Posted on 12/26/2004 1:30:15 AM PST by Truth666
However, the government said two thirds of the capital was under about four feet (1.2 meters) of water in some areas. About a third of the country’s 330,000 population live in the highly congested capital island.
Maldives is a cluster of 1,192 tiny coral islands scattered some 800 kilometres (500 miles) across the equator and is vulnerable to any rise in sea levels.
The fate of tens of thousands of tourists in the Maldives was not immediately known.
ping!
Maldives flooded after tidal waves, reports of casualties but no figures..(correct headline).
(AFP)
I assume you have never had to try to get information on a relative after a great natural disaster..Lack of knowledge and accurate information, difficulty in assessing numbers is the norm.
Actually there are dozens of articles about the Maldives and it's been mentioned in each CNN report live...(CNN International).
Communication has largely been cut off to the hardest hit areas (which has been WIDELY reported in the articles about the region) and I think that's the real cause of lack of specifics...for the Maldives and anywhere else.
Many of these places have communication problems due to smaller things than this...
There have been some brief reports about the Maldives in Australian online news services.
I will listen to BBC at the top of the hour and post what I hear...they usually have the latest in these areas, such as that last terror bombing over there that targeted the Aussies.
Took CNN three days to report Bali
Do not change a title...If you wish to editorialize, put it in parentheses.
There are thousands of germans in the Maldives. Check what the german mass media says about them (blackout):
http://www.spiegel.de/
Not one word about the Maldives in the TV news, just like in the TV site (first channel, german state television)
http://ard.de/
Oddly enough they are actually reporting (or did for 40 minutes on CNN international starting at 1 am your/our time Pacific time)...crazy they are actually the ones up on this one!
This is your take on it..It was not the headline..
My family was in a tornado in Wichita Falls...we followed lines of utility co trucks, telephone co trucks, and ambulances in the middle of the night through storms to find out their fate..It took hours of personal search to find them after we arrived...No telephone communication..overload on existing lines.
The city of Darwin in northern Australia was more or less flattened by a cyclone that night. This was a city in a modern western country. It was so effectively cut off by the disaster that communications for hours basically consisted of morse transmissions to and from a vessel in the harbour.
I think a lot of people seriously underestimate precisely how cut off a disaster can leave places and how hard it can be to get accurate information out.
Exactly..
Your headline sucks. Don't change the headlines.
I just saw a Deutsche Welle report that (my German being very crappy) seemed to address this issue.
I gave above links to illustrate that there is a blackout about what might have happened to the tourists.
And, again, both these facts are the news :
- there are tens of thousands of european tourists there
- there is a blackout about this fact
You must not change the titles.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/26/quake.maldives/index.html
FYI, CNN Int'l quoting Foreign Minister of Maldives as saying communication is cut off to outlying islands and death toll hasn't been assessed. Obviously it's not a German news source, but this is what the FM is saying and it's being reported many other places. I'm sure details will start coming as soon as they can...and I'm afraid they won't be good :-(
Maldives islands covered by water
From Journalist Iqbal Athas in Colombo, Sri Lanka
Sunday, December 26, 2004 Posted: 0829 GMT (1629 HKT)
(CNN) -- Massive waves triggered by a powerful earthquake temporarily covered several inhabited islands in the low-lying Maldives archipelago, south of India, according to the country's Foreign Minister Fathulla Jamil.
At least three children were killed in the high waters on an island north of the capital, Male. However an accurate death toll has not been assessed because communications to the outlying islands have been cut off, Jamil said.
Jamil said the islands north of the capital were the worst hit
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