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The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.
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Anna Quindlen (Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake)
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Cosby, 60. Weinstein, 87. Nassar, 169. The news used phrases like avalanche of accusations, tsunami of stories, sea change. The metaphors were correct in that they were catastrophic, devastating. But it was wrong to compare them to natural disasters, for they were not natural at all, solely man-made. Call it a tsunami, but do not lose sight of the fact that each life is a single drop, how many drops it took to make a single wave. The loss is incomprehensible, staggering, maddening—we should have caught it when it was no more than a drip. Instead society is flooded with survivors coming forward, dozens for every man, just so that one day, in his old age, he might feel a taste of what it was like for them all along.
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Chanel Miller (Know My Name: A Memoir)
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Nature has a myriad of weapons to combat human arrogance.
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Wayne Gerard Trotman
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The witch who claims to forbear her magick for fear of causing the next Indian tsunami is really saying that she is powerful enough to kill thousands of innocent strangers when all she meant to do was water her mugwort. She can't be challenged to produce evidence of this, because doing could provoke earthquakes and Africanized bee attacks.
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Thomm Quackenbush (Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft)
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Man-made disaster is here and upon us in multiple forms, each one its own earthquake, flood, fire, tsunami. And the repercussions keep coming. We can barely catch our breath...And yet there is still so much to be done, so much we can do, so much to care for and about. Is there a way through? We may not know, but the way through is also the way of surmounting suffering...
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Shellen Lubin
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You might think that, by now, people would have become accustomed to the idea of natural catastrophes. We live on a planet that is still cooling and which has fissures and faults in its crust; this much is accepted even by those who think that the globe is only six thousand years old, as well as by those who believe that the earth was "designed" to be this way. Even in such a case, it is to be expected that earthquakes will occur and that, if they occur under the seabed, tidal waves will occur also. Yet two sorts of error are still absolutely commonplace. The first of these is the idiotic belief that seismic events are somehow "timed" to express the will of God. Thus, reasoning back from the effect, people will seriously attempt to guess what sin or which profanity led to the verdict of the tectonic plates. The second error, common even among humanists, is to borrow the same fallacy for satirical purposes and to employ it to disprove a benign deity.
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Christopher Hitchens
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The tsunami that cleared the shoreline like a giant bulldozer has presented developers with an undreamed-of opportunity, and they have moved quickly to seize it. —Seth Mydans, International Herald Tribune, March 10,
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Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
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In the aftermath of the recent wave action in the Indian Ocean, even the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williamson [sic], proved himself a latter-day Voltairean by whimpering that he could see how this might shake belief in a friendly creator. Williamson is of course a notorious fool, who does an almost perfect imitation of a bleating and frightened sheep, but even so, one is forced to rub one's eyes in astonishment. Is it possible that a grown man could live so long and still have his personal composure, not to mention his lifetime job description, upset by a large ripple of seawater?
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Christopher Hitchens
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What we are now witnessing in the 21st century is the fracture or complete breakdown of families, societies, and governments as a result of centuries of dehumanization that have taken a toll. More natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, etc.) merely uncover the reality of the national disasters we have created by granting sanctuary to dehumanization via the law.
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Liza Lugo (How Do Hurricane Katrina's Winds Blow?: Racism in 21st-Century New Orleans (Racism in American Institutions))
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It’s impossible to say how much the decision to use the tsunami as an opportunity for disaster capitalism contributed to the return to civil war.
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Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
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Most of the parents who came to the school were full-time mothers and housewives; most of the villagers offering their opinions were retired, elderly and male. It was another enactment of the ancient dialogue, its lines written centuries ago, between the entreating voices of women, and the oblivious, overbearing dismissiveness of old men.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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Vivian Carlisle happened to her, like an avalanche or tsunami, as sudden and unforgiving as natural disaster. That was the thing about nature, though. It was frightening, dangerous, unpredictable–yes, all that. It was also inspiring. Even Beautiful.
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Roslyn Sinclair (Truth and Measure (Carlisle, #1))
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Let’s face it, disaster follows my every move. Like a newborn duck imprinted on a tsunami.”
“That…makes no sense,” he said.
A & E Kirk (2014-05-26). Drop Dead Demons: The Divinicus Nex Chronicles: Book 2 (Divinicus Nex Chronicles series) (p. 567). A&E Kirk. Kindle Edition.
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A. Kirk
“
What struck me, in reading the reports from Sri Lanka, was the mild disgrace of belonging to our imperfectly evolved species in the first place. People who had just seen their neighbors swept away would tell the reporters that they knew a judgment had been coming, because the Christians had used alcohol and meat at Christmas or because ... well, yet again you can fill in the blanks for yourself. It was interesting, though, to notice that the Buddhists were often the worst. Contentedly patting an image of the chubby lord on her fencepost, a woman told the New York Times that those who were not similarly protected had been erased, while her house was still standing. There were enough such comments, almost identically phrased, to make it seem certain that the Buddhist authorities had been promulgating this consoling and insane and nasty view. That would not surprise me.
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Christopher Hitchens
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In disasters, children show us the way to laughter. They are our special treasures.
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Gretel Ehrlich (Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami)
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I asked him what kind of consolation a priest could offer to people such as the parents of Okawa school, and he was quiet for a moment. “You have to be careful,” he said. “You have to be very careful in doing this to people who have lost their children. It takes long months, long years—it might take a whole lifetime. It might be the very last thing that you say to someone. But perhaps all that we can tell them in the end is to accept. The task of acceptance is very hard. It’s up to every single person, individually. People of religion can play only a part in achieving that—they need the support of everyone around them. We watch them, watch over them. We remember our place in the cosmos, as we work. We stay with them, and we walk together. That’s all we can do.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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Everything made by men will be destroyed by nature in the end. Mountains and river, the creations of nature -- they will remain. Everything human, that will go. We nee to reconsider the respect we give to nature.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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The Crucified is the One most traumatized. He has borne the World Trade Center. He has carried the Iraq war, the destruction in Syria, the Rwandan massacres, the AIDS crisis, the poverty of our inner cities, and the abused and trafficked children. He was wounded for the sins of those who perpetrated such horrors. He has carried the griefs and sorrows of the multitudes who have suffered the natural disasters of this world--the earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis. And he has borne our selfishness, our complacency, our love of success, and our pride. He has been in the darkness. He has known the loss of all things. He has been abandoned by his Father. He has been to hell. There is no part of any tragedy that he has not known or carried. He has done this so that none of us need face tragedy alone because he has been there before us and will go with us. and what he has done for us in Gethsemane and at Calvary he ask us to do as well. We are called to enter into relationships centered on suffering so that we might reveal in flesh and blood the nature of the Crucified One.
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Diane Langberg (Suffering and the Heart of God: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores)
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The true mystery of Okawa school was the one we all face. No mind can encompass it; consciousness recoils in panic. The idea of conspiracy is what we supply to make sense of what will never be sensible— the fiery fact of death. Extinction of life: extinction of a perfect, a beloved child: for eternity. Impossible! the soul cries out. What are they hiding?
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
“
What we are now witnessing in the 21st century is the fracture or complete breakdown of families, societies, and governments as a result of centuries of dehumanization that have taken a toll. More natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, etc.) merely uncover the reality of the national disasters we have created by grandting sanctuary to dehumanization via the law.
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Liza Lugo (How Do Hurricane Katrina's Winds Blow?: Racism in 21st-Century New Orleans (Racism in American Institutions))
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We have raped the natural world, damming rivers and carelessly using up resources, polluting the atmosphere, and battling the nurturer, Mother Earth. Now nature fights back with a fury of natural disasters: hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, droughts, floods, and global warming. In response we fight climate change, seeking to stop it without addressing the underlying attitude that created the problem to begin with.
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Tsultrim Allione (Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict)
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We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish
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Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)
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Kaneta said, “What determined life or death? No Buddhist priest knows, no Christian pastor—not even the Pope in Rome. So I would say, ‘There’s one thing I can tell you, and that is that you are alive, and so am I. This is a certainty. And if we are alive, then there must be some meaning to it. So let’s think about it, and keep thinking about it. I’ll be with you as we think. I’ll stay with you, and we will do it together.’ Perhaps it sounds glib. But that is what I could say.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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He said, “We realized that, for all that we had learned about religious ritual and language, none of it was effective in facing what we saw all around us. This destruction that we were living inside—it couldn’t be framed by the principles and theories of religion. Even as priests, we were close to the fear that people express when they say, ‘We see no God, we see no Buddha here.’ I realized then that religious language was an armor that we wore to protect ourselves, and that the only way forward was to take it off.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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Hence, democracies escape Hobbes’s state of nature and autocracies generally don’t. Indeed, we can see just how dramatic the difference is in escaping the state of nature by looking at what happens when nature exercises its freedom to wreak havoc. We have in mind the consequences of natural disasters like earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, and drought. These certainly are not political events, but their consequences are the product of how rulers best allocate revenue and how people’s freedom to organize shape allocation decisions.
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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics)
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It is true that people can be “brought together” by catastrophe, and it is human to look to this as a consolation. But the balance of disaster is never positive. New human bonds were made after the tsunami, old ones became stronger; there were countless remarkable displays of selflessness and self-sacrifice. These we remember and celebrate. We turn away from what is also commonplace: the destruction of friendship and trust; neighbors at odds; the enmity of friends and relatives. A tsunami does to human connectedness the same thing that it does to roads, bridges, and homes. And in Okawa, and everywhere in the tsunami zone, people fell to quarreling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy, and fell out of love.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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The Crucified is the One most traumatized. He has borne the World Trade Center. He has carried the Iraq war, the destruction in Syria, the Rwandan massacres, the AIDS crisis, the poverty of our inner cities, and the abused and trafficked children. He was wounded for the sins of those who perpetrated such horrors. He has carried the griefs and sorrows of the multitudes who have suffered the natural disasters of this world--the earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis. And he has borne our selfishness, our complacency, our love of success, and our pride. He has been in the darkness. He has known the loss of all things. He has been abandoned by his Father. He has been to hell. There is no part of any tragedy that he has not known or carried. He has done this so that none of us need face tragedy alone because he has been there before us and will go with u. and what he has done for us in Gethsemane and at Calvary he ask us to do as well. We are called to enter into relationships centered on suffering so that we might reveal in flesh and blood the nature of the Crucified One.
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Diane Langberg
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He and others have interpreted contemporary accounts in terms of a succession of impacts, too small to have a global impact but quite sufficient to cause mayhem in the ancient world, largely through generating destructive atmospheric shock waves, earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires. Many urban centres in Europe, Africa, and Asia appear to have collapsed almost simultaneously around 2350 BC, and records abound of flood, fire, quake, and general chaos. These sometimes fanciful accounts are, of course, open to alternative interpretation, and hard evidence for bombardment from space around this time remains elusive. Having said this, seven impact craters in Australia, Estonia, and Argentina have been allocated ages of 4,000–5,000 years and the search goes on for others. Even more difficult to defend are propositions by some that the collapse of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages may somehow have been triggered by increased numbers of impacts when the Earth last passed through the dense part of the Taurid Complex between 400 and 600 AD. Hard evidence for these is weak and periods of deteriorated climate attributed to impacts around this time can equally well be explained by large volcanic explosions. In recent years there has, in fact, been a worrying tendency amongst archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians to attempt to explain every historical event in terms of a natural catastrophe of some sort –whether asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, or earthquake –many on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence. As the aim of this volume is to shed light on how natural catastrophes can affect us all, I would be foolish to argue that past civilizations have not suffered many times at the hands of nature. Attributing everything from the English Civil War and the French Revolution to the fall of Rome and the westward march of Genghis Khan to natural disasters only serves, however, to devalue the potentially cataclysmic effects of natural hazards and to trivialize the role of nature in shaping the course
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Bill McGuire (Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions;Very Short Introductions;Very Short Introductions))
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It is easy to imagine grief as an ennobling, purifying emotion—uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illuminating the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn’t resolve anything, any more than a blow to the head or a devastating illness. It compounds stress and complication. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, and cracks into gaping chasms.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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low expectations are corrosive to a democratic system.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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In North America and Europe, there is no lack of odious and incompetent leaders; but there is a sense of creative friction and of evolution, of a political marketplace in which ideas and individuals less popular and effective yield, over time, to those that prove themselves fitter for purpose, and where politics—even if it has its wrong turns and dead ends—is at least in constant motion. In Japan, this is not the case; even seventy years after the war, a genuinely competitive multiparty system has still not established itself.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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Everything started off smoothly enough, as everything usually does before going horribly wrong. Disasters typically come without warning. Earthquakes toss children from their beds in the dark of night. Airplanes plummet from clear blue skies. Tsunamis level entire coastlines. Buildings collapse, banks fold, economies fail, empires crumble.
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Tod A (Banging the Monkey)
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More appalling than the scale of death was the spectacle of the bereaved survivors. “They didn’t cry,” Kaneta said. “There was no emotion at all. The loss was so profound, and death had come so suddenly. They understood the facts of their situation individually—that they had lost their homes, lost their livelihoods, and lost their families. They understood each piece, but they couldn’t see it as a whole, and they couldn’t understand what they should do, or sometimes even where they were. I couldn’t really talk to them, to be honest. All I could do was stay with them, and read the sutras and conduct the ceremonies. That was the thing I could do.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway, prayed for the spirits of those who had died—and the ghostly calls ceased. A taxi in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no longer existed. Halfway through the journey, the driver looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty. He drove on anyway, stopped in front of the leveled foundations of a destroyed house, and politely opened the door to allow the invisible passenger out at his former home.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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At a refugee community in Onagawa, an old neighbor would appear in the living rooms of the temporary houses and sit down for a cup of tea with their startled occupants. No one had the heart to tell her that she was dead; the cushion on which she had sat was wet with seawater.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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Religious people all argue about whether these are really the spirits of the dead,” Kaneta told me. “I don’t get into it, because what matters is that people are seeing them, and in these circumstances, after this disaster, it is perfectly natural. So many died, and all at once. At home, at work, at school—the wave came in and they were gone. The dead had no time to prepare themselves. The people left behind had no time to say goodbye. Those who lost their families, and those who died—they have strong feelings of attachment. The dead are attached to the living, and those who have lost them are attached to the dead. It’s inevitable that there are ghosts.” He said: “So many people are having these experiences. It’s impossible to identify who and where they all are.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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It was a weekday afternoon, and the working people of Kamaya were away at their shops, factories, and offices. Most of the parents who came to the school were full-time mothers and housewives; most of the villagers offering their opinions were retired, elderly, and male. It was another enactment of the ancient dialogue, its lines written centuries ago, between the entreating voices of women and the oblivious, overbearing dismissiveness of old men.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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It was bitterly cold, and the darkness was overwhelming. Everyone who lived through that night was amazed by the intense clarity of the sky overhead and the brightness of the stars. They found themselves in a land without power, television, telephones, a place suddenly plucked up and folded into a pocket of time, disconnected from the twenty-first century.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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A buckled car protruded from the window of one of the upper classrooms.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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No photograph could describe the spectacle. Even television images failed to encompass the panoramic quality of the disaster, the sense within the plane of destruction of being surrounded by it on all sides, sometimes as far as the eye could see. “It was hell,” Hitomi said. “Everything had disappeared. It was as if an atomic bomb had fallen.” This comparison, for which many people reached, was not an exaggeration. Only two forces can inflict greater damage than a tsunami: collision with an asteroid or nuclear explosion. The scenes along four hundred miles of coast that morning resembled those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but with water substituted for fire, mud for ash, the stink of fish and ooze for scorched wood and smoke.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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As the night progressed, the story of Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s murder and the recovery of her stolen child took on gargantuan proportions as talking heads hosted experts in every crime field imaginable on air, trying to understand the nature of the murder, how it could have happened in the heartland of America, and who was this woman who allegedly had committed such an unthinkable crime. Not even an undersea earthquake of biblical proportions, which would occurr in the coming days, was enough to reduce coverage of the Lisa Montgomery story. Because of the size of the quake, reverberations on the surface of the water generated a tsunami that killed a reported 150,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in history.
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M. William Phelps (Murder In The Heartland)
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early to rise and late to sleep’ schedule had its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, his habit of tuning in to the BBC early in the morning helped the Government of India respond with alacrity to the tsunami in December 2004. Long before any disaster management, national security or intelligence agency woke up to alert government agencies, the PM was up and heard the news of the tsunami.
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Sanjaya Baru (The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh)
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Bill Clinton became the UN Special Envoy for Haiti, pledging, in a slogan borrowed from his work after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, to “Build Back Better” from the storms. The stakes, everyone knew, were high. President Préval, ever more
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Jonathan M. Katz (The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster)
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She had always had a streak of recklessness about her, a willingness to go chasing hurricanes and tsunamis, all in the name of science, always willing to go that bit further than anybody else. Disaster hunting, she called it, surfing the extreme weather.
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Stephen Baxter (Flood (Flood, #1))
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In 1755 one of the worst natural disasters of the eighteenth century occurred: the Lisbon earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people. This Portuguese city was devastated not just by the earthquake, but also by the tsunami that followed, and then by fires that raged for days.
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Nigel Warburton (A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories))
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At the White House, President Collins took a call from Governor Hunt of California, “Mr. President, we have a disaster here in California. San Francisco was wiped out by a tsunami and a 9.5 earthquake. There are no survivors,” “I’m sorry to hear that. When did it happen?” “Thirty minutes ago,” “Was there any warnings at all?” “None. I need you to declare it a federal disaster area, sir,” “I’m not going to do that, Governor,” “Why not?” Hunt couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “The election is less than a week from now, so I need all the votes I can get. San Francisco has been useful to me, since the residents there make up most of my base, so to declare it a federal disaster area and all citizens killed will not get me the votes I need. I will simply purge the story from the media, you won’t acknowledge it happened, and any story that leaks out about it, the person who leaks it will be severely punished.
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Cliff Ball (Times of Trial: Christian End Times Thriller (The End Times Saga Book 3))
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Carlton Church - Natural Disaster Survival Kit
Floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, super typhoons and fires. These types of news appear more frequently within this year than the previous ones. Old people nowadays even complain of the changing world, followed by endless accounts of peaceful living during their time. Are these all effects of global warming? Is our Mother Earth now starting to get angry of what we, humans, have done to its resources? Perhaps.
We can never predict when a disaster would strike our home. And since you are still reading this, it is safe to assume that you are still able breathe and live your life. The best thing we can do right now is prepare. There is no use panicking only when the warning arrives. It is better to give gear up now and perhaps survive a few more years.
Preparation should not be too extravagant. And it doesn’t have to be a suitcase filled with gas masks and whatnot. Remember that on the face of disaster, having a large baggage would be more of a burden that survival assistance. Pack light. You’ll only need a few of the following things:
1. Gears, extra batteries and supplies.
Multi-purpose tool/knife, moist towelettes, dust masks, waterproof matches, needle and thread, compass, area maps, extra blankets and sleeping bags should all should be part of your emergency supply kit.
It is also important to bring extra charge for your devices. There are back-up universal batteries available for most cell phones that can offer an extra charge.
2. Important paperwork and insurance documents.
When tsunami hit Japan last 2011, all documents were washed up resulting to chaos and strenuous recovery operations. Until now, many citizens linger in the streets of Tokyo in the hopes that most technologically advanced city in the world can reproduce certificates, diplomas and other legal and important written document stolen by water. This is why copies of personal documents like a medication list, proof of address, deed/lease to home, and insurance papers, extra cash, family photos and emergency contact information should be included in your survival kits.
3. First Aid Kit
Store your first aid supplies in a tool box or fishing tackle box so they will be easy to carry and protected from water. Inspect your kit regularly and keep it freshly stocked and do not use cheap and fraudulent ones. It is also helpful to note important medical information and most prescriptions that can be tucked into your kit. Medical gauges, bandages, Hydrogen peroxide to wash and disinfect wounds, individually wrapped alcohol swabs and other dressing paraphernalia should also be useful.
Read more at: carltonchurch.org
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Sabrina Carlton
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A guy once asked me to go with him to Indonesia to help people after the latest tsunami hit. I said yes. I had no idea what I was doing. We arrived in Banda Aceh two weeks after the destruction. (Indonesia alone lost a mind-bending two hundred thousand lives.) We weren’t welcomed by everyone. Most people love the help, sure. But I felt unwelcome when a group of Muslim separatists threatened to kill us. (I have a sixth sense about this kind of thing.) They were opposed to Western interference in Aceh and didn’t want us saying anything about Jesus. I just wanted to help some people. I also wanted a hotel. I wanted a safer place. I didn’t want to die. I had no idea what I was getting into. We took supplies to what was, before the tsunami, a fishing village. It was now a group of people living on the ground, some in tents. I just followed what the rest of our little group was doing. They had more experience. We distributed the food, housewares, cooking oil, that sort of thing, and stayed on the ground with them. That’s how our little disaster-response group operated, even though I wanted a hotel. They stayed among the victims and lived with them. After the militant group threatened to slit our throats, I felt kind of vulnerable out there, lying on the ground. As a dad with two little kids, I didn’t sign up for the martyr thing. I took the threat seriously and wanted to leave. The local imam resisted our presence, too, and this bugged me. “Well, if you hate us, maybe we should leave. It’s a thousand degrees, we’ve got no AC or running water or electricity, and your co-religionists are threatening us. So, yeah. Maybe let’s call it off.” But it wasn’t up to me, and I didn’t have a flight back. As we helped distribute supplies to nearby villages, people repeatedly asked the same question: “Why are you here?” They simply couldn’t understand why we would be there with them. They told us they thought we were enemies. One of the members of our group spent time working in a truck with locals, driving slowly through the devastation, in the sticky humidity, picking up the bodies of their neighbors. They piled them in the back of a truck. It was horrific work. They wore masks, of course, but there’s no covering the smell of death. The locals paused and asked him too: “Why? Why are you here?” He told them it was because he worshiped Jesus, and he was convinced that Jesus would be right there, in the back of the truck with them. He loves them. “But you are our enemy.” “Jesus told us to love our enemies.” The imam eventually warmed up to us, and before we left, he even invited our little group to his home for dinner! We sat in his home, one of the few in the area still standing. He explained through an interpreter that he didn’t trust us at first, because we were Christians. But while other “aid” groups would drive by, throw a box out of a car, and get their pictures taken with the people of his village, our group was different. We slept on the ground. He knew we’d been threatened, he knew we weren’t comfortable, and he knew we didn’t have to be there. But there we were, his supposed enemies, and we would not be offended. We would not be alienated. We were on the ground with his people. His wives peered in from the kitchen, in tears. He passed around a trophy with the photo of a twelve-year-old boy, one of his children. He told us the boy had been lost in the tsunami, and could we please continue to search for him? Was there anything we could do? We were crying too.
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Brant Hansen (Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better)
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Nature exists in a state of unconscious oneness with the whole. This, for example, is why virtually no wild animals were killed in the tsunami disaster of 2004. Being more in touch with the totality than humans, they could sense the tsunami’s approach long before it could be seen or heard and so had time to withdraw to higher terrain.
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Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
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Being omnipotent and perfectly evil it is intuitively appealing—irresistible, even—to the pedestrian observer to then suspect that The Owner of All Infernal Names occasionally shoves the earth’s great rocky plates, unwraps a tsunami, whispers a tornado into existence, or angers a volcanic vent. Perhaps it is out of boredom and a need for entertainment, or a thirst that demands to be satisfied, calamities deliver evil in devastatingly muscular ways, and every terrestrial incentive exists to assume the Creator delivers disaster to satisfy His own perverted needs.
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John Zande (The Owner of All Infernal Names: An Introductory Treatise on the Existence, Nature & Government of our Omnimalevolent Creator)
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And now that we exercise so comprehensive a medical and technological mastery over whole regions or nature at whose mercy our ancestors lived out their lives, we enjoy the unprecedented luxury of being able to render the 'natural' at once remote and benign. It is we who summon it, rather than the reverse, and we do so at our pleasure; it dwells with us, not we with it. We are free to sentimentalize or romanticize it, or even weave a veil of empty and unthreatening sanctity around it - until the moment when disease, age, infirmity, or random violence suddenly defeats us, or fire, flood, tempest, volcanic eruption, or earthquake surprise us by vaulting past our defenses. Then nature astonishes and horrifies us with its power, immensity, and sublime indifference. Even at such times, though, it is unlikely that we truly hate it; ours is a disenchanted world because it is one from which our love, reverence, dread, and hatred have all been irrevocably alienated. Nature for us is a single, internally consistent thing, an event, lovely and enticing, then terrible and pitiless, abundant and destructive at once, but moved neither by will nor by intelligence; it is sheer fact.
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David Bentley Hart (The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?)
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Joe Public never took long to move to the next news sensation. Downed airliners, earthquakes in China, tsunamis killing tens of thousands, or myriad of disasters that trotted across the news bulletins regularly, all of them were always replaced by the next big headline.
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Susan May (Happy Nightmares! Thriller Omnibus)
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There is no such thing as a natural disaster. In earthquakes the architecture fails. If you’re out in a grassy meadow, it doesn’t matter how big the earthquake is: it might knock you down, but if nothing falls on top of you and nothing catches fire from broken gas mains or power lines, then you’re probably okay. Architecture is the first casualty of earthquakes, and human beings under the architecture are the casualties of the architecture. Even with a wholly natural disaster, whatever that might be—a tsunami, maybe—who gets help, who has resources to rebuild, who is treated as a threat or a malingerer—those are not natural but social phenomena.
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Rebecca Solnit
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I was remarkably calm. Calm and fatigued. There would be no violence. It was like a storm coming up. The café chairs are carried inside, the awnings are rolled up, but nothing happens. The storm passes over. And, at the same time, that's too bad. After all, we would all rather see the roofs ripped from the houses, the trees uprooted and tossed through the air; documentaries about tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis have a soothing effect. Of course, it's terrible — we've all been taught to say that we think it's terrible. But a world without disasters and violence — be it the violence of nature of that of muscle and blood — would be a truly unbearable thing.
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Herman Koch
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Karma, God, Earthquake, Natural disasters,
Posted on May 2, 2015 by Priyavrat Thareja
The Earthquakes, Tsunamis, etc are God’s smaller initiatives to a bigger correction, implemented in single steps. The prioritisation of place, time and logistics is set by mankind in inverse relationship to the Karma.
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Priyavrat Thareja
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The most important thing of all is to stay supple and flexible,” he said. “The moment you will be most stiff is when you die—you never get stiffer than that. So you’ve got to sleep well, eat well, and keep moving.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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The earthquake is the thing that all humans face: the banal inevitability of death. We don’t know when it will come, but we know that it will. We take refuge in elaborate and ingenious precautions, but in the end they are all in vain. We think about it even when we are not thinking about it; after a while, it seems to define what we are. It comes most often for the old, but we feel it most cruelly when it also takes away the young.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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The universe wraps everything up inside it, in the end,” Kaneta said. “Life, death, grief, anger, sorrow, joy. There was no boundary, then, between the living and the dead. There was no boundary between the selves of the living. The thoughts and feelings of everyone who was there at that moment melted into one. That was the understanding I achieved at that time, and it was what made compassion possible, and love, in something like the Christian sense.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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The moment you will be most stiff is when you die - you never get stiffer than that. So you've got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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Fast on the heels of his brilliant 'The Cardiff Giant', Larry Lockridge has done it again, and differently. 'The Great Cyprus Think Tank' offers a fizzing brew of ideas, erotic shenanigans, cultural commentary, and stylistic brio. With the lightest of touches and a rapier wit, Lockridge conjures a sociable intellectual frolic that effortlessly ingathers everything form climate change to animal rights to Shakespeare to Rimbaud's lost notebook to the upheavals of Cypriot history. Mindful of all kinds of disaster, this is a novel of deep comedy, energy, and chastened joy. I strongly advise you to ride out any tsunami on the backs of Lockridge's sea turtles.
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Maureen N. McLane
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The hurricane Ian disaster was a like a tsunami in slow motion!
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Steven Magee
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Your worldview will make a difference to how you react to disasters like the coronavirus pandemic, and to earthquakes or tsunamis.
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John C. Lennox (Where is God in a Coronavirus World?)
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In geological terms, Japan is in an appalling situation, on top of not one, but two so-called triple junctions—points at which three of the Earth’s tectonic plates collide and grate against one another. Fire, wind, flood, landslide, earthquake, and tsunami: it is a country of intense, elemental violence. Harsh natural environments often breed qualities that take on the status of national characteristics—the dark fatalism of Russians, the pioneer toughness of frontier Americans. Japanese identify in themselves the virtue of nintai or gaman, variously rendered as endurance, patience, or perseverance
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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Japanese gaman is not a philosophical concept. The conventional translations fail to convey the passivity and abnegation that the idea contains, the extent to which gaman often seems indistinguishable from a collective lack of self-esteem. Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after the disaster; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted the Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over and no responsibility for their national plight.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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A magnitude 9.2 earthquake,” he said. “When something that powerful occurs, the Earth moves on its axis. So many people, all over Tohoku, were looking up at the sky on that night, filled with intense feelings. And looking at the stars, I became aware of the universe, the infinite space all around and above us. I felt as if I was looking into the universe, and I was conscious of the earthquake as something that had taken place within that vast expanse of empty space. And I began to understand that this was all part of a whole. Something enormous had happened. But whatever it was, it was entirely natural; it had happened as one of the mechanisms of the universe. “It’s engraved in my mind: the pitiless snow, and the beautiful shining, starry sky, and all those countless dead bodies drifting onto the beach. Perhaps this sounds pretentious, but I realized that when I began my work, giving support to people whose lives had been destroyed, I had to attend to the hearts of human beings and their suffering and anguish. But I also
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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However, a year later, the new Secretary of Agriculture, Julius Sterling Morton, brought in by the newly elected President Cleveland, was opposed to scientific research, even attacking scientists within the Weather Bureau, and preferred to ask a major in the Signal Corps for weather advice.
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Bruce Parker (The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, Rogue Waves, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters (MacSci))
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When I filed my stories on the ‘Children of the Tsunami’ I had thought there was no special eloquence needed to convey such visceral sadness and loss. Children dead in their thousands in one of the worst natural disasters the country had experienced—this was a story that told itself. But that night, after the telecast, I got a call from a friend who said, ‘Do we really have to watch this depressing stuff on television right now?’—as if life’s grim reality was an optional item on a movie menu in a hotel room and you could pick out only the cheery stuff to view. In several of my reports I actually began editorializing more than ever before, appealing directly to those vacationing in happier, sunnier spots to pause and at least think about these children. The callousness of the well-heeled was eye-opening. To be reminded that for a section of Indian society the deaths of the children of poor fisherfolk mattered not at all was both disconcerting and disturbing.
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Barkha Dutt (This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines)
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Even the most intense aerial bombing leaves the walls and foundations of burned-out buildings, as well as parks and woods, roads and tracks, fields and cemeteries. The tsunami spared nothing, and achieved feats of surreal juxtaposition that no explosion could match. It plucked forests up by their roots, and scattered them miles inland. It peeled the macadam off the roads, and cast it hither and thither in buckled ribbons. It stripped houses to their foundations, and lifted cars, lorries, ships and corpses onto the top of tall buildings.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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There was no advance warning, no marginal area of incremental damage. The wave had come in with full force, spent itself and stopped at a point as clearly defined as the reach of a high tide. Above it, nothing had been touched; below it, everything was changed.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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There are several aerial films of the incoming tsunami, but the one that plays and replays in my imagination was shot above the town of Natori, south of the city of Sendai. It begins over land rather than sea, with a view of dun winter paddy fields. Something is moving across the landscape as if it is alive, a brown-snouted animal hungrily bounding over the earth. Its head is a scum of splintered debris; entire cars bob along on its back. It seems to steam and smoke as it moves; its body looks less like water or mud than a kind of solid vapor. And then a large boat can be seen riding it inland, hundreds of yards from the sea, and—unbelievably—blue-tiled houses, still structurally intact, spinning across the inundated fields with orange flames dancing on their roofs. The creature turns a road into a river, then swallows it whole, and then it is raging over more fields and roads towards a village and a highway thick with cars. One driver is accelerating ahead of it, racing to escape—before the car and its occupants are gobbled up by the wave.
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Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
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AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION: More than twenty-five years ago while researching the fourth Saint-Germain book, Path of the Eclipse, I ran across references to the Year of the Yellow Snow, sometimes called the Year of the Dark Sun, in Western reckoning A.D. 535-36, which was characterized by catastrophic drops in temperature, crop failures, and famine throughout Asia and Europe, with disruption of trade and movements of populations resulting from these losses—just the sort of event to set the speculative juices, flowing, but not the object of my research, nor the period with which I was dealing, promising though it appeared. Then, about ten years ago, other researchers did some serious scholarship on those disastrous events and tried to determine the cause of what turned out to be a worldwide famine and, after considering a number of different scenarios from meteor collisions to a mini-ice age—which indeed occurred—at last identified the probable source of the trouble as an eruption of that all-time bad-boy volcano, Krakatoa; this eruption was more overwhelming than many of its others, for, according to records in Indonesia, this eruption broke Sumatra off from Java—Krakatoa is at the hinge position of those two islands—and opened the Sundra Strait to a deep-water sea passage instead of only the shallowest-draft boats, which it had been for centuries. The eruption occurred in late February or early March of A.D. 535, and its explosion was heard all the way to Beijing. It had been heralded by many months of regional instability, earthquakes, and drastic variations in ocean temperatures in and around what was becoming the Sundra Strait, making the shipping lanes more treacherous than they had been in the past. Many ships' captains reported dangerous sailing in and around Indonesia, and over time, merchant ships avoided the region. ¶ In April, following the eruption, the ash from the volcano had spread all around the world, and disaster followed after it, impacting global weather patterns and lowering the average temperatures sufficiently to keep crops from growing in most of Asia and Europe, as well as large portions of Africa and Americas. Although every part of the world was affected, there were regions that bore more of the brunt of the tragedy than others. Many of the nomadic people of the Central Asian Steppes were driven out of their traditional grazing lands when their herds began to die because of lack of food as the grasslands became arid plains, and their struggle to find new pastureland was made much more difficult by the impact of the colder weather; the significant westward migration from Central Asia began as an attempt to find grass for their herds. In China and Tibet, the snow that continued to fall all the way into June and July was yellow due to the high levels of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. Closer to the eruption site, actual flakes of sulfur fell from the sky, burning people, animals, and fields alike and contaminating wells, springs, and rivers; the devastation of the Indonesian Islands was calamitous, with tens of thousands of people killed in tsunamis spawned by the eruption, by gaseous emanations, and by sulfur contamination, records of which still exist in the royal archives of the Srivijava Empire, which comprised most of modern Indonesia. For months afterward, the remains of humans, animals, trees, sea-life, and buildings washed up on the shores of what are now Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines, China, and India.
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Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Dark of the Sun (Saint-Germain, #17))
Mary Pope Osborne (Tsunamis and Other Natural Disasters (Magic Tree House Fact Tracker #15))
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We’ve already noted that we can’t detect natural disasters on Earth, but many native creatures can. From this, we can conclude that our home planet probably doesn’t have any natural disasters. This is easy enough to explain: if the crust is one solid piece, as it is on Mars, rather than separate plates, as it is on Earth, there won’t be any earthquakes or tsunamis. Without seasons, there’s nothing to
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Ellis Silver (Humans Are Not from Earth: A Scientific Evaluation of the Evidence)
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Nikki gets a Tweet about the Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who donated a million dollars to Tohoku’s disaster relief fund.
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Gretel Ehrlich (Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami)
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This was another important lesson in the impermanence of all things. Japan lies in a seismically active zone, so earthquakes are not uncommon. Disaster can strike at any moment, but we forget this, distracted by the bright, shiny comforts of our everyday lives. Wrapped in a false sense of security, we fall asleep, and in this dream, our life passes. The earthquake shook us awake, and the tsunami washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken. Knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is, and love each other as we are—completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful this way, don’t you think?
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Ruth Ozeki (The Book of Form and Emptiness)