Authorities anticipate death-toll in Thailand could represent largest peacetime disaster involving Finns
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At present, nobody can make any firm predictions on the ultimate Finnish death-toll in the Asian tsunami catastrophe
What is self-evident, however, is that the destruction caused by the sea-surges following the underwater earthquake in Sumatra has caused one of the worst disasters to befall Finland in peacetime in the last century, even if the tragic events were played out thousands of miles from the country itself.
If the worst happens and it transpires that the great majority of those missing did indeed perish in Sunday’s deluge, the number of victims will exceed those lost in the sinking of the S/S Kuru in the autumn of 1929.
In this, the largest single peacetime disaster in Finland during the 20th century, a total of 133 people drowned in a squall on Lake Näsijärvi, near Tampere.
More recently, in 1976, 40 died in an explosion at a munitions factory in Lapua.
Still much fresher in the memory is the loss of 23 individuals, many of them young people, in a horrific bus crash in Konginkangas in March of this year.
When the passenger ferry Estonia sank off the Finnish coast in 1994, "only" 10 Finns lost their lives, although the total death-toll was an appalling 852.
Many of those victims came from Estonia and from Sweden. The Swedes are themselves now facing if anything an even bleaker New Year than the Finns, as current predictions suggest as many as 1,000 or more Swedish fatalities from the effects of the tsunami in Thailand.
The resorts in the Phuket area are very popular winter destinations for holidaymakers from across the Nordic region, and a further 400 or more Norwegians are also being sought frantically.
If wartime events in Finland are taken as a point of comparison, it is feared that the current disaster could be on a par with the loss of the Finnish cruiser Ilmarinen, which struck a mine in the Baltic Sea in 1941 during the Continuation War.
A total of 271 crew members went down with the vessel.
Another point of comparison with events taking place abroad but affecting Finland directly takes us back to an infamous shipwreck nearly a century ago: around 70 Finns perished aboard the passenger liner Titanic in 1912.
A similar number were killed two years later when the Empress of Ireland was involved in a collision with another vessel in Canadian waters.
The sudden loss of as many as 200 or 250 people from a population of just over five million will inevitably mean that few are left completely untouched: even if friends or relatives do not number among the dead, there will be empty desks in workplaces and empty seats in schools and kindergartens up and down the country.
There is no recent precedent, save in the memories of those of the war generation. It remains to be seen how the country will come to terms with the grief that is bound to follow. At present people are still trying to grasp what has happened, much as their government is: the numbers are too awful to contemplate, the situation has become progressively more horrific as the week has gone on.
One way in which people have reacted is through giving: donations to aid organisations working in the affected region have been flooding in across the country, and by Thursday evening more than EUR 3 million had been given, primarily to the Red Cross and to church organisations.
A number of public events scheduled to mark the New Year have been cancelled, and several cities have pledged the money they would have spent on New Year's Eve fireworks displays for use instead by aid organisations working to provide emergency relief for the many thousands of victims of the catastrophe across the entire Indian Ocean coastal zone, from Somalia to Malaysia.
More on this subject:
 UPDATED 01:30 FRIDAY Police publish names of missing Finns; upwards of 260 now feared dead in Thailand
Police Lists of Missing Persons, 30.12.2004
Helsingin Sanomat
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