Wednesday, March 07, 2007

The Catalogue of Disasters

This morning, as usual, I did my ritual before starting any works: updating myself with the world news. Sadly, today's headline on most of the journals shared the same breaking news: "Garuda Bursts into Flame and Kills ... People".

My heart sank immediately. Never had I felt very disturbed with disastrous news before. This is the 6th disaster that hit the nation within 2.5 months, which means since Dec 30, 2006, we have heard a disaster taking place in Indonesia every 11 days! Gee... we are talking about real disasters here... disasters on which human beings were killed in vain.

The record does not stop there. Since the last tsunami that badly hit Aceh and its surroundings on Dec 26, 2004, there have been 15 disasters altogether, natural and accidental. This gives us one big headline almost every 2 months (53 days to be exact).

For the list of the disasters, you can click here, but they simply forgot to list the recent deadly floods in Jakarta early Feb this year.

Sadly, it's just yesterday when we heard about the 6.3 Ritcher earthquake in West Sumatera that has devastated the people (... and my thoughts and prayer are still for them). And today, we had Garuda on the news.... just moments after we selfishly judged Adam Air or the other budget airliners and said never to fly them again and decisively chose only to fly Garuda for domestic flights thinking they are safer than others, given the few available options.

For the accidents, I am not here to judge anyone. It has been said enough by many people who demanded the accountability of the Ministry of Transportation, the Governor of Jakarta, airline or ferry owners, etc. But will they ever listen to us? No! Will they ever learn? Never! Will they step down? Never ever!

I am just tired of all these.

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