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Video from Tsunami Relief on NBC - High Res Satellite Images - Information and Links

Inconceivable.  Unimaginable.  Horrific. 

HIGH Resolution Images to follow:

I created the image above a few days after the Tsunami struck.  I was really overwhelmed once I realized how vast it was.  With California we hear of quakes often, but the term Tsunami was foreign to most Americans until this event occurred.  And so the day after Christmas when I heard there was an earthquake I didn't think much of it - then word of a 'Tsunami' - still foreign.  Then once the death toll was doubling quickly, the realization of how vast this was hit us all.   Try and imagine living in a small coastal village of several thousand people and only 50 people surviving.   God rest their soles and comfort the survivors.  So many people gave to help these people and may you be blessed for helping these poor people.  Hopefully a Tsunami Warning System will be put in place world wide, with the US leading the efforts so that this never happens again. 

HIGH RESOLUTION SATELLITE IMAGES

The following thumbnail photos can be clicked to load full size image.  These are very large files but if you have fast internet it should not be a problem loading them.  Hold your shift key on your keyboard down and then click on images below, and when they open, move your mouse off the image then back on and the "Enlarge" button will appear at the lower right corner of the image.  Click that button to make it go full size so you can scroll around and view different areas.   This will keep this main page open and the background music playing.

Side-by-Side Shots for Comparison of Before and After

Thanks to Space Imaging for lending their time and money to urgent events in our world and our lives.

Tsunami Relief Benefit - NBC Television - January 15, 2005

Roger Waters-Eric Clapton - Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" Animated/CD Quality Sound

All of the songs from tonight's benefit are available for download for a small donation- some fantastic music as well- Annie Lennox was amazing.  Download at Sony's www.connect.com.

Press the Play button to start   

Where are our warnings for man-made disasters?

By Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe - 01/09/05

BOSTON — There is a moment when nearly every astronaut looking out from the spaceship to the great blue earth enters the same sentiment into the public travel log. From their Olympian heights, they see no borders, no countries, no demarcation lines to separate people. They report, in the cliche of space travel, that we share one planet, benign and awesome.

Now we are living with a very different and terrible reminder of our membership on a single planet. On Dec. 26, following some geological timetable, the tectonic plates deep in the earth shifted. An immense body of water moved thousands of miles across oceans and landmasses, across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and all the way to Somalia.

Scientists and journalists alike described water moving ‘‘at jet speed.'' The airplane, after all, is the very model of a connecting link that brings people together across time zones, continents and cultures.

Europeans had flown to the Andaman seacoast of Thailand ‘‘at jet speed.'' Americans had gone to India ‘‘at jet speed.'' The same planes that shrink the world, allowing Northerners to flee the winter at jet speed to share summer, had left tourists sharing a watery grave with natives.

So the earthquake knocked the world off its axis by 2.5 centimeters and shortened the day by millionths of a second. But it was in the personal tragedy we felt our unity.

Waves swept away Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians with a ferocious indifference. The tsunami took no side even in decades-old enmities over borders and beliefs.

The stories, singular in their pain, were universal in their common human denominator. The unimaginable horror of children snatched from their parents by a wave. The dazed survivors counting their losses up to a collective 150,000. The disappearance of whole known worlds, villages, families.

So too, the search for understanding was as universal, if perhaps as futile, as the search for bodies. Some survivors talked about the tsunami as an ‘‘act of God'' — as if God were the fine print on an insurance policy. Others, like the woman whose daughter rode out the tsunami on a tourist boat off Phuket, talked about that too as an act of God — as if He'd rolled the dice in their favor.

Indeed, survivors described ‘‘miracles'' until that word sounded like nothing but a synonym for incomprehensible, random luck. Or perhaps miracle is the answer when you run down the list of possibilities and hit ‘‘none of the above.''

Once again, unified in the face of catastrophe, we hit the pause button on our own man-made conflicts. We were caught up short in the midst of endless squabbling over our own differences. Even in Sri Lanka where 64,000 died in decades of civil war, Tamils and Sinhalese took time out to share the loss of 34,000 in minutes.

Now it's international aid that travels to Asia at jet speed. The world sends money to victims at Internet speed. There is a worldwide conference in Indonesia and talk of creating an early warning system in the Indian Ocean.

But I also watch us inch back to ‘‘normal.'' On Page 1, the fury of nature shares space again with the folly of humanity. The victims of nature make room for the victims of man-made conflict.

There is another car bombing in Iraq. People in Washington are parsing the definition of human torture. There is a story, datelined Iran, about nuclear weapons. And in the northeastern districts of Sri Lanka there are the first disheartening reports of Tamils refusing aid and government officials burning up food.

I am no theologian. In my business we prefer to avoid questions without answers. We are shy about inquiries that lurch between the profound and the naive. We set aside the sort of wondering that sets us wandering.

But it's impossible to watch this unfold and not wonder why people need tragedy to remind us of our humanity. And why we manufacture disaster when nature provides quite enough of its own.

Not long ago, Rwanda added more than 800,000 to the wave of its human death toll. Each year, two million die from malaria. Is it only from the Olympian heights of outer space or the geological depths of an undersea earthquake that we feel our connection. Is it only during an ‘‘act of God'' that religious wars seem absurd and suicide bombs redundant?

Even now in the wake of the tsunami, we know more about tectonic plates buried under the ocean than we do about our own heart of darkness. Where on earth is the early warning system for man-made disasters?

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Above article is © 2004 Boston Globe. 

Tsunami 2004 Image © Steve Shep.

My Car Accidents in Dallas

View my car wreck video, with footage of two accidents I was in here in Dallas, the latter one requiring the jaws of life.  Photos and video can be viewed at the following links: 

My Car Wreck Photos    My Car Wreck Video