Tsunami: learning to live with the threat

The waves made landfall in 14 countries, inundating coastal communities, killing more than 230,000 people and displacing a further 1.74 million. Coastal fishing villages were particularly hard hit, and the environmental damage – to mangroves, coral reefs, forests, coastal wetlands, and groundwater supplies – was immense.

The humanitarian response was equally substantial. Relief teams from throughout the world quickly converged on the worst-affected areas, to be followed by aid and reconstruction packages that eventually totalled about $US14 billion.

Large disaster relief efforts are, by their nature, problematic undertakings, and those that were hurriedly rolled out after the Boxing Day tsunami were no different. Badly coordinated and patchy in their coverage, they were a reflection not just of the chaotic aftermath of disaster but of the poor governance of hard-hit countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

As The Canberra Times reported last week, many of the millions of dollars in foreign donations sent to Indonesia's Aceh province and to the devastated provincial capital of Banda Aceh simply disappeared, most likely into the pockets of corrupt and unscrupulous politicians and business people. Infrastructure and housing in Banda Aceh has been largely restored, but the region remains among the poorest in Indonesia. The disaster did deliver one dividend for the long-suffering Acehenese: it was a catalyst for peace talks that ended the separatist insurgency.

The tsunami was also the catalyst for urgent international efforts to establish a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean region. A system had been operating in the Pacific Ocean since the mid 1960s, but not to the east of the Pacific rim. In the early 2000s, Geoscience Australia estimated that a global warning system could be established for as little as $26 million, although vulnerable countries would have been obliged to spend significant sums to ensure that people living in low-lying areas received timely warnings. In Indonesia, where millions of people live on remote islands, such an exercise would have been dauntingly difficult. For this reason, and because big earthquakes had been rare in the Indian Ocean up to that time, Geoscience's arguments for a better warning system went unheeded.

Extensive monitoring of undersea earthquakes is now routine in the Indian Ocean region, and elsewhere, and warnings are now delivered swiftly – a comforting development given the spike in tremors since 2004.

If governments now take the threat more seriously than they did a decade ago, it's arguable that individuals do not. The towns and villages that were destroyed in 2004 have not been rebuilt further inland, but in the same spots they occupied previously. If people are prepared to coexist with such threats, it's often because they have no choice. More frequently, however, their collective memories of such events fade or they convince themselves that the chances of them recurring are infinitesimal.

It is the unpredictability and raw power of earthquakes and volcanoes that makes them so confronting – and disturbing. The New Madrid earthquakes of 1812 in the central midwest of the United States caused the Mississippi River to run backwards for several hours, so frightening people that there was a sudden increase in religiosity. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in the then Dutch East Indies darkened skies for years afterwards, cooling the entire planet.

Our growing understanding and mastery of nature has diminished but not vanquished the threat posed by natural forces. In 2009, scientists failed to correctly assess the threat that a series of tremors in southern Italy posed (309 people were subsequently killed when the medieval city of L'Aqula was struck by a larger quake), and in 2011, sea walls and other defensive measures were overwhelmed by a series of tsunamis that struck northern Honshu in Japan after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast.

Australians are fortunate indeed to live in a country where seismic activity is relatively benign, although bushfires, floods, and cyclones can never be underestimated. Nor should we be lulled into a sense of complacency about climate change, another natural disturbance (albeit man-made) with the potential to kill and dislocate on a scale far greater than the 2004 tsunami.