Free Republic

Four central Illinois parents got a scare late Saturday when they learned their two daughters were stuck in the tidal waves that killed thousands of people over the weekend in South Asia. When the tsunamis hit, the two women, Maria Cicci, 24, and Gina Will, 23, were on a beach vacation with two other women on Thailand's Phuket Island during the Christmas holiday. Cicci and Will work as English teachers in Ashikaga, Japan, Springfield's sister city. Bernie and Lin Will got a phone call from their daughter about 8 a.m. Thai time to tell them that everything was going well....

The USS Memphis was a large armoured cruiser of 18,000 tons, originally named the Tennessee, and launched on 3 December 1904. Her boilers were coal-fired and she had two reciprocating engines which gave her a speed of 23 knots. Her main armament consisted of four ten-inch guns in twin turrets, and when she was commissioned these guns could outrange those of any battleship in existence. Her subsidiary armament included 16 six-inch and 22 three-inch guns. She was renamed Memphis in 1916 to release the name Tennessee for a battleship (BB43) which was then under construction. Many of the dock workers...

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations has warned of epidemics within days unless health systems in south and southeast Asia can cope after some 12,000 people were killed and tens of thousands left homeless by giant tsunami waves. Aid agencies round the world rushed staff, equipment and money to southern Asia after the tsunamis, triggered by a massive underwater earthquake, pummelled coastal communities in at least six countries on Sunday. "This may be the worst national disaster in recent history because it is affecting so many heavily populated coastal areas ... so many vulnerable communities," the U.N.'s Emergency Relief Coordinator...

It is no wonder that earthquakes and floods feature so frequently in the Old Testament. They are, in the correct sense, awesome things. When the Earth itself is disordered, we feel a primal fear. Even the most sophisticated people may find themselves crossing their fingers superstitiously, or murmuring imprecations to some ill-defined power. The flood story - the folk-memory of an ancient inundation that wiped away all but a few survivors - was common across Europe, Asia and pre-Columbian America. Modern fears of global warming and rising sea-levels are, in their way, an echo of that same Noah myth: they...

Earthquake, Tidal Waves Crush Korea's Tourism Industry The powerful earthquake that triggered devastating tidal waves off the waters of the Indonesian island of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean is impacting Korea's travel agencies during a peak holiday season. While on-site rescue efforts are underway, many tourists are bottled up in the region, with delays in flight arrangements as local airports have also been hit by the colossal tidal waves accompanied by the earthquake. Runways are inundated with water and air traffic control systems at key airports have been rendered out of service. Korean travel agencies have been flooded with last-minute...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - A military spokesman raised the estimated number of deaths in Sri Lanka caused by devastating tidal waves by more than 5,000 people on Monday, raising the death toll from the regional catastrophe to just under 20,000 people.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Asian stocks and currencies fell on Monday after tsunami waves triggered by the world's worst earthquake in 40 years killed nearly 15,000 people and wreaked havoc on tourist beaches. The yen touched an 18-month low against the euro, falling with emerging Asian currencies as traders tried to assess the economic fallout from the disaster. Shares in travel-related companies fell across the board as the region counted the cost of tsunamis that devastated areas of Sri Lanka, southeastern India, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. Thai shares fell 1.5 percent to lead losses in Asia, weighed down by a 3.5...

However, the government said two thirds of the capital was under about four feet (1.2 meters) of water in some areas. About a third of the country’s 330,000 population live in the highly congested capital island. Maldives is a cluster of 1,192 tiny coral islands scattered some 800 kilometres (500 miles) across the equator and is vulnerable to any rise in sea levels. The fate of tens of thousands of tourists in the Maldives was not immediately known.

A collapsing volcano in the Atlantic could unleash a giant wave of water that would swamp the Caribbean and much of the eastern seaboard of the United States, a scientist has claimed. Dr Simon Day, of the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at University College London, UK, believes one flank of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, in the Canaries archipelago, is unstable and could plunge into the ocean. If I was living in Miami or New York and I heard that the Cumbre Vieja was erupting, I would keep a very close eye on the...

Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites   Rare photo of a rogue wave     21 July 2004  Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins.  Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major...