Few people even knew the island existed.
A thousand kilometers off Africa's west coast, its inhabitants noticed nothing unusual in the weeks before mankind's greatest single catastrophe.
At 9:55 PM on January 15, 2018, the flank of the island's main volcano collapsed in the largest landslide ever recorded.
The extent of the gigaton collapse and subsequent displacement were hidden by the dust cloud that rolled over the ocean, advancing twenty kilometers in minutes. A circular wedge of water raced westward, the waves declining in amplitude as they spread out. The ocean turned white for hundreds of kilometers. From above, the ripples revealed the geography of the seafloor.
The great wave needed a few hours to cross the Atlantic, the water piling up as the continental shelf approached.
The tsunami rose to one hundred meters in parts of the Amazon and the Dominican Republic.
In Florida, the average wave height was only fifteen meters, despite the converging funnel of the West Indies and the Bahamas. This was still enough to flood the coast up to ten kilometers inland, where every building collapsed or was irreparably damaged. The lower eastern seaboard was devastated in half an hour.
Only twenty million people died, a mere three hundred thousand in the United States. The evacuation warnings had saved many more, though the survivors had endured the biggest traffic jams of all time. They were lucky the warning had arrived in the late afternoon and not at night.
The calamity had only just begun.
It turned out civilization could not handle a shock of this magnitude. The reaction to the disaster was much worse than the disaster itself, a cascade of socio-economic disruptions.
Even though the tsunami was considered an act of God, and the recovery created millions of new jobs, history would record the USA was finally destroyed by its lawyers.
Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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