"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

We Suck

by Lee

Once again, it’s all America’s fault.

Until two weeks ago, Smith Thammasaroj was a prophet without honor. As chief of Thailand’s meteorological department in 1998, he was accused of scare-mongering when he warned that the country’s southwest coast could face a deadly tsunami.

He retired under a shadow, dismissed as a crackpot, accused of causing panic and jeopardizing a critical tourist industry that grew up around the tropical resort island of Phuket.

Today, Smith is being lionized for his foresight after the devastating Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 150,000 people around the region, including 5,300 in Thailand, where 3,600 more are listed as missing.

Less than a week after the tragedy, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra appointed Smith as a vice minister and put him in charge of the newly established National Disaster Warning Office, which will work with seismologists to establish a tsunami early warning system.

Now when Smith speaks, people listen. And he has a new message: The United States must take some of the blame for the grievous number of casualties.

The 68-year-old forecaster - who earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the University of Vermont in 1962 - said he believes that if the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center had acted quickly enough, many lives could have been saved.

Workers at the Hawaii center have said they tried in vain to warn Indian Ocean nations about the possible effects of the earthquake but they were not equipped to monitor that part of the world and didn’t even have phone numbers for the right officials.

The Hawaii center, set up in 1948, hosts the only regional network of its kind in the world, but is set up solely to monitor Pacific Ocean countries.

“I’m not angry at them for failing to warn Thailand, because at that time they did not know for sure, they merely said a tsunami was possible after the earthquake,” Smith told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Tuesday.

But after the giant waves hit southern Thailand, the center had more than an hour to alert India, Bangladesh and the Maldives, “and if they warned those countries, they could have saved thousands of lives,” he said.

“It’s their failure to do so that makes me mad at them,” he said.

Somehow he neglects to blame Thailand for not installing their own tsunami warning system.  Why should he, when America is the defualt target?

Comments

Posted by on 03/07/05 at 10:13 PM from

Yay!  Let’s sue America!

U.S. and Austrian lawyers have filed a lawsuit demanding Thailand, U.S. forecasters and the French Accor group answer accusations they failed in a duty to warn populations hit by December’s Tsunami disaster, a lawyer said Monday.

I’ve heard that the US is “The World’s Policeman”, but never “The World’s Weatherman”.

Posted by Drumwaster on 03/07/05 at 10:15 PM from

Wasn’t there some story that said we did warn them but they chose not to pass on those warnings because it would wreck tourism?

Posted by on 03/07/05 at 10:17 PM from

Hmmm.  I don’t know.  Sounds like a job for the FactBot!  (I wouldn’t be surprised, though.)

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