Why did Diego Garcia Escape Tsunami? (moved from ATSNN), page 1

Conspiracy rumours have been circulating on the internet of how the US base at Diego Garcia somehow avoided casualties even though other islands suffered huge losses. The US Navy’s official Diego Garcia website states the island wasn’t badly hit by the tsunami because it is surrounded by deep waters and the grade of its shores would not allow a tsunami to build before hitting land. The site states that an estimated six foot tidal surge was generated on the island.

www.rantburg.com
- The Navy's explanation is correct. If you're familiar with wave physics, a glance at the Diego Garcia nautical charts would lead you to expect little or no tsunami effect. In engineering parlance, the island presents a "poor acoustic impedance match" to the surrounding ocean because of the abrupt falloff in depth very close to shore. And that, in turn, means that very little of the tsunami's energy gets transferred to the shallows and thus to the land.

- There's a tsunami reflector constructed by Halliburton resting on the ocean floor that surrounds Diego Garcia. It can be observed by any research sub.

- It means the ocean waves just reflect off the steep sides of the Diego Garcia seamount like sound waves reflecting off a brick wall. And so they just get a little blip, instead of a huge amount of water piling up like it would if they had extensive shallows.

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It appears many want to make this out to be a horrible thing or a conspiracy to protect our base but not protect the peoples of the various countries. This is certainly not true. When engineers are involved in building a base, they would obviously take all kinds of things into account such as the weather conditions that affect a certain area. Engineers can't go into all these countries and develop some sort of deflecting device to protect sevaral countries from tsunami's. It not logical and certainly not finacnially feasable. Should they now build a massive retaining wall around the whole area to protect the residents from the next possible tsunami? That would put a damper on tourism as there would be no view of the ocean from the beaches.