On the pulse of future disasters

WEEKS after the seas retreated, after the minutes of terror along hundreds of kilometres of coast, people on the rim of the Indian Ocean are emerging from their December morning’s nightmare to a long, hard future of trying to recreate an obliterated past. 

The Dec 26 earthquake-tsunami took a staggering toll of lives. But for those left behind, from Aceh to Galle to the shores of east Africa, it also destroyed a world: of houses, shops and schools, clinics, mosques and farms, roads and railways, boats and vehicles, bridges, power lines and irrigation channels, harbours and storehouses, trees, beaches, reefs and lagoons.