EDITORIAL - A reminder from history

Yesterday saw the 20th anniversary of what is arguably the worst natural disaster to happen in modern times; the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed no less than 227,000 people.

It all started with a magnitude-9.3 earthquake off the west coast of Banda Aceh in Indonesia. That undersea quake gave rise to monster waves that killed hundreds of thousands in 18 countries bordering the Indian Ocean.

The sight of seaside towns and resorts reduced to rubble, of people frantically looking for missing loved ones or desperately trying to pick up their lives, and of piles upon piles of corpses lying among the ruins became the staple of news reports for days or even weeks to come.

There was no human culprit or influence here. That disaster was a completely natural act. While storms can be influenced by climate change brought about by human activities, the same cannot be said of undersea earthquakes; nature just decided that that was the time for such an event.

The only reason why the disaster didn’t affect us here in the Philippines was that we were shielded by our Southeast-Asian neighbor countries. And we might be able to say this is somewhat fair in a providential way; we are always being battered by storms from the Pacific Ocean it would seem only right that we don’t receive any more harsh treatment from another ocean just a few countries away.

But still it should serve as a reminder to always respect nature’s power. Nature doesn’t always make sense; disasters like earthquakes can strike anywhere at any time. It is also never fair as it can inflict multiple disasters on a place at once.

This disaster should also serve as reminder for all of us to be ready for whatever nature might dish out. Before the year ended some places in the Philippines saw a series of strong typhoons, but with what we saw with government response it would again seem they hadn’t experience something like this before.

This perennial unpreparedness, this perpetual slide to tabula rasa after every disaster is something we have to remedy.