"We
see the sea come forward," he said, describing how he ran and then swam
from the 40-foot wave, grabbing onto catamarans for life support.
"Everybody was running, but God saves little."
That was the last paragraph before the "jump" to a second page. The
quote offers such a sense of "closure" that for a moment I thought it
was the end of the whole story. There was more, eventually reaching an
ending that was less poetic, but conveyed the scope of the disaster:
But even without further calamity, the devastation will take weeks to unfold and years to repair. Officials in some areas expressed concern that saline water could contaminate drinking water and ruin arable land. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless, crowded into unsanitary temporary shelters, and bodies are likely to wash up for days.
The BBC's ending to the main page of a multi-part Web report is more of an "inverted pyramid" exit, tapering off into background details:
Sunday's tremor - the fifth strongest since 1900 - had a particularly widespread effect because it seems to have taken place just below the surface of the ocean, analysts say.
Experts say tsunamis generated by earthquakes can travel at up to 500km/h.
The Washington Post story, the work of five staff writers and correspondents, finished with summaries of reports from the fringe of the tsunami's reach:An international tsunami warning system was started in 1965, after the Alaska quake, to advise coastal communities of a potentially killer wave.
Member states include the major Pacific rim nations in North America, Asia and South America. But because tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean, no system exists there. Scientists said deaths would have been reduced if one had.
Among the missing in India were 200 Hindu pilgrims who went for a ritual sea bath. Hundreds scattered petals on the water and sacrificed chickens to pray for their loved ones' return.
I read that reference to the Iran earthquake right after reviewing "top 10 stories of the year" reports to prepare for class. Ironically, neither the 2003 earthquake nor the 2004 tsunamis appear on such lists: Both disasters fell a week after the Associated Press and other commentators prepared their year-end news retrospectives. For the record, here's what AP picked for 2003 and 2004.
2:45:55 PM #
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