major general A. N. M. Muniruzzaman address an environmental conference in Colorado about rising sea levels and the future of his country. He was an articulate speaker, who addressed the audience in a clipped British accent, clearly derived from his days at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He heads the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies in Dhaka, an appointment that puts him directly on the horns of the dilemmas facing 168 million of his countrymen, crammed into a muddy, often inundated delta about the size of Louisiana. The general spared no punches. He couldn’t afford to, as Bangladesh’s population will reach an estimated 220 million people in a mere forty years. We learned that between 17 and 40 million people living on, or close to, the Bay of Bengal will have to move to other parts of the country in the face of rising sea levels by 2100. The audience gasped. He was talking about tens of millions of environmental refugees not as an abstract problem for the future, but as a sobering reality.

Muniruzzaman believes that these potential environmental refugees are not only a humanitarian problem, but also a serious issue of national security, a subject he knows firsthand. The realities are mind-boggling to the casual observer. There is already unrelenting pressure on agricultural land; millions of displaced people will effectively have nowhere to go in coming decades; the government lacks resources or organizations to handle the potential displacement. Nor is there anywhere for them to go, hemmed in as Bangladesh is by India to the north and west and
Myanmar to the east. Both their neighbors feel deep antipathy to densely populated Bangladesh and possess different religious beliefs. The two countries are understandably nervous about the prospect of uncontrolled mass migrations, which could lead to major epidemics, food and water shortages, and also violence. India is building a four-thousand-kilometer fence to keep out migrants, cattle rustlers, and people seeking work. All of this is quite apart from the nuclear weaponry in the hands of both India and Pakistan, of which Bangladesh was, of course, formerly a part.