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Thursday, February 24, 2005
Probably How I Will Go
CNN:
John and Jackie Knill of North Vancouver, frequent visitors to the popular Thai resort, Khao Lak, were apparently on the beach when the tsunami hit December 26.
The couple disappeared and relatives say they were notified about a week ago that the identities of their remains had been confirmed.
Searchers later also recovered the couple's destroyed digital camera but were able to print photos from its memory card.
In a sequence of photos over the course of a few minutes, some curious onlookers are shown wandering onto suddenly exposed tidal flats, a sign of the impending tsunami. In one, a large wave appears to be breaking in the distance.
The pictures show that within minutes, the wave grows larger and some beachgoers begin to take notice.
"I don't know why they didn't run," their son Christian Knill told Global TV in Vancouver. "Either they knew they couldn't or they didn't know the power of the wave."
A photo taken at 8:30 a.m. shows a wall of water churning up sand and mud. A final shot a couple of minutes later shows the tsunami hitting the beach.
In all seriousness, a couple times on puddlejumper flights when we've come into LGA or BTV in some serious turbulence, with the plane making all sorts of scary noises and my stomach doing somersaults, I've wondered if my memory card would survive a crash. I figure in that situation I'd shoot as many pics as I could. Why the hell not?
With a tsunami coming at me, I don't know what I'd do. I'd bet I could get some awesome shots, though. I'd like to see what the Canadians captured. [Update: okay, so I didn't see the gallery right there in the CNN story. It's George Bush's fault.]
ntodd
February 24, 2005 | Permalink
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Comments
The pix are right there on the CNN page under "Gallery." Scroll down a little and look on the right of the column!
Posted by: Darryl Pearce | Feb 24, 2005 10:54:39 PM
"It's George Bush's fault."
Well, see? I told you!
Posted by: Ivytree | Feb 24, 2005 11:21:08 PM
Darryl - thanks for the head up. [/wipes egg off face]
Ivy - I was wrong to doubt you.
Posted by: NTodd | Feb 24, 2005 11:46:25 PM
...well, I am one of those multimedia guys who makes those boring user instructions (manuals, videos, narration, graphic-interface, illustrations) for thermal printers.
That said...
Pictures left behind by folks who've witnessed cataclysmic events are so poignant. Nat'l Geo magazine had a scientist's pictures of Mt St Helens. I had the same emotional tugs then as I did looking at these photos.
For more, read "Riding a Tidal Wave" in this document.
Posted by: Darryl Pearce | Feb 25, 2005 1:12:08 AM
I had that feeling a lot while flying from Kwajalein to Meck (30 miles up the atoll) on 30-seat twin-engine prop Caribous. The runway was about 100 yards long, and those planes used every inch. I did that every day for 8 months, and there were times...
Posted by: Linkmeister | Feb 25, 2005 1:44:31 AM
That's right, NTodd. Place blame where it belongs. That's my motto.
Posted by: oldwhitelady | Feb 25, 2005 2:52:51 AM
Darryl - I'm reminded of the video that was salvaged from Columbia after it broke apart. That eerie glow as the shuttle was just entering the atmosphere all around the cabin, and the astronauts being all playful. So sad.
Linkmeister - why were you flying that route?
owl - words to live by.
Posted by: NTodd | Feb 25, 2005 8:55:39 AM
Well, the astronauts, the volcanologist, the Canadian couple... were exactly where they wanted to be when they died.
What makes me sad is that I'll probably die here in the engineering cubicle and nobody will notice.
Posted by: Darryl Pearce | Feb 25, 2005 11:51:21 AM
Working for a defense contractor. Transmitting telemetry data from Kwajalein (where missiles launched from Vandenberg ended up) back to Huntsville, AL (where Space Command was). This was 1975-1978, pretty much mid-Cold War. Here's a link to pictures of the island and the planes.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Feb 25, 2005 1:30:44 PM
What makes me sad is that I'll probably die here in the engineering cubicle and nobody will notice.
Well, eventually you'll start to smell, won't you?
Working for a defense contractor.
Wow, that must've been quite a gig.
And don't you miss the simpler days of the Cold War sometimes?
Posted by: NTodd | Feb 25, 2005 3:35:21 PM
"And don't you miss the simpler days of the Cold War sometimes?"
The gig didn't pay that well! Like many of us, I made an hourly wage ($3.85/hour to start; when I left I was up to $5.25/hour, but with 25 hours of O/T a pay period it added up).
There was a whole subculture of people (mostly ex-military satcom or telcom on the tech side; logistics work included cooks, tree-trimmers, plane mechanics) doing that kind of work. Mostly it was a way to amass savings (since there was nothing much to spend money on) in out of the way places like Kwaj, Adak, Thule, and Eluthera.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Feb 25, 2005 4:02:38 PM
Well, if that's the way it's gonna be, I'll be rolled up and smothered in my own quilting frame. Altho now that I think about it, it puts a huge smile on my face. lol!
You people are morbid:)
Posted by: vachon | Feb 25, 2005 8:36:38 PM
Those tsunami pics are eerie. You wonder what was going through the couple's minds. Maybe they just didn't realize what was about to hit them. The wave didn't look that high in the pictures - I always imagined that a tsunami wave would be a tower of water.
Posted by: kc | Feb 26, 2005 11:47:55 AM
vachon - I've always had gallows humor and a fascination with death. Really.
kc - tsunamis aren't always big. In fact, some are only inches high. Learned that on the Discovery Channel (or maybe TLC) a few years back. And now that I think about it, I'll need to go back and figure out what the real def'n of tsunami is--and I wonder if it's anything like solitons?
Posted by: NTodd | Feb 26, 2005 1:32:17 PM
Buy me stuff off my 
