After their return owing to favourable circumstances, many of them would report, horror-stricken, how the ocean slowly "receded" in order to come back about half an hour later in several deadly giant waves. In the media around the globe, news chased each other about the countries and regions most heavily hit – Indonesia (mainly Sumatra), Sri Lanka, the Maldives, India, Bangladesh, but also the coast of East Africa – and about the number of casualties among locals and tourists.

By mid-February, the number of victims seemed to have finally halted at about 280,000. Thus, the flood wave identified as "tsunami" goes down in history as one of the deadliest natural disasters in the past centuries!

What Japanese fishermen have called by the comparably harmless-sounding name "harbour wave" (Jap. "tsunami") already for centuries, came totally unexpected for the people of the regions this time affected in two respects.

On the one hand, scientific records report only six tsunamis in the past 250 years (in spite of frequent quakes in the region). On the other, western measuring stations did record the December seaquake causing the tsunami, and warnings were issued to the states most likely to be hit, but all emergency plans failed or were simply not existent.

Why the wave(s), which did not seem THAT huge on our TV screens, was (were) still able to cause a disaster of this extent, explains Hans Schönlaub, director of the Geologische Bundesanstalt in Vienna. He relies on the findings of a naturalised Austrian of the 19th century.

It was Ferdinand von Hofstetter, whom the Geologische Reichsanstalt Vienna sent on the famous expedition on the frigate “Novara”, who penned the first scientific description of the natural phenomenon tsunami. After a ten-month stay in New Zealand, the later First Director of the Natural History Museum in Vienna kept an intensive correspondence with his New Zealand colleagues and thus learned of an extraordinary natural phenomenon, which devastated the harbour of the city of Littleton in 1868.

Together with additional information on similar events in Peru, he reasoned that earthquakes, seaquakes and submarine landslides were closely connected to the gigantic flood waves. “As a matter of fact, the December tsunami, too, was caused by a typical seaquake in the Indonesian island arc.

Before a tsunami, tectonic plates of the Earth’s mantle slip underneath each other and get “jammed”. This causes one of the plates to bounce up again, displacing trillions of cubic metres of water all at once. A ring-shaped wave of ten to fifteen metres high originates in the hypocentre and rushes at the incredibly high speed of 600 to 800 km/h over the sea surface.

With increasing distances, the wave – depending on the magnitude of the quake, on the depth of the ocean, and the topography of the seafloor – becomes shallower (approx. 80 cm), in order to rise again to heights of more than 10 meters on coasts, where it has less space,” explains Schönlaub.

The wavelength is approximately 100 km! The trough reaches the coast first, and about half an hour later, the first crest of the wave. “This gives the impression that the sea recedes at first,” says the expert and continues: “The energy of a tsunami remains constant from its location of origin to the coast. The strange thing is that this giant wave does not brake and that its entire energy is discharged only at the coast – and way up inland!”

International help is arriving!

While the extent of the disaster became only gradually clear in far-away Europe, telephones ran hot already within no time at the two international aid organisation United Nations Organisation for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid/UNOCHA and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent/IFRC, both located in Geneva.

Top priority was the “assignment” of operational areas and the assessment of the kind and extent of necessary support. For this purpose, special Field Assessment and Coordination Teams/FACT of the IFRC (partly in personal union with UNOCHA representatives) were sent on site.

In addition, the Red Cross team members constantly present in the so-called “disaster prone areas” of the region were asked for their assessment of the situation. As to the IFRC, the national societies were subsequently informed. Thus, the Austrian Red Cross was assigned the worst affected Aceh Province/Sumatra (acute care), and Southwestern Sri Lanka (reconstruction aid).

In the case of Aceh, officer-in-charge Peter Kaiser and his colleague Günter J. Stummer of the Vienna General Secretariat immediately decided to send a so-called “Emergency Response Unit”/ ERU with the emphasis on water and sanitation. This form of ERU is able to provide help regarding the purification and distribution of drinking water, the construction of latrines, disinfestation, malaria control, etc. within the shortest possible time.

The poorest are hit worst

This strange “universal law” seems to particularly apply to the northernmost province of Sumatra, Aceh (capital Banda Aceh). Devastated by a civil war of many decades, the people had just begun to remove the damage caused by the quake, when the wave, high as a tower, hit them.

Peter Kaiser recalls the oppressive pictures of the rural areas all too well: “In the midst of a landscape covered by grey sludge, in a brooding heat smelling of putrefaction, we meet the first survivors. Particularly thirst is omnipresent, since the flood has also destroyed most of the traditional karezzes (canals and tunnels for water distribution). In addition, many of the springs are now contaminated or filled with salt water. These pictures stay with you for many weeks after returning home, although we were not concerned with the recovery of bodies and although we have adequate psychological support.”

As fast as possible, the specially trained volunteers of the ERU (eight Austrians, two Swedes, and two Macedonians) position the drinking water purification units brought along. Each of them fills almost 100 euro-palettes and weighs nearly 20 t. This is manly due to the pre-treatment tanks with a capacity of 15,000 l raw water, the 15,000 l bag tanks (for transport by lorry), the stable, 10,000 l capacity aluminium ring tanks for the distribution of pure water in villages, but also heavy generators.

Like the Austrian Army in its relief missions, the Austrian Red Cross, too, relies on the approved filter technology of the German company ELGA Berkefeld GmbH in Celle. After all, in the adsorption procedure for drinking water purification, the chemicals added to raw water – chlorine, iron-3-chloride, or aluminium sulphate – have to be removed again after the treatment process is terminated.

Günter J. Stummer can be satisfied: “Our labs confirm that the final result is excellent drinking water with bacterial count ‘zero’, which fully corresponds to the Austrian Drinking Water Ordinance.” Directly on the coast, drinking water is produced by seawater desalination, for example by reverse osmosis. In this context, it is important for relief teams to have the latest technology at hand, which is simply operated and serviced.

The Austrian Red Cross thus unites all three generally acknowledged principles of international disaster relief – sustainability, cultural awareness, und capacity building – with the motto “KISS” coined by the US Army at the end of the Vietnam War (however, with a contemptuous connotation).

KISS stands for “Keep it simple, stupid” – now with the connotation of “aligned technology”. After the emergency, all appliances go to the national organisation, which shall be able to handle them in the future. Peter Kaiser: “Being the ‘competence centre’ for water treatment within the IFRC, the Austrian Red Cross will therefore organise a kind of in-house exhibition in the Vienna region in 2005 to get an overview of the latest innovations.

Filling tube in place of assault rifle

Other Austrian organisations presently active in the disaster regions are in addition to the Austrian Red Cross the Arbeitersamariterbund, Caritas, ÖBB (Austrian Rail), and, like the Austrian Red Cross “in the front line”, the Austrian Armed Forces.

While the Austrian Rescue Teams – recruited from employees of the Ministries of Defence, of the Interior and for Foreign Affairs – were mainly involved with supporting the Austrian embassies with the search for Austrian citizens, the involvement of the army has meanwhile developed into a mission for supplying the local population with drinking water in the Southwest of Sri Lanka.

According to Major Norbert Schartner of the Press Department of the Austrian Armed Forces, this mission was a response to a request for aid by the Singhalese Government addressed to the Austrian Government, which sent an Austrian Forces Disaster Relief Unit/AFDRU. The AFDRUs, established after the disastrous earthquake in Armenia, are part of the NBC Defence Schools consisting of about 600 persons and are grouped for every mission individually – e.g. “Search and Rescue” or “Water Purification”.

AFDRU is formed of volunteers being mainly professional soldiers with special knowledge and a secondary function, e.g. at the ambulance or fire brigade.” In the case of the Asia mission, the starting signal of the Federal Government was given on 3 January, whereupon 76 soldiers of the NBC Defence School immediately began with the preparations.

Definitely record-breaking was the ensuing performance demonstration. Thus, the Armed Forces, suffering from decade-long financial depletion and political unkindness, succeeded within only 96 hours in mobilising the “AFDRU Water Purification” as well as a paramedic and a pioneer contingent, transferring it 8,000 km to Colombo, moving it another 140 km south near the city of Galle, where special forces erected a camp for themselves later called “Camp Elephant Lodge”, assembling the equipment and starting with water purification already in the evening of 6 January! Raw water was taken from the Hyare Lake (about 15 km in the Northeast of Galle) that a sent-out rescue team had found before.

Schartner’s eyes glow with ardour as he reports that the highly equipped and flexible US Marine Corps arrived only days later and had to supply itself with drinking water from the Austrians for two days... While drinking water purification itself was largely easy – until the first week of February a total of 1,462,000 l of pure drinking water were produced – the transport of water proved a real challenge. Major Schartner himself spent several weeks in the disaster region and is still shocked about the effect of the flood.

“It was even able to rip the local ‘Jungle Express’ off the rails and to catapult it 150 m inland! Due to the extensive damage of infrastructure, we only had three old tank lorries for our AFDRU and the Pinzgauer cross-country vehicles that we had brought along.” Each equipped with a 2,500 l collapsible tank and sent out in convoy three times a day, the happy exclamation “The water makers from Austria are coming!” – soon became a regularly heard acknowledgement of the quality provided, which would soon become a model for both Singhalese policy and other relief organisations.

An important reason for the popularity of the Austrians in Sri Lanka, however, was certainly the applied Armed Forces doctrine: “The presence of relief teams must not be a burden to a country hit by a disaster!” This means taking along as much of necessary equipment as possible. Although the flood disaster in Asia was a huge physical and psychological stress for foreign rescue teams, too, the experiences were valuable for many.

Norbert Schartner’s point of view certainly represents that of uncountable other helpers: “Only those can be efficient helpers who can keep a certain distance to what they experienced. We often encountered scenes, which did not leave us unmoved, for example the gratefulness of those people we were able to help. And the problems waiting for you at home are seen in a much more relaxed way after such a mission!”

As a consequence of the disaster, Hans Schönlaub expects a visible improvement of counterstrategies. They range from architectural measures, the development of an early warning system on the sea floor and on the surface (wave height measurement) up to the urgently needed improvement of communication structures within the threatened regions.
(Source: aqua press Int. 1/2005, Mag. Christof Hahn)