Red Cross Blogs

The tsunami challenge: five things you should know

By Sarah Oughton
December 9, 2009 at 12:31 pm

Did you realise this Boxing Day, it will be five years since the Indian Ocean tsunami?

To mark the anniversary, the Red Cross is launching the Decisions for Recovery challenge.

The tsunami is the worst disaster in living memory and drawing on the real-life challenges faced by the Red Cross in the aftermath of the disaster, the Decisions for Recovery game asks the player to make a series of choices about how recovery will be carried out.

But before you get started on the challenge, here’s a little warm up to see how much you actually know about the facts and figures of what happened on that fateful day.

1.    How high on the Richter scale was the earthquake that triggered the tsunami (1 is low and 10 is high)?
2.    How many metres high was the tsunami wave?
3.    How many countries were affected by the tsunami?
4.    How many people died in the tsunami?
5.    How many people were affected by the tsunami?

Of course the facts and figures are never going to reveal the true story about what happened. If you want to find out what it was really like for some of the people we helped you can read their stories and see some of their video reports on our website.

So here are the answers, how many did you get right?

Answers:

1.    9 on the Richter Scale
2.    20 metres
3.    13 countries
4.    230,000 people
5.    5,000,000 people lost homes, or access to food and water

Now, imagine you were the Red Cross recovery manager. How would you have helped people rebuild their lives after the tsunami? Who would you help first and how? Should you prioritise speed of response or sustainability?

Take the Decisions for Recovery challenge and see how well you can do. And don’t forget to let me know how you get on!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Emergencies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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