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After the Tsunami

Experts discuss what needs to be done to help survivors and policy steps that should be taken to take precautions against the next disaster

 Choo Youn-Kong

Related Items: Jan. 14 Meeting at Duke to Discuss Tsunami Aid

The massive undersea earthquake and subsequent tsunami that ravaged South Asia Dec. 26 not only devastated the area's people and economy, but will adversely impact the region for decades to come, Duke experts say.

Economic future gloomy

How tsunamis yield deadly waves

Another warning against beachfront development

Ecosystem destruction might have contributed to damage

Psychological impact must be addressed

Duke alum survives tsunami

Fuqua student raising money for relief

Economic future gloomy

Even as worldwide relief continues to pour in, the tsunami-devastated areas of Asia face a bleak economic future, two Duke professors say.

Ongoing expenses for health care in the affected nations may swell the ranks of the poor for decades, said assistant public policy professor Anirudh Krishna, who studies poverty in developing countries.

"For people who are living on the edge, health care costs and the related loss of ability to work resulting from ill health, injury or death of a primary wage-earner are the greatest reasons for people being plunged into poverty," Krishna said.

Many tsunami survivors will endure the "double whammy" of increased health care costs coupled with diminished capacity to earn, said Krishna, who during the last five years has conduced research into the causes of poverty in villages in rural India, Peru, Uganda and Kenya.

"Many survivors lost their homes, and infrastructure was severely damaged, but even more important, they lost the means to generate incomes - their fishing boats, tools and implements, their pushcarts. It's going to be hard for them to claw their way back to where they were before."

That assessment was echoed by Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences professor Randall A. Kramer, who has studied rural economic development in Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Kramer says the loss of coastal villages' fishing fleets will be a major long-term obstacle to economic recovery.

"These communities are dependent on the ability to fish, to trade by boat and to travel by boat," he said. "These villagers have very low incomes to begin with, and without their boats -- their major source of income recovery will be especially slow."

Kramer has conducted house-to-house socioeconomic surveys in Indonesian coastal communities similar to those decimated in northern Sumatra. In some villages, Kramer and his research team found that up to 90 percent of all households relied on fishing for all or part of their income. In other communities, the percentage dependent on fishing dropped to as low as 20 percent because villagers earned their incomes through farming or in low-paid trades.

The destruction of boats, vehicles, harbors and roads will make it extremely difficult for fishermen to travel to other villages in search of work, Kramer said.

"It will be a challenge to find ways to earn the money they'll need to buy or build new boats," he said. "They'll have to scrape together what little they can, or borrow money from relatives in other communities, assuming those communities haven't also been devastated. Government or commercial loans for small-scale fishermen to buy boats and fishing gear are rarely available."

Aid efforts by governments and international agencies will likely focus on meeting short-term needs -- food, shelter, medicine and burying the dead. Fewer resources will be available to address long-term economic needs.

"Governments in many of the worst-hit places -- especially in places like Sri Lanka or northern Sumatra, where there are on-and-off civil wars -- have very limited ability to help fishermen and coastal communities rebuild," Kramer said. "UNICEF, the United Nations development program, and other donors may be able to offer some assistance, but with thousands of communities affected, you have to wonder how much they really can do."

Krishna recommended that follow-up relief efforts concentrate on providing low-cost or free health care to people who are sick or injured. Low-interest loans also would provide people a way to rebuild their productive capital, Krishna said. In addition, to help restore earning capacity, wealthy nations could forgive debts owed by nations severely affected by the disaster, and write off loans on productive capital lost in the flooding.

"Food supplies, money and housing assistance are all important, immediate responses. But when the tragedy fades from newspaper headlines, there will still be a need for a continuing response," Krishna said.

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How tsunamis yield deadly waves

The massive death and destruction from tsunamis arise from a tragic confluence of phenomena involving geology and the physics of ocean waves, said Peter Malin, a professor of seismology at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

First of all, there is the fact that the magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Indonesia significantly changed the depth of the ocean floor over an area larger than the size of North Carolina in a minute or two. Such a "megathrust" earthquake is caused by one crustal plate abruptly slipping beneath another.

"You have to understand that it's not just crust pushing into the ground and diving," Malin said. "There will be other parts that get uplifted too. When you pick up the continental shelf many feet this quickly, the water doesn't have time to adjust gradually. So suddenly you have an elevation difference on the sea surface, creating great long waves -- a tsunami -- as one might from quickly tilting a bath tub a few inches."

But in the deep ocean this vast wave stretches out over many miles, he said. Being exceptionally long, such a wave might be hardly noticeable to ships and boats passing over it as it moves across the ocean at the speed of a jetliner rather than the pace of a normal wind-driven wave.

"Think of the bathtub again," Malin said. "If you make small waves on top of the water it takes time for that wave to propagate across the surface. But now slosh the tub. That sloshing moves much faster because it has a much longer wavelength."

Also, said Malin, the sequence of a tsunami is insidiously deadly. When the spread-out waves finally reach beaches, they can first suck the surf line far down from the shore, exposing shallow stretches of ocean bottom and stranding sea life. This tempting opportunity often lures unsuspecting tourists and fish gatherers to venture out too far to escape when the water returns with a vengeance.

At that tragic moment, the waves that were long and wide in the depths of the sea consolidates in the shallow coastal waters into a series of onrushing walls, with the later waves being the tallest. This "wave group" behavior -- well known to surfers -- is caused by "dispersion effects," Malin said. Such effects are caused by the interaction of waves of different lengths, in which some lengths reinforce one another, combining to cause large motions of the sea surface.

Residents of the East Coast of the United States should be aware of tsunamis, said Malin. He cited, for example, the possibility of waves generated in the Atlantic Ocean by large landslides from the volcanic island of La Palma in the Canaries off Africa.

La Palma's Cumbre Vieja volcano is crumbling, with significant portions of it having slipped into the Atlantic every few thousand years. If that were to happen again, while different from the Sumatra event, "it's quite possible that a negligible to significant tsunami could be set up and propagate across the ocean to North and South America," Malin said. "Not tomorrow or next month, but just as frequently as in the past."

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Another warning against beachfront development

The deadly tsunami is the latest -- albeit most extreme -- example of the dangers of dwelling near the surf zone, said retired Nicholas School professor Orrin Pilkey, who has long warned that hurricanes and other storms will inevitably destroy seaside structures.

"I think this is yet another nail in the coffin of the rationality of beachfront development," Pilkey argued. "Maybe we should forgo the view of the sea and the breeze from the sea. Set the hotels way back, on the back sides of islands."

Some areas of the tsunami-stricken region had already heeded warnings about such damage. For example, according to The New York Times, most new properties in Phuket, Thailand, conform to a law establishing a 150-foot setback from the shoreline, which limited damage from the tsunami. And the prime minister has said that damaged coastal areas should be rebuilt to observe such setback regulations.

Research by Pilkey has revealed that the North Carolina coast, in fact, might have experienced a tsunami about 16,000 years ago, when the sea level was some 300 to 400 feet lower than today. He studied the seafloor well seaward of Cape Hatteras.

"We found a massive deposit of sediment," Pilkey said. "It was more than 100 cubic kilometers in volume. By comparison, Mt. St. Helens produced one cubic kilometer."

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Ecosystem destruction might have contributed to damage

The scope of the tsunami destruction and its death toll might have been increased by humans' destruction of forested hillsides, mangrove swamps and coral reefs, said Stuart Pimm, the Nicholas School's Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology.

"Throughout the world, and particularly in this region, large areas of mangroves have been cleared, sometimes for shrimp farming, sometimes for resorts and hotels," he said, stressing that he is talking in general without knowledge of specific situations.

"I'm afraid a story that has been consistently missed, not only with this disaster but also for example with the flooding in Haiti last year, is that such natural ecosystems provide an enormous amount of protection,' he said.

"When you get a disaster like this, one thing you would want to have between you and the ocean is a mangrove swamp to absorb the impact of a storm surge or a tsunami."

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Psychological impact must be addressed

While the first focus on relief efforts must be on the basics -- food, water and shelter -- psychological needs will take on growing importance in the coming days, weeks and over the longer term, said Dr. John Fairbank, associate professor at Duke University Medical Center and co-director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.

Fairbank said there were a number of characteristics of the tsunami disaster that separate it from other disasters.

"In this case, one signature difference has to do with the large number of children lost and also the large number of children who lost both parents. There's also has been a lot of mass burials, bypassing the cultures' traditional means of burial. All of these are complicating factors when figuring what to do in terms of psychological services.

"In the immediate aftermath, the cultures' traditional means of healing are very important. I have a colleague in Sri Lanka who is making use of traditional mass grieving ceremonies there. These allow communities to come together and engage in local time-honored rituals."

Fairbank said most survivors will come to terms with the disaster and be able to move on. But for a large number of them, long-term psychological care will be needed.

"The danger is that individuals, even communities, can enter into cycles of depression that can be contagious," he said. "And the fact that the losses were across generations has implications for the communities' mental health.

"Western-based psychologists are available to help. Our national network has a Terrorism and Disaster Branch, which is in contact with affected communities.  However, it's important for us to understand that the best practices that work in our cultures don't necessarily translate well to other cultures. 

"We will have to ensure that whatever advice we provide, it is done while working closely with the caregivers in the indigenous community. We can provide assistance, but we should follow the community's lead."

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Duke alum survives tsunami

Jerry Bodden, a 1954 Duke graduate, was gathered with others at the Golden Buddha Island Resort off the coast of Thailand for a morning meeting when the tsunami struck.

 "It was just unbelievable," Bodden, 72, said in an interview with the Mobile Register. "We heard the first wave and it was nothing but noise. Everyone rushed to look at it.

"Someone said, 'Look out there on the horizon, there's another big one coming.' What we saw looked like a large cumulus cloud, but it was a wall of water.

"I said, 'We're just going to have an extra big wave,'" Bodden said. "In about five minutes it started coming over the embankment ... and really pouring in."

Bodden told the newspaper that he clung to a log and struggled for nearly four hours to get back to shore. He was tossed about by currents so strong that "they ripped not only my trousers off, but my undertrousers."

"I was drifting north and wasn't sure where I was going to end up," Bodden said. "The currents changed and started pushing me back south to where the resort was.

"When I got within a reasonable distance of the shore, I just started swimming with all my might."

By then, he had only his shirt left as clothing.

"I collapsed for 20 to 30 minutes and then got up and walked 30 minutes to the edge of the resort ground."

Every house was empty, Bodden said. "For a brief moment I thought everyone had been lost," he said.

Then a worker at the resort walked toward him with a pair of trousers. "It turned out everybody was up a very steep hill," Bodden recalled.

The survivors spent the night on the hill, until rescuers could come to get them the next day. Bodden was eventually transported to the Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital, to recuperate from dehydration and pneumonia.

Bodden, who is fluent in several languages, has lived in Thailand for 14 years, but he said he'll also never return to his Buddha Island resort home.

"I couldn't go back with the memories of the losses there," he told the Register. "I don't know if I could ever go to sleep on that oceanfront, not knowing if one of those things was going to come in and take me away during the night."

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Fuqua student raising money for relief

When the tsunami struck on Dec. 26, Uday Kiran Chaka quickly began raising money.

Chaka, an MBA candidate at the Fuqua School of Business, did the same several years ago when an earthquake struck his home country. Chaka grew up the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where more than 100 people died in the tsunami.

"I am away from my country and fellow citizens now, in the time of need," he said. "Making people aware of the extent of the disaster and raising money for relief efforts is the best possible way I can help."

Chaka doesn't have a specific dollar figure in mind. Instead, he said, his first goal is to raise awareness and then let people decide how much they want to contribute. He said he will send money to local, grassroots organizations with low overheads so that the bulk of the contributions go directly to food, health care and, eventually, rebuilding infrastructure.

He said he is trying to solicit contributions from the Duke community as well as from immigrants from affected countries who live in the Triangle. Earlier this week, he said, he received a contribution from an IBM employee of Indian origin.

The efforts will be ongoing as the semester begins, with the Indus Club at the Fuqua School coordinating tsunami relief activities. Other groups, such as the Association for India's Development, are also raising money.

"According to Hindu philosophy, every human being is potentially divine," Chaka said. "Therefore, service to man is service to God. Simply put, social service gives me a lot of personal satisfaction, and it is one of the best ways of creating a peaceful and productive society. I started a social service organization in Bangalore, India, as I believe there is a lot to be done to make this world a better place."

For more information about his fundraising efforts, contact Chaka at udaykiran.c@fuqua.duke.edu.

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Monte Basgall, Kelly Gilmer, Karen Kemp, Tim Lucas and Geoffrey Mock contributed to this report.