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| OTHER RECENT UPDATES: Dec 29, Dec 30, Dec 31, Jan 2, Jan 4, Jan 6, Jan 9, Jan 11, Jan 15, Jan 18, Jan 21, Jan 25, Jan 28, Feb 2, Feb 4, Feb 25, March 31, April 1, April 3, April 9, April 15, April 19, April 27, July 28 | ||||||||||||||
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Hello everyone. This is just a brief update to you keep you posted on our latest findings, as well as the status of our relief mission. We should have much more detailed information and photos soon, as Scuzz, the Californian crew, and the rest of our aid workers set foot on some of the devastated regions of northern Sumatra.
The recent tragedy has also inspired one of our long-time return customers to make a special trip out to help those in need. Luis Renato Brand (a.k.a. “Mano”) is a surgeon from Curitiba, Brazil who usually comes out at least once a year to spend several weeks surfing with us. However this year Mano began a university job and was finding it impossible to come over with his new schedule. But after this most recent catastrophe, the pull to help was too great: “My mind tells me to come and leave all my jobs here and stay in indo as much it is needed.” This webmaster can tell you from personal experience that Mano does AMAZING work. I fell forward on a shallow reef up north, cutting my right hand badly. I didn’t even want to look at it at the time, but today I have trouble finding any evidence I was every even cut. Luis’ skills will be an extraordinary asset to the relief effort, but equally important is his positive and heartwarming personality. He puts everyone’s mind at ease and has a great way of relating to all cultures, and that’s exactly the type of people we need to make this relief effort successful.
We have also received further word from Dr. Kerry Sieh, our geologist friend from Caltech. He said the earthquake on March 26th appears to have been caused by a 3 – 10 meter slip on the megathrust under southern Simeulue to southern Nias, with the biggest patch of slip between Nias and Simeulue, west of the Banyaks. Members of Kerry’s crew will be heading out to the Mentawais and Batus this week to download their GPS units and send the data back to Caltech ASAP to see if anything strange has happened there. They have already received information from their stations in Bulasat, Tello, Singabang, and Sikaui, which should be processed within the next two days. This information should be very telling, and it should also give them a good idea whether or not anything fishy happened in the Mentawais or Batus. Kerry
himself will be back in Sumatra from mid-May through
early-June As we said at the end of our last update, we hope to have more positive stories to report soon. But as of now, things are still very, very heavy. Please send you best wishes and positive vibes to the citizens of this area, as they will surely need it. And if you want to make a contribution to our relief effort, there is information on how to do so here. Terima kasih – Slayer the web dork. |
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