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I don't know why, but I got to wondering about Diego Garcia, and the US base there. I knew that it was a low lying island in the Indian Ocean. I thought it might have experienced some problems. I looked it up in a map, because I wasn't quite sure where exactly it was located. Turns out it's one of the dots on the lower left in this thread's animation, in a direct line from the epicenter of the quake. The animation starts over again before the wave hits the island, so I'm not sure if they actually got hit, but it looks like it. Even Somalia lost a couple hundred people, and this base is much closer to the epicenter.
So I did a Google news search. According to Stars and Stripes, nobody on Diego Garcia noticed anything that day. The highest point of the island is only 22 feet above mean sea level, so the place could have been completely submerged if it had been hit.
Apparently, according to another paper source, Diego Garcia was one of the few islands in the Indian Ocean that actually got a warning in advance of the tsunamis. I wonder if they did anything to prepare. There are no hills to run to in Diego Garcia.
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12-28-2004, 07:44 AM
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