Chinese people living abroad send aid to China to help the victims,
 
while some western countries try to gain benefits from the tragedy in Burma.

-- Edited by LAO SPY at 12:44, 2008-05-21

LAO SPY wrote:

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Chinese people living abroad send aid to China to help the victims,

while Burmese people living abroad together with some western countries try to gain benefits from the tragedy.

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Do you know how many overseas Burmese in USA, Europe, Singapore, Japan, Australia, etc, have been busy raising funds to send to the cyclone victims in Burma? They have sent so much that the exchange rate of the Burmese kyat has risen against the dollar.

I hope the thinking & mentality of Lao Spy doesn't reflect that of all Lao people.

 

News can be biased. For all we know, what the media says about a certain group of people (overseas Burmese, overseas Lao, overseas Tibetans, etc) might be what the media wants to make us believe about those people...which might not necessarily be the truth about them or their thinking. Words can be manipulated, people can be misquoted, only a small part of an entire story can be revealed, pictures can be photoshopped. It's up to us whether we allow others to control our minds.

I'm quite shocked by how someone on this forum said that the Burmese 'government' (can't call them a real government since they seized power after losing the election) loves their people. I wonder if that's how he has been brainwashed by the education in his country...maybe it'd be good for him to travel to Burma & see what life is really like over there, why so many Burmese people resort to working as illegal labour in Thailand... According to my parents, when they were kids, Burma used to be one of the wealthiest ASEAN countries, much wealthier than countries like Singapore.

Some links:

http://operationnargis.org
http://cyclonerelief.wordpress.com
http://cyclone-aid.blogspot.com

it is hard to be prepare for things like this....  earthquake can happen at any given time and anywhere..

as far as cylone goes... yes, you can warn the people that the cyclone is heading their ways.... but, where can all those people go to???

Parts are to blame when some peoples are corruptied and careless. They built the schools with poor quality material and bad concrete that couldn't stand up the strong earthquakes. The buildings collapsed easily because of poor quality of the building material even the steel rods are so flimsy and very bad quality.

Or maybe you mean the Chinese earthquake. Even still, its a magnitude 8.0 earthquake. I don't think its fair to blame flawed engineering against an 8.0 magnitude earthquake.

In many cases, the school buildings that totally collapsed were surrounded by other buildings (including taller ones) that remained standing, it was shown on TV (if you watch China Central Television) & in photos in the Chinese newspapers. That's why people are questioning the quality of the construction & materials used, & the Chinese government has promised to investigate.

After the earthquake, China is worrying about the structural integrity of dams - if any of them break there will be flooding & even more destruction. Many dams are being built or have already been built in north Laos, mainly by China. & from time to time north Laos experiences tremors from earthquakes in neighbouring countries e.g. last year(?) Huayxai had a bit of damage. Are the dams in north Laos built to withstand such tremors?

Perhaps a lucky thing that Laos doesn't have any skyscrapers yet, so there's still time to consider fine-tuning building regulations before any of them are built. Unlike in Bangkok, where there isn't much that can be done about all the tall & unsafe buildings they have already built - expensive to put up structural reinforcements, & also can't afford to tear down & rebuild.

Think Lao people who have studied/lived in places like Japan & California will be familiar with how those countries/states prepare themselves to handle earthquakes.

Correct me if am wrong, but cyclones build up over the ocean, & cause the most damage to coastal areas at the point where they hit land...but further inland they lose their power & become less destructive (just very heavy rainfall)...so this is something landlocked Laos doesn't need to worry that much about? :P Although the worry will be: deforestation + heavy rainfall = mudslides...this one Laos still cannot escape especially when the land is so mountainous :|

Anonymous wrote:

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No country can prevent a natural disaster, but a well run country can plan and help its citizens afterwards. Look what a bad government did in the US just a couple years ago with that hurricane. Shamefull. Likewise the Burmese government does'nt want to accept aid so to save face. They care not for the people, only maintaining power.

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i totally agree with you on this one... you can not prevent a mother nature disasters..  you can't predict earthquake to minutes or hours before it will occur...  but, every country should have a plan of attack... in case these things do happen..

If believed the below article, people in California need to be careful in next 30 years.

Please read!

Earthquakes are best predicted from space

MOSCOW. (Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti) - China's deadly earthquake in the Sichuan province has again showed that ground-based earthquake prediction methods and systems are not reliable.
Traditional seismology does its best, sometimes succeeding, but more often only saying something like, "California will be destroyed in the next 30 years." Remote sensing from space can provide more accurate data about locations, and even dates of expected disasters.
The majority of earthquakes happen in two long narrow stripes, one around the Pacific and the other running from the Azores to Southeast Asia. There are several other earthquake prone regions.
Half of Russia's Far East is in a seismically hazardous zone, and the seismic stations there can, with only minor error, give the future epicenter, its depth under the surface, and its magnitude. But they cannot say when the earthquake will happen.
There are many methods for predicting when an earthquake will strike, the most reliable of them being a long-term prediction for several years, and possibly months, ahead. Scientists have predicted a 99.7% chance of a 6.7 magnitude earthquake hitting the U.S. West Coast, more specifically California, in approximately 30 years.
Mid-term predictions are highly important but not as accurate. The situation with short-term predictions is highly complicated, as shown by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Haicheng, China. Warnings were issued days before the February 4, 1975 earthquake and people in nearby cities remained outdoors, despite the cold weather. As a result, many lives were saved.
By that time, China was conducting broad seismological surveys, using Soviet experience. Central and provincial seismic monitoring stations collected data about natural anomalies, which accumulated considerable information. This helped predict the location and date of several earthquakes, including in Haicheng.
But a year later a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit 93 miles from Beijing, which nobody had predicted, and claimed over 400,000 lives. The predicting optimism of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to the dark pessimism of the 1990s. The problem did not move from research to practice and showed minor progress only in the past decade. It turned out that predicting earthquakes from space is much easier and more accurate.
The main advantage of this high-tech method is the ability to survey huge territories for seismically hazardous areas and predict earthquakes one to five days before the disaster.
The Russian method is based on the study of geomagnetic field variations, which induce currents in the Earth. Therefore, surface field measurements can detect the hypothetical regional changes that precede earthquakes. At the same time, intensive electric fields in places where earthquakes are brewing induce specific currents in the ionosphere.
Anomalous ionospheric phenomena were first reported in the 1960s, but they were disregarded along with astrologic predictions and UFO sightings. The breakthrough came when the Soviet Union launched its Intercosmos-19 satellite in 1979. It detected an unusual low-frequency noise in a large area centered near the epicenter of an earthquake that occurred a few hours later. This finding was registered as a Soviet discovery and was later confirmed by other spacecraft.
Harbingers of powerful earthquakes appear approximately five days before the main shock and have specific characteristics that distinguish them from the other ionospheric variations. Registering them is a very complicated task that includes constant satellite monitoring of the earthquake-prone region and regular baseline studies, because baseline changes can point to a brewing earthquake.
Many countries, including Russia, are studying the connection between earthquakes and the ionosphere, but not as vigorously as scientists would like. Such surveys were made from the Mir space station, but only for a year even though the results were encouraging.
In 2001, Russian scientists designed the Vulcan system for monitoring and predicting natural disasters and industrial accidents, which was included in the 2001-2005 federal space program and provided for launching low- and high-orbiting microsatellites.
In December 2001, the Complex Orbital Magneto-Plasma Autonomous Small Satellite (COMPASS) was launched to monitor the Earth for possible harbingers of earthquakes and collect requisite data. Its equipment was created in Russia, Hungary, Greece, Ukraine and Poland. Unfortunately, the experiment was cut short because of satellite malfunctions.
Studies continued in 2002-2003 from the Meteor-3M satellite. Space-based predictions have been correct for 44 of 47 registered earthquakes.
To collect more data, Russia launched the COMPASS-2 satellite in 2006. Although its operation was hampered by malfunctions, it nevertheless quite successfully probed the Earth's underground lithosphere, atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere to learn how each terrestrial region is connected with a variety of events such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tropical cyclones, and tornadoes.
Methods and equipment for the Vulcan system are being tested on the International Space Station within the framework of the Uragan program. The ISS, which is flying in a relatively low orbit, turned out to be ideal for such studies. With the California earthquake only 30 years away, humankind is running out of time for inventing new reliable space-based earthquake forecasting systems.

Yury Zaitsev is an expert at the RussianAcademy of Sciences' Institute of Space Research.  http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080523/108209892.html