Well, apparently brittish newscasts are more concerned with some inconvienced travellors and a brittish forum member acknowledged that. Why be mad at me for responding to their posts?

The whole "explains a lot" bit is the most insulting part.

How is that insulting? Maybe you should explain how you took it.

It sounds condescending, as if you look down on the British community and that this in part explains why.

I certainly don't look down on them. Truth be told, I think Mort exagerated news broadcasts and M posted some honest feelings about concerns she had. I was being an ***. But not maliciously. More so because I thought Mort was way off base. Your first assumption about me being sarcastic was correct.

Good, because if it was the latter, I was ready to go into overdrive "pissed off dinosaur" mode.

YKMTFF

death toll has passed beyon 27000.



and they are saying it could double again.

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11797185%255E28477,00.html



....frickin' hell.

Yeah, scary. Currently we have a foreign exchange student living with us, and his family is in Thailand. Thankfully they are located in the Northeast so they didn't feel it. However, we discovered later tonight that his sister was supposed to go on a holiday to Phouket(one of the places struck) But they decided not to. Thank god.

Quote from [url]www.rr-bb.com[/url]



What a terrible tragedy... we have no idea. Literally none. Merry Christmas to them too I guess.

How's the newsfeed reporting this in the US?

RIP

Update: count is at 36,000; estimate of total casualties is at 100,000

I was thinking something similar the other day. I'm not really a religious person but for those that are I'm sure this event carries many connotations.

The only news source I pay attention to is Fox News and they seem to be doing a good job of covering all the various aspects of this enormous event.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/973853.cms

Latest confirmed according to that is 55,000 and climbing.

Jaiph, I just read somewhere else that along with that, the International Dateline was moved back 3 seconds by the quake.

that's 0,000846 of the earth's population.

It's disturbing how well the statistical approach of the news is desensitizing me.....

When disease hits the death toll will probably double, if not triple.

On the news broadcast front I've watched both BBC, MSNBC, CNN, SKY and FOX they all have "special" sections of the news broadcast devoted to which ever country they are based in and people from the country who were affected, its not just the Brits.....and I did take minor offence to wookie's post being a Brit myself but I'll assume he hadn't watched much news from said networks and compared, so I don't really care, I know everyone in the world thinks this is a disaster and feels profoundly sorry for anyone effected by it be them from their own country or not....

on a different note, one of my first year flat mates and what I would call a close friend at uni (seni, maeve also knows him), comes from Thailand, although he's lived in the UK for a good few years now he has a lot of family over there, gave him a text today, guessing from the rather subdued response that he knows people that are missing or worse.....

I'm going to guess that the end death toll from just the quake and tsunami will reach nearly 200,000 then factor in the disease that will likely spread....terrible.

It was sarcasm. I think Mort exagerated the media spin over there. The networks outside the affected region are obviously going to focus on their citizens who were affected over there. It's a way to personalize the situation. Most of us can scarcely imagine what those people have lived and died through over there. This has got to be the most horrific event of our lifetimes. I think it is safe to assume that nobody on this forum lived through the holocaust.

I refuse to believe any numbers until this story is put closer to the back burner. Those numbers are more than likely inflated and exaggerated. Kind of like how it was reported that close to 50,000 people died in the WTC attacks a few days after it happened.

...what?

I remember numbers like 10,000 being reported as a potential number of deaths on the day of september 11th, but 50,000? I simply don't recall that occuring.

dude, these are confirmed dead. those large estimates are also based on th fact that the missing were sucked out to sea by the recedeing water. Also, there is no need to inflate figures for a natural disaster as it serves no political gain.

50,000 is not at all unreasonable. This is, to say the least, a disaster the likes of which makes the World Trade Center business look minor. It was but a single building (well, two). 2,000 people died, sure, but New York still had electricity, food, houses, and much more importantly, fresh water. Much of the thousands of kilometres of coastline hit by the tsunamis do not. The sad fact is, a lot of people who survived the tsunami are going to die of starvation and thirst (their water supply just having had millions of litres of salt-water poured in it).

...no this is confirmed dead Keiran, the actual death toll will likely be in the 100,000 neighbourhood. If you think these numbers are inflated in any way you obviously haven't been following the story that closely.

Simple fact is the world hasn't seen anything like this in a long long time. Hell even when Krakatoa erupted in the same region a century or so ago the resulting tsunamis were restricted to a smaller area and still killed 30-40,000 (and you should consider that then there were far fewer people living in coastal areas)...in this case, due to the location of the wave source it hit many many more places.

To think that this natural disaster was caused by a lack of Christianity in this part of the world is disgusting.

Haha, that's hilarious. The guy is clueless. Indonesia is located in one of the most geologically unstable areas of the planet....and it's been that way well before any of the people there were muslim. But hey, why let a little fact get in the way of some good self righteous nonsense

I'm sure santa drops cherry bombs down the chimneys of non-christians who don't celebrate christ's birth.

JediKirby

Death toll's up at ~70,000.

Did God let the dinosaurs die because they weren't Christian?

Also, I thought God wanted to salvage people. Why would he let them die so they don't have a chance?

People still believe in God?

Ahahahaha.

if this is the 5th biggest in the past 100 years, what the heck were the other 4?

wow, my mate was right about tsunami's travelling at 500mph. he's pulled some dodgey numbers out of his **** in the past, so we called ******** on him again.

I do remember the 50,000 figure but it was used because that was the estimate of how many people worked in those buildings. In the early stages of 9/11 we had no idea how many people were instantly killed and how many managed to escape.



It's one guy voicing an opinion. I touched on this earlier. This event has give the religious have much to think about. Personally, I think this event just goes to prove the impotence of man over this world. The arrogance to think that we affect this planet on a global scale. Earth owns us.

I would appreciate it if you apologized for that.

Don't take everything you read on the Internet seriously.

My apologies.

Thank you. And I'll try.

Hard to judge seriousness on the net.

just browsing through the BBC website while bored out of my head and came across this story...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4123927.stm

seems as through there was a major quake off the Antarctic on the 24th of dec...

coincidence that two such large quakes occur in such a short time 'relatively' close to one another??

If you look on the links on the top right of the BBC page, notice how many largish quakes there has been within the last few months....

I'm no expert but do we normally have such large quakes on a regular basis? maybe we do but an 8.1 and ~9 within two days of each other in 'roughly' the same area, if you look at the attached image, and from what I gathered from doing some minor reading up, the Indian and Australian plates are sometimes taken to be one, called the Indo-Australian plate in the report...i've marked with the curvy black line where the join of the two plates are....

if you had horizontal movement of the 'Indo-Australian' with any of the pacific plates (its not specific in the report.....@@@ try saying pacific and specific quickly after one another and figuring out what you actually said....)....anyways, if this movement was large enough it would have created a build up on the join in the 'Indo-Australian' plates for sure....they can tell where the movement in quakes goes now, didn't someone think that 'oh maybe we better watch out for some activity around the Indian ocean...' and maybe put out a warning or something....

K, this is all looking back at the incident and its easy to make conclusions after the result, but i'm just a little surprised I haven't heard this other quake mentioned at all on the news....plus I also accept people and governments don't want to alarm people when there may not be any reason for it, we still don't know anywhere near enough to predict quakes, its just its seems a little odd that it hasn't been mentioned....

Actually, false alarm. That would be 3 microseconds, not 3 seconds.

I heard that our year has now been increased by 1 second, because the quake actually SHIFTED THE EARTHS ORBIT by one inch. How in gods name do they find this stuff out??!

James Bond, that initial quake around 1000km off the coast of Tasmania was considered a catalyst of the Asian quake. Interesting they think a 8.1 or so a 'minor tremmor'...

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11787870%255E2,00.html

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/More-than-30-tremors-after-quake-that-may-have-given-world-the-wobbles/2004/12/28/1103996555937.html?oneclick=true

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/28721/story.htm

unfortunalty can't access the middle link as I need to register and honestly can't be bothered, but I hadn't come across those news stories, they seem to be mostly limited to Austrailian news reports, probably why in the UK we haven't heard all that much....still interesting reports.

The Richter scale is logarithmic, which means for those that don't know, a quake measuring 9.0 is 10 times more powerful than one measured at 8.0, so relatively speaking the one off the coast of Tasmania was 'pretty small', but still big enough to have flatterned the whole of sydney if it was centred there....:eek:

Well guess I was maybe right in thinking that the quake off Tasmania and the Asian quake were related, uumm....

My heart goes out to all thosepeople. This year has been crazy. I've been watching the news all day today. I had been avoiding it, not yet wanting to take it all in. The numbers are up to 80,000+ dead. Wow...it's just horrible.

The thing that always makes me smile though is that during these hard times, so many people are coming together. it has happened in past hurricanes, and now during these hurricanes from this year, and now I see reports of people giving food and water to those who have lost homes, although they themselves also need the food. Amidst all the horror, there does lie decency and great humanity. Often in situations u see people coming together. People trying to help save one another, and children, and suddenly pety differences are erased from your mind, and general caring comes to the surface. It makes u really realize what's important.

I want to help. Those people have had it so bad, and yet i'[m still seeing reports of children smiling...it's amazing. I feel so bad for all their losses. My prayers go out to them, and if there are any donation places around here, I want to donate money. I'll have to look into that. Ok imma stop ranting

What a year this has been huh. It makes you really stop and be thankful for all the things u have.

Laura

It's rocket science.

Anyway, just gave some money to the Red Cross. http://www.icrc.org/