Chile: The Lessons of a Tragedy

摘要

The giant waves that devastated the Indian Ocean's coastline clearly demonstrated the need to create at the global level a tsunami warning system similar to the one UNESCO established in 1968 in the Pacific Ocean. It was early afternoon on May 22, 1960, in the thriving port of Corral, southern Chile, when disaster struck. The town's inhabitants were at first startled to see the sea rising and then disappearing: the water simply withdrew, leaving boats marooned on the mud of the sea floor. Just a few minutes later, the terrified inhabitants began to witness the return of the water, but this time in the shape of a gigantic wall that was decimating everything in its path. Thousands of people died that day on the shores of southern Chile and in lands as far away as Hawaii or Japan, for the giant wave (or "tsunami," as the Japanese call it) travelled the entire Pacific Ocean, coast to coast.