BBC - Could We Survive A Mega Tsunami (2013) [Repost]

Calm was the last thing that Could We Survive a Mega-Tsunami? (BBC Two) was trying to create. Instead the objective of this imagined staging of a super wave hitting Europe and America appeared to be the creation of enough fear to have paranoid survivalists fleeing up the nearest mountain to barricade themselves in. What else was this Hollywood-style, CGI-heavy bad dream with hysterical voice-over and tribal wailing trying to achieve? Understanding for the real survivors of the real tsunamis that really killed 200,000 people and devastated the Indian Ocean region in 2004? Or the even more recently traumatised victims of this natural horror show in Japan? I hadn’t detected a world sympathy deficit following these events, and use of real footage of the carnage from those disasters mixed up with fantasy sequences seemed gratuitous.
Was it therefore to make us sit up and take notice of the scientists warning us that a small Canary Island could well collapse and trigger a wave big enough to pound across Europe and increase in magnitude as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean to wipe out the Caribbean and East Coast of the USA? If so, I’m sure self-interest resulted in half the audience turning off at the point where we were told London would be fine, Brighton might have a bit of “disruption” and America might not be prepared because New Yorkers famously didn’t take warnings seriously. Worse, was the conclusion to this hysterical piece of science fantasy: as Japan showed us, you couldn’t do anything to prepare for a tsunami anyway. This was a frightening vision I’d sooner forget.