Tony DeyalOLD GEOLOGISTS never die, they just keep on finding faults. If this were true, every one of us is a geologist of advanced years.
It is a human tendency, never more pronounced that when disaster strikes or bad news and other excrement hit the fan, to look at the motes in the optical equipment of others and ignore our own. For many people, fault-finding is an art, a means of taking pressure off themselves and transferring culpability to others. It is a way of shifting attention to the stable door long after the horse has made its exit.
In reviewing the enormous disaster in the Far East, too many people were intent on finding faults or imperfections, failings or defects, mistakes or errors, and trying to find people to blame instead of concentrating on the real fault, the fracture in the earth's crust which resulted in the relative displacement and loss of continuity of the rocks on either side of it. Whose fault is it? Some people are blaming the Almighty, and some are fixed on less insubstantial and handier targets politicians who did not agree to a tsunami monitoring system in the Indian Ocean, the United States for not warning everyone on time, the United States again for not providing enough money in aid, and people who watched instead of ran and added to the mortality statistics, highest among felines, attributed to curiosity.
There are those who take fault-finding to ridiculous extremes. Enrico Caruso, the great tenor, was caught in the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and swore he would never go back to such a city where disorders like that were permitted. The Japanesewarlord, Hideyoshi, once commissioned a huge statue of Buddha which took 50,000 labourers five years to build. In 1596, shortly before the work was completed, an earthquake brought the roof of the shrine tumbling down and destroyed the statue. Hideyoshi got extremely angry and shot an arrow into the fallen statue of Buddha shouting, "I put you here at great expense and you can't even look after your own temple!"
HUMOUR
Bob Newhart, the comedian, said that in situations of extreme anxiety, tension and loss, humour makes us free. It is our way of dealing with the inexplicable. These are dark days indeed and humour helps to lighten the burden. Following the last Los Angeles earthquake, the joke was that the traffic had stopped but the freeways were moving. There is a moral in the story of the lawyer and engineer who were fishing in the Caribbean. The lawyer said, "I'm here because my house burned down, and everything I owned was destroyed by the fire. The insurance company paid for everything." "That's quite a coincidence," said the engineer. "I'm here because my house and all my belongings were destroyed in an earthquake, and my insurance company also paid for everything." The lawyer looked somewhat confused. "How do you start an earthquake?" he asked.
In the Caribbean, starting an earthquake is not hard. Stopping it is the problem. In the past few weeks Dominica and other islands to the north, and Trinidad and Tobago in the south, experienced earthquakes. The first thing to do is to separate fact from fiction. According to the research, there is no such thing as earthquake weather. If dogs, cats and other animals behave strangely before an earthquake, the behaviour is not constant or consistent. Earthquakes can happen at any time of night or day. According to several sources, including the U.S. National Science Foundation, the worst thing is to feel that there's nothing we can do about earthquakes, so it is a waste of time worrying.
PREPARED
While earthquakes can't be stopped, we can be prepared. What compounded the problem in the Far East is that many of the mangroves and wetlands, which serve as natural filters and buffers, were destroyed to make way for high-rise hotels on the beachfront. A news report, quoting Jeff McNeely, chief scientist of the Swiss-based World Conservation Union (IUCN), said, "Human activities, notably the building of coastal resorts and the destruction of natural protection, contributed to the enormous loss of life from killer tidal waves that hit the shores of the Indian Ocean after an earthquake."
Prime Minister Manning has already asked for a disaster plan for Trinidad and Tobago. There are moves to monitor 'Kick 'em Jenny', the nearest potential source of danger. What is more important is that we become serious about building codes, not just how we build, but where we build.
Following the disaster in Grenada, a colleague who is a consultant for the World Bank wrote to me bemoaning the powerlessness he felt. He had tried over several months to warn the government to increase their preparedness and they had not responded. He asked whether there was anything more he could have done. My response is that we cannot change the past, but we can learn from it even as we mourn the losses. More, we can apply the lessons of the past to the future.
Mr. Manning now needs to go to the wider Caribbean, to his fellow prime ministers, and use his influence to ensure that while we cannot start or stop the earthquakes, we can monitor and manage the effects much better than we are doing now. Just as his predecessor, George Chambers put houses before horses, so should we put mangroves before mansions and tomorrow before tourism.
Tony Deyal was last seen
saying that the earth we live on is God's gift to us. What we make of it is our gift to God.
