Katherine Frisk – But what if we did? What if we saw through the veil and discovered another story entirely? What if I speculate here a bit just for fun? It’s just a bit of sport, sort of like George Orwell did in his novel 1984. A little bit of “what if the future looks like this?” Nobody took him seriously … just saying.

So here is my first “what if?” The 2004 Tsunami that took out half of Sumatra. Remember that? I watched the coverage almost 24/7 flipping from BBC, to CNN to Sky. Sky News got the Oscar. Best coverage of that disaster ever. My friends and family eventually got fed up with what they saw as my “morbid fascination.” It was not a “morbid fascination” exactly, I was just trying to make sense of the whole disaster. Because quite frankly, even though the earth throws a huffy fit every now and then and weird things happen, somewhere in the back of my mind this did not look right for a number of reasons.

One memory that sticks in my mind was of a young girl in her twenties, from Europe somewhere who had been on holiday. She stood only in her shorts, tea shirt and slops. That was all she had left. But she had spent the whole week working with the Thai authorities helping to collect bloated, dead bodies washed up on the beach, tag them and put them into plastic bags. By the time she was interviewed she was mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted and was finally returning home.

What shocked me was how little the countries effected by this tsunami were helped by the international community. India for one, USA for another, Australia, all of whom have fleets of Navy vessels in the area who could have sent in their forces, their military hospitals, their helicopters within half an hour of this disaster happening and done a united search and rescue operation. Instead it was left to tourists like the young girl who was interviewed. Years later in 2014 when the Air Malaysia flight went missing I found out about a place called Diego Garcia. A secretive military and air force base on a Island in the middle of nowhere and… close to Sumatra. They could almost launch World War 3 from there, with all the equipment stockpiled in that small space, but apparently a search and rescue operation is not part of their brief. Continue reading →