Tag Archive for 'National Hospital'


Call for Papers: Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?
Deadline: 05 December 2008.




Responding to the tsunami

The wind was not held back

Below is a talk given 6 years ago entitled “To hold back the wind.” That was an attempt to get disaster preparedness going. It failed, obviously. The walls of water came in with no warning; thousands died instantaneously; millions are homeless. Parentheses refer to 9/11 in the US for scale: in a few hours on the 26th of December more that 17,900 (3,000) died out of a population of 19 million (280 million). More than a million are homeless (mostly office space was lost). More will die due to epidemics caused by thousands of unburied corpses, bad water, etc. (insignificant). This is just Sri Lanka. LIRNEasia’s immediate focus is the Bay of Bengal region. We have lost over 40,000 people…