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| Reuters,
10 Jan 05 Geography, Planning Spare Maldives Tsunami's Worst by Dayan Candappa MALE - Standing on the rock that is the Maldives' highest point and looking down on the Indian Ocean less than 3 metres (10 feet) below, it is easy to see why this nation of low-lying atolls fears rising sea-levels will one day wipe it off the map. What is less easy to understand is why that nightmare did not become a reality the day after Christmas when a giant tsunami crushed fishing villages and tourist resorts across Asia. Thanks to a combination of geography and planning, the death toll in the Maldives stands at just 80 in a disaster that claimed more than 150,000 lives from Indonesia to Somalia. That is not to say the remote, idyllic island chain famed for its pristine white sand beaches and some of the world's best scuba diving escaped lightly. "Some of the places I've visited look like they've been hit by a nuclear bomb," said Tom Bergmann-Harris, head of the United Nations Children's Fund in the Maldives. More than 15,000 of the 300,000 population are homeless and the economy is reeling from the impact on tourism and fishing. But the death toll could have been far worse. Geography was key. Ironically the very factor that made the islands so vulnerable to the ocean may have spared them the tsunami's worst. "The Maldives are so flat and small and low that the tsunami may not have even noticed us in its path," said Mohamed Shareef, a British-educated environmental expert who works for the president's communications office. LUCKY ESCAPE The absence of a big landmass on which to crest meant the waves hitting the Maldives did not pack the same punch that so devastated Indonesia's Aceh province, close to epicentre of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that triggered the tsunami, as well as the southeastern coast of neighbouring Sri Lanka. Many of the Maldives' 1,200 tiny palm-fringed coral islands, dotted across 500 miles (800 km) off the toe of India, were swamped by waves about a metre high, much smaller than the walls of water up to 10 metres (30 ft) high reported elsewhere. But even on islands that took bigger hits -- some survivors reported seeing waves up to 4 metres high -- another geographical quirk saved lives. As they did elsewhere, the first waves struck the islands' eastern shores, which faced the epicentre, and then swirled round to crash into their western seaboard. In the Maldives the phenomenon was a life saver, with the second wave cresting so soon after the first that it simply washed people back onto the shore. "We heard this story again and again among survivors," said Deputy Tourism Minister Mohamed Saeed. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom has spent much of his 26 years in power warning that his country will disappear if nothing is done to fight global warming, which is thought to cause sea level rises. The issue is a central plank of foreign policy and a national obsession, so much so that the government is building a new isle from scratch as an overflow to Male which is a metre higher. "People here are constantly thinking whether their grandchildren will be able to live here," said Ajit Weerwardene, a hotel worker from Sri Lanka. Those fears have prompted the Maldives to take a series of precautions. A sea-wall around Male spared the city any serious damage, while strict regulations mean there is never more than one hotel on any of the 200 inhabited islands. It was not yet clear how much damage has been caused to the island's coral reefs, which give natural protection against rising tides and storms, but the government fears the worst. links Related articles on Tsunami and the environment |
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