NEW DELHI, May 21: At least 15,000 villagers were evacuated on Saturday after a freak tide caused a surge of sea water in the southern Indian state of Kerala , triggering memories of December’s devastating tsunami. Sea water crashed into fishing hamlets late Friday in Trivandrum, Ernakulam, Alappuzha, Thrissur and Kannur districts, state revenue Minister K.M Mani told reporters.
Meteorologists did not say what caused the tide.
“District officials with the help of the police shifted people living in the coastal belt into 16 makeshift camps as sea water swept into their homes,” said Mani. “The high tide has started receding but people have been asked not to go out into the sea in their fishing boats. Most of the villagers are too scared to think of taking any chances as it has revived memories of the tsunami,” he added.
Most people opted to stay at the camps Saturday, despite the sea being calm. Some 10,273 people died and 5,823 were listed missing in the December 26 when towering waves slammed into the Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago in the Indian Ocean.
TSUNAMI REASSESSED: The devastating December 26 earthquake that rocked the Indian Ocean and unleashed a tsunami that killed nearly 300,000 people was even stronger than officials initially believed, measuring 9.15 on the Richter scale instead of the initial calculation of 9, according to new studies published in the journal Science on Friday.
The quake was the world’s fourth largest since 1900. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in India and the United States Geological Survey also found that the earthquake was slower than first thought.
“The earthquake lasted at least an hour and perhaps up to three hours, with much of the deformation happening more than one hour after the main shock,” said Roland Buergmann, professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley.
“Normally, we see deformation of the surface a few hundred kilometers away, but here we see deformation 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) away, and five or six times the deformation we’ve seen in previous quakes,” he said.
More than six months later, said Buergmann, “the Earth is still ringing like a bell.” In another article in Science, Roger Bilham, a University of Colorado seismologist, said that investigating the December quake will allow scientists to “learn numerous new things about our planet, and in particular about the Pacific Northwest, where a similar earthquake could occur at any time.”—AFP
