Another huge earthquake -- 8.8 in Chile

@hawkeye10,

I feel rather certain that the relatives of the hundreds of thousands who died in the Indonesian tsunami would have preferred a few overblown, media- hyped up predictions and unnecessary evacuations to the no warnings and no evacuation orders they received.

I feel equally certain that had there been no evacuations and a much higher rise in water, that the same people would be here denigrating governments for not evacuating their people when they had the warnings to do so from that same inexact science of predictions.

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@Butrflynet,

for me the question is what happens next time, and the time after that and so on. When the "experts" completely blow a call they lose credibility, the chances that they will be listen to next time goes down.

There was zero mention in the alarms that the so called experts did not know what was going to happen, that they were guessing. they only said that after the fact, and said

Quote:

This was a very large earthquake in a part of the world that tends to produce very large tsunamis. We need to walk a line between a false alarm and missing something that's dangerous and could kill people. Since the science is not exact, we chose to err on the side of not killing people by missing something."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/27/AR2010022701580_2.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010022801199

Transparency during the process is a REQUIRMENT, the "oops, sorry. we decided that spreading fear was a good idea so we did not admit that we were guessing" after the fact will not do. This kind of BS is EXACTLY why so many no longer trust government institutions.

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@hawkeye10,

Maybe I'm just more receptive of government's emergency management systems because of living in California all my life where we were exposed to earthquakes, floods, mudslides, and wildfires and paid great attention to the predictions and heeded them.

I'd rather be inconvenienced by a few erroneous predictions than have no predictions at all and no effort made by governments to keep people safe from those disasters because some people might get annoyed if they're wrong.

1 Reply

@Butrflynet,

Quote:

I'd rather be inconvenienced by a few erroneous predictions than have no predictions at all and no effort made by governments to keep people safe from those disasters because some people might get annoyed if they're wrong.

there are other options than those two, and you blithely ignore the cost of this Tsunami warning. In Japan alone it shut down a huge chunk of the national economy for two days....plus the cost of evacuation of nearly 600,000 households. We are talking of costs that run into the billions I'll bet, and while the cost of the tsunami damage was minimal to non-existant.

this happened in America with hurricane Rita (after katrina) as well, the authorities went ape **** over a little storm, and so the cost of the warning execution far outpaced storm damage

there are many costs to exaggerated warnings, some in lives in future events, some in dollars upfront.

I think that citizens have the right to know the truth about the expertise of those sounding the alarm, so as to be able to make sound personal decisions. Furthermore, governments are obligated to be honest.

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Quote:

Strong earthquake strikes central Chile
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck the central coastal area of Chile on Sunday, some 70 kilometers (45 miles) northwest of Temuco, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There were no immediate reports of major damage or injury.

The quake, which stuck around 5:20 p.m. (3:20 p.m. ET), was felt as far away as Santiago, roughly 595 km (370 miles) north of where the USGS said the quake occurred. The epicenter was more than 10 miles underground, the USGS said.

(cnn)

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@Region Philbis,

There was also a 7.0 quake in Argentina today.

http://able2know.org/topic/126216-22#post-4462035

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Another huge earthquake -- 8.8 in Chile

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