Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Help human tsunami victims (some animals helped themselves)
Please consider making a donation to Sarvodaya ... a group doing direct relief and humanitarian work in Sri Lanka.
(More on Sri Lanka here.)
Also, again to help those in Aceh, donate money here.
The big organizations will get plenty of money and will move on once a new crisis emerges. The groups above are there for the long haul. Please support them.
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If you live in an “industrialized” nation, try not to forget how lucky you are...and how much we must do to change things:
The average natural disaster kills 63 people in Japan. But in Peru, the average toll is 2,900-46 times higher. Around the same time as Latur in India (1993), California (US) was hit by an earthquake which was 100 times more powerful. Only one person died in the US, while 11,000 people perished in Latur. When Hurricane Elena hit the US in 1985, only five people died. But when a cyclone slammed Bangladesh in 1991, half a million people were killed.
Excerpted from this article.
(Thanks to SK)
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Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned—the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast, but they can’t find any dead animals.
Giant waves washed floodwaters up to 2 miles inland at Yala National Park in the ravaged southeast, Sri Lanka’s biggest wildlife reserve and home to hundreds of wild elephants and several leopards.
“The strange thing is we haven’t recorded any dead animals,” H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of the national Wildlife Department, told Reuters Wednesday.
“No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit,” he added. “I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening.”
(Excerpted from a Reuters report.)
MZ: Regardless, it would be foolish to downplay the inevitable number of animals that have died in this tragedy.
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
