Seeking answers, hope amid site of devastation
azcentral.com

Jobs | Cars | Real Estate | Apartments | Shopping | Classified | Customer Service | Phone Book | Dating | azcentral.com

Phoenix 68°
Tucson 74°
Flagstaff 49°
Traffic | Weather

go
marketplace



News



Print This Email This Most Popular Subscribe to The Republic


Seeking answers, hope amid site of devastation

William Hermann
The Arizona Republic
Jan. 9, 2005 12:00 AM

COLOMBO - Harindra Joseph Fernando returns today to his tsunami-stricken native Sri Lanka to practice the cool disciplines of science while, in a living hell around him, thousands of suffering countrymen cry out for compassion.

But out of the team's work, out of their science, may come compassion and even protection from another disaster, he believes.

Arizona State University professor Fernando, 49, a mechanical engineer and expert on fluid dynamics, will join a team of other wave experts sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation. They will spend a week in the hardest hit areas of the country where about 30,000 people were killed by gigantic waves that struck Dec. 26.
advertisement


While relief efforts go on all around them, the researchers will interview eyewitnesses to the monster waves to learn how big they seemed, how fast they moved, how hard they hit. They will use surveying equipment to measure beach erosion and they will climb palm trees to investigate how high the water rose.

"We are mostly interested in the power of the water flow and effect of the power on structures,'' Fernando said. "How far did the water go into the land? We are also very interested in finding why some areas were hit and others not.''

Team leader Philip Liu, a professor at Cornell University, helped create a computer model of tsunami behavior that the team wants to test.

"It seeks to predict where the land will be inundated,'' Fernando said. "The model showed that for some strange reason (the Sri Lankan city) Galle would be effected even though it's on the west coast. Well, the wave did, in fact, behave as the model predicted; it devastated Galle. We want to know why.''

Fernando knows the area well. He grew up in Moratuwa, only about 50 miles away.

He says that as a child he would walk with his father, a civil servant, out of their middle income neighborhood about a quarter mile from the sea and past the shanties of the poor who live only yards from the beach. There Fernando watched the waves.

"I would feel the wind blowing off the water, see the waves breaking one after another, and I was fascinated by them,'' Fernando said. "I wanted to know about those waves.''

After secondary school and getting an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in Sri Lanka, Fernando in 1980 communicated with Johns Hopkins University about his desire to study the theory of waves.

"The university gave me a fellowship that covered my tuition and I got a research assistantship,'' he said. "It was a wonderful thing and I applied myself to my work there very, very hard. I got a master's and a Ph.D in two and half years. Quick. I had a lot of interest.''

His interest was in pure science, but it was in application, too.

"I studied the fluid dynamics of waves, which is the melding point between science and technology,'' Fernando said. "You do science and you do application.''

Application that people in the military are interested in. Or countries with coastal cities threatened by wave erosion or inundation. Application of theory that can attract big grant dollars.

So when Fernando applied to ASU in 1984 the school snapped him up, got him tenured in four years instead of the usual six, created a new Environmental Fluid Dynamics program and made Fernando the director.

He now brings in about $1.5 million in grants each year. The U.S. Navy wants information on how certain kinds of waves will affect certain kinds of submarines. Fernando and his staff research the matter and tell them. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality wants to know how currents of air will move pollution around. They go to Fernando.

Though busy with his university work, Fernando has taken time to nurture, with wife Ravini, a large family. They live in Chandler. Their son Ravi is a senior at Brophy College Preparatory Academy; sons Sahan and Shenal attend Mount Carmel School in Tempe. Daughter Thilini, 4, stays home with mom.

Fernando says he will be thinking of his family often while he is in Sri Lanka - and thinking of the many people he knew who were swept away to their deaths.

"It was terrible, terrible, but in our work, in our purpose, we will find a silver lining,'' Fernando said.

A part of that silver lining will be if the team can further refine a computer model to predict inundation areas when an undersea earthquake triggers huge waves.

"It's too hard to evacuate an entire coastal area, and often not necessary; if we can tell a government to get helicopters to these six or seven places and get the people out, then that can work and could save many lives,'' he said. "If we can accurately predict where the worst hit area of a country will be, that would be a very important part of a better warning system than we have now.''

Fernando says that if the research the team does can help governments find ways to prevent such a disaster from happening again, "Then we will have found our silver lining.''

And ASU will, according to President Michael Crow, have played a proud part of helping avert future disasters.

"Sri Lanka has given us Joe Fernando, one of the world's experts in oceanic-wave theory," Crow said. "It's incredibly fitting that he return to Sri Lanka to help design an early warning system that will save the lives of future generations."







SITE MAP  azcentral.com main | news | sports | money | entertainment | families | health | food & home | photo/video | shopping | español | weather | classified | jobs | autos | real estate

CUSTOMER SERVICE  terms of service | contact The Republic | subscribe to The Republic | Newspapers in Education
The Republic in your community | about The Republic | jobs at The Republic | jobs at KPNX-TV | about KPNX-TV

PARTNERS  USA Today | Gannett Co. Inc. | Jobs: CareerBuilder.com | Cars: cars.com | Apartments: apartments.com | Shopping: ShopLocal.com | Real Cities Network Member

Copyright © 2006, azcentral.com. All rights reserved.