First Person Reports from Asia
This morning I’ve been seeing photos and reading accounts of the terrible earthquake
that hit Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Thailand and others. The death toll is
up to 23,000 people. Here’s a round-up of what I’ve found (mostly through Scoble,
BoingBoing, WorldChanging
and Waxy):
- Photos
of the after-effects of the tidal wave. - Evelyn Rodriguez got
slammed by the wave, but she’s okay. - Michael Dobbs talks about being
swept out to sea. - More
photos of the wave hitting Phuket and the
aftermath. - A
personal account from Colombo. - In Mumbai, blogger Dina Mehta is
also writing about the disaster. - Another
account from Sri Lanka. - More
photos from Phuket (the password to get in is "abc123"). - Personal accounts collected
by the BBC. - Here’s the
WikiNews piece on the disaster. - UPDATE: WorldChanging has a better version of this post, with plenty more first person accounts.
That last link demonstrates how the Beeb gets citizen-journalism. For at least
the past 24 hours, the BBC has had a link that reads "Your
experiences: Asian disaster" on their
news front page. You enter in your experience in a form and click Send.
They vet your submission, and if they approve, post it to the page. It’s essentially
a temporary, de facto weblog for BBC readers to post their stories.
The Command Post offers a
good clearinghouse of organizations accepting donations for disaster relief. You can also check out the Tsunami Help blog (thanks, Jim).
UPDATE #2: Waxy is hosting some harrowing amateur footage of the disaster.