MSNBC – U.K. girl saved tourists after raising warning — Here is why education is important. Who else did this?
LONDON – A 10-year-old British girl saved 100 other tourists from the Asian tsunami having warned them a giant mass of water was on its way after learning about the phenomenon weeks earlier at school, a newspaper reported.
“I was on the beach and the water started to go funny,” Tilly Smith told the Sun at the weekend from Phuket, Thailand.
“There were bubbles and the tide went out all of a sudden. I recognized what was happening and had a feeling there was going to be a tsunami. I told mummy.”
In my experience, the first several stories after a disaster are found out to be bullsh*t within a week. I bet this one is; and I’m sure the story of the guy riding the wave is too.
So should we install 10-year-old British girls along public beaches in, say, half-mile intervals?
I knew this too, but I didn’t see the tide go out in any of the home videos I’ve seen. Just saw a swell/wave building in the distance.
I tend to agree. But the stories are great whether BS or not. The problem with todays media is that nobody will ever follow up. And where is the picture of the little girl? Are cameras not working?
How much of this c*** comes out of people’s mouths on a daily basis…
Only when disaster hits you find that one in a million who sent a signal, probably because it was in the school curricula.
When my little sister was 6 she told my Dad not to take a flight to Frankfurt. He left the airport and came back home. Nothing went amiss with that flight.
I may be wrong, but one of the unreported effects of the Tsunami is the impact its had on companies who off-shore work. I bought a Virgin Mobile phone for my wife for Christmas ands i has yet to be activated. Iquiries to Virgin yield nothing except, “Be patient.”
I’m thinking that even if the Tsumani had no direct effect on these operations, the infrastructure of the local governments is inadequate to quickly and efficiently reroute or reconfigure communications.
As I say, maybe I’m wrong, but I still wonder.
at this point, I’ve read a number of stories……and, seems the “smart money” ran instead of staying to oooh and ahhhh the water rushing away from the beach….then watching as a wall of water was rushing towards them.
It’s not like it hit “without warning”. An approaching tsunami is usually preceeded by a noticeable fall or rise in the water level. (Way out of the ordinary.) And, its LOUD…like the sound of a dozen freight trains. (You can hear the background noise on a number of the home vids). The point is, tsunami’s just don’t sneak up on you like our Pacific Coast “sleeper waves”.
Eyewitness reports confirm that many people were killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami because they went down to the beach to view the retreating ocean exposing the seafloor. (Unaware that this phenomenon precedes a killer wave.) Every science book I’ve ever read says that if you see the receding ocean you may have as much as 5 to 10 minutes to move to higher ground.
I don’t think this story is b.s. A number of people recognized this as a tsunami. The amazing thing is that the girl’s mom listened to her!!
It’s interesting to see how this blog has attracted so many cynics. BRAVO!! And I also wonder about how the litle girl managed to convince Mom that she knew best. Then again kids can be nags too.
[Dvorak]
When people become superstitious and when they watch films like the Exorcist, they’ll believe anything.
We cannot really know if this is true, though the Sun is better known for giving opinionated stories rather than actually making them up. Reuters, who was another source, tends to be very reliable. So it is probable that some version of this occurred. But as meetsy above comments, this relationship between reef and tsunami is not unknown, just rare or inactive, even for island people.
It certainly could have happened. Having witnessed a (much much) smaller tsunami (some years ago), the visual impact on the reef is dramatic – like something out of the twilight zone. It draws people to it, locals and tourists. By the time you can see what is coming, it would be too late to reach high ground if needed. This was a constant topic of conversation on Atiu and Rarotonga in the Cook Islands immediately following the recent disaster. They discussed past tsunami on different islands in the group (Manihiki in the Northern group was nearly destroyed 7 years ago by a wave that washed over the entire atoll), and they said much the same thing … people gather to watch until the alarm is given by someone. The point being, the alarm is taken and action follows.
I too wonder how the girl managed to convince anyone, unless they also ‘knew’ but just weren’t putting the knowledge together in time to make the association. Events such as this one happen on generational time scales, even smaller ‘threatening’ tsunami are few in a lifetime. I suspect the role the girl was taking was that of ‘reminding’ everyone to drag that arcane knowledge out (the locals would certainly ‘know’ even if it was deep in the background).