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Ripple Effect | HOW THE TSUNAMI AFFECTED THE CORNELL COMMUNITY

IT WAS THE DAY AFTER Christmas, and Bob Kandiko '76 and his wife and niece were kayaking the calm, teal waters off the island of Rawi in Thailand. They had been looking for a place to have lunch when they came upon the perfect spot--a gorgeous cove with a white-sand beach. But one thing struck Kandiko as strange: the ocean had receded so far that it had exposed the jagged coral seafloor-- at high tide.

Kandiko, a middle-school science teacher from Bellingham, Washington, knew that an empty bay at high tide meant that a massive force had displaced a large amount of water, and quickly. And he knew that meant a tsunami.

As the kayakers watched, a four-meter-high wave rushed in, parallel to the shore, and filled the entire bay and beach in fifteen seconds. "Half of a football field is what we were looking at," Kandiko says. The wave circled back and collided with itself like water in a giant blender, creating a swell that lifted the eighteen-foot kayaks and shoved them away from shore. "Right after that happened," says his niece, Camille Kandiko '02, "my uncle screamed at us to paddle out to the ocean--fast."

Kandiko knew that they'd be safest in deep water, where the tsunami would be a massive but navigable ocean swell; it breaks into a wave only as it nears land, he says. "And my comment was, ‘If it's a tsunami, there's going to be more coming.' " Sure enough, fifteen minutes later another wave--twice as big as the first--surged along the coast and crashed into the jungle, ripping up trees and churning the clear water to dark brown. "That's when we started to get creeped out," Camille says, "because we realized that had we been in there, we never would have survived."

They made it to shore several exhausting hours later, but it would be days before they reached the mainland and discovered that the tsunami had left hundreds of thousands missing or dead throughout Southeast Asia.

The devastation literally hit close to home for Saiful Madhi. In the chaotic days following December 26, the thirty-sixyear- old graduate student from Aceh Province in Sumatra--the region closest to the undersea earthquakes that spawned the giant waves--was unable to find out if his immediate family was alive. He was determined to return to Aceh to find them, leaving his wife and three children in Ithaca.

Madhi's colleagues and students in the city and regional planning department gave money. Ithaca companies donated supplies such as medicine and two-way radios. Derek Cabrerra, a doctoral candidate in education, and his wife offered airline miles for his plane ticket. An e-mail solicitation circulated, and soon the generosity of a few friends grew into a grassroots outpouring that enabled Madhi to found the Aceh Relief Fund (www.aceh relief.org). By the end of January, donations had reached $68,000, enough to enable Madhi and a handful of volunteers to operate a mobile medical clinic and deliver supplies to remote villages that international humanitarian groups had not reached. Madhi's neighbor and friend Mazalan Kamis, a postdoctoral fellow in the education department, says that Madhi is uniquely qualified for the task. "As an Indonesian, Saiful can get through the checkpoints that have been turning away Westerners with desperately needed supplies."

In his online journal,Madhi describes his first visit to his family's home, sixteen days after the tsunami destroyed it. "The air smelled terrible--a mix of rotten mud, garbage, and decaying corpses. I felt sorry, in fact guilty somehow, for not being able to do anything about the many corpses we passed." As of January 31, he had found many family members and survivors from his village and was holding out hope that he may yet locate his missing brother and sister and her family. Before returning to Ithaca, he vowed to rebuild a local school. "When you remember your loved ones' last minutes being chased by the tenmeter- high wave, the gloomy IDP [internally displaced persons] camps, the 60 percent destroyed city, the separated kids--no matter how small your contribution," he wrote, "you do not want to stop working for others."

While Madhi has been helping survivors one bag of rice at a time, Lieutenant General Robert Blackman '70 is doing the same on an international scale. As the highest-ranking Marine in the Western Pacific, he is coordinating the relief efforts of 18,000 U.S. military personnel with civilian aid organizations and governments in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Blackman, the former chief of staff for land operations during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is no stranger to complex logistical scenarios. The biggest challenge of this one, he says, has been to plan, organize, and then execute the relief mission--all at the same time. "I liken it to packing up your entire family for a vacation, throwing all of your luggage into a vehicle, and then planning your entire trip while you are driving down the road," he says.

While Blackman struggles to deal with the devastation left in the tsunami's wake, Philip Liu, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, is working to prevent future destruction. In January, Liu led a group of scientists from the National Science Foundation's Tsunami Research Group to Sri Lanka and Thailand to gather data. The researchers studied the height of the waves, the distance they traveled inland, sediment deposits, and structural damage; with this information, they hope to refine predictive mathematical models designed prior to the event. "The more data we have, the more accurate the model will become," Liu says.

The scientists confirmed that three earthquakes over a ten-minute period caused three waves. The highest to hit Sri Lanka rose ten to eighteen feet, which they determined by measuring the height at which water had stripped bark from trees near the shore. They also found that the waves rushed inland as far as a mile and a half over the country's flat coastal plain. Liu contributed some of the data in GPS form to a Cornell website (http:// polarbear.css.cornell.edu/srilanka/) that displays a satellite map of Sri Lanka to assist researchers and relief workers. He also created a computer simulation with graduate student Xiaoming Wang that compresses tenand- a-half hours in the life of the tidal wave into one minute. (It can be seen online at www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan05/tsunamiVid320.html.)

The most destructive force, Liu notes, is not the wave but the debris flow. "The boats, the logs, being pushed up on shore--they're like water-born missiles, these objects." His next step is to help improve tsunami alert systems, which were largely lacking in the region. And some of the data he's gathered could be used to guide future shoreline development.

For Bob Kandiko, the sight of a strangely empty bay was enough to keep him and his family alive--because he knew what it meant. But luck also played a role. "You can make all of the correct decisions," he says, "but if the cards are stacked against you, there's nothing that you could have done ahead of time to prevent it."

-- Susan Kelley

Not Guilty | DEFENSE LAWYER WINS CASE OF A LIFETIME

LATE IN 1988, MICHAEL BANKS '78, a young lawyer at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Philadelphia, was looking for a special pro bono case. In addition to his regular work with business clients, Banks had taken on occasional family court and civil rights cases for which his firm was not compensated-- but this time he wanted a client who was facing capital punishment. "I have always been a fervent opponent of the death penalty," he says, "and I was looking for a case that would give me a chance to challenge a death sentence."

At about the same time, John Thompson, a New Orleans man who was on death row for a 1984 murder, was writing letters to 200 lawyers across the country. They stated simply: "I didn't do it." A defense lawyer active with the Louisiana Death Penalty Project, an advocacy group that seeks to prevent executions, sent Thompson's case file to Banks and another attorney at his firm, J. Gordon Cooney Jr. Neither Banks nor Cooney had ever tried a criminal case before, but they immediately began working on an appeal to get Thompson off death row. His execution was scheduled for February 22, 1989.

Thompson had been tried and convicted in 1985 on an unrelated armed carjacking charge while he was under indictment for the murder. Because of the felony conviction for the carjacking,New Orleans prosecutors had asked for the death penalty on the murder charge. Banks and Cooney quickly found many problems with the conduct of the prosecutors during the two cases against Thompson--among them that Thompson's conviction on the carjacking charge had kept him off the witness stand in his own defense during the subsequent murder trial. Banks and Cooney filed appeals, raised questions about tainted testimony and prosecutorial misconduct, and requested a new trial, delaying Thompson's execution seven times.

The case eventually was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999, but Thompson's appeal was rejected. Then, just a few weeks before Thompson was to be executed by lethal injection, Banks and Cooney discovered a memo that referred to blood evidence prosecutors had intentionally withheld from the defense during the carjacking trial. The evidence proved that Thompson could not have been present at the crime scene. Banks and Cooney took this information to the district attorney, who went with them to a judge to seek a stay of execution. The judge agreed, and Thompson was also cleared of the carjacking charge.

Thompson still faced life in prison for murder, though, so Banks and Cooney continued to fight. They realized that their client was innocent of the charge, and that exculpatory evidence had also been hidden from the original defense attorneys in that case. After several more years of determined legal efforts, a Louisiana appellate court ordered a new trial. In May 2003, the murder case was retried--and the jury deliberated for only thirty-five minutes before finding Thompson not guilty. After eighteen years in prison, he walked out a free man on May 7, 2003.

Banks, who was a Near Eastern studies major at Cornell and earned his JD at Columbia, says the Thompson case offers an extreme example of how the legal system can become unbalanced. "Prosecutors have enormous power," he says. "In 99 percent of criminal cases, there is an incredible mismatch of resources between the state and the defendant. Safeguards have been set up to deal with that--if the prosecutors play within the rules. If they disclose what they're supposed to disclose and provide the defendant an opportunity for a fair trial, there can still be justice. But if they conceal evidence, decide who's guilty and who's innocent, and use their power and resources to suppress the truth rather than present it, just for the purpose of securing a conviction, then a sad perversion is bound to occur--and that is what happened here."

Banks says that even though he and Cooney demonstrated that there had been numerous violations of Thompson's constitutional rights along the way, "the judges seemed too prepared to ignore that--until we were able to establish actual evidence of John's innocence." It's not supposed to work that way, he explains. A criminal defendant can't always muster evidence of his or her innocence, and the constitutional issues alone should be enough for an appellate court to take interest.

Before the Thompson case, most of Banks's pro bono work had involved child custody and support cases for the Support Center for Child Advocates in Philadelphia. He credits his days on the Hill-- where he was politically active and helped to found the Cornell Corporate Responsibility Project--for his strong interest in becoming involved with important issues rather than watching from the sidelines. And he says that he always tries to relate to his clients as individuals, a lesson he learned from his father, Barton Banks, an attorney who handled many criminal defense and civil rights cases.

Banks and Cooney have stayed in touch with Thompson since his release. They brought Thompson and his new wife to Philadelphia for a belated honeymoon a few months after they were married, and have visited their former client and his family in New Orleans. Thompson, who earned a GED after his release, now works as a paralegal for the New Orleans-based Center for Equal Justice, helping with the appeals of some of the death-row inmates he knew when he was in prison. Banks says that Thompson is well-equipped to earn the trust of others who believe the system has failed them. "When you're sitting on death row, there's a tremendous sense of futility," he says. "Thompson's views and perspectives are unique."

The Thompson case drew a lot of attention in the legal press, and much praise has been lavished on Banks and Cooney. Paul Braverman, writing in the American Lawyer, called their work "highpowered lawyering." Thompson put it more simply. "Them guys have been incredible," he told the Philadelphia Lawyer, marveling at his attorneys' fifteen years of persistent work on his behalf. "They didn't leave me."

-- Joe Wilensky

Set in Stone | CAN JEFF MORGAN SAVE THE WORLD THROUGH ENLIGHTENED TOURISM?

THE GARDEN OF EDEN AND THE hometown of Gilgamesh. The city of Ur, where Sumerian civilization flowered and the Biblical Abraham was born. Babylon, famed for its gardens and the codes of King Hammurabi. The roots of civilization itself lie in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the region once called Mesopotamia and home to modern Iraq. In 1923, Iraq established a board of antiquities to protect the country's estimated 100,000 historically significant sites, but decades of political unrest, war, and economic sanctions drove away most scholars and turned the looting of artifacts into a thriving industry. Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, the Cradle of Civilization is better known for car bombings and kidnappings than ancient archaeological wonders.

But Jeff Morgan '84 has another vision for Iraq--tourist destination. Within a decade, the forty-three-year-old former software executive insists, visitor dollars could be second only to oil revenue. As executive director of Global Heritage Fund (GHF), a San Francisco-based nonprofit conservancy, Morgan is employing a strategic combination of archaeological preservation and tourism promotion to transform some of world's most endangered regions. Currently, GHF has ten projects under way on five continents, from pre-Incan ruins in the highlands of Peru to the ancient city of Lijiang in China's Yunan Province. "We're going to use these sites as a cluster--to save the nature, protect the culture, provide jobs," Morgan says. "If you just go in there and restore the stones, that doesn't do it. You have to train the people, develop the tourism, help their living culture survive and prosper."

Each GHF project shares common features: UNESCO World Heritage Site ranking or nomination, proximity to an airport, and local funding commitments. And,Morgan says, each is fundamentally unique: "The sites where we're working aren't just another Roman amphitheater, Catholic church, or mosque. These sites are one-of-a-kind." Essentially, GHF serves as a broker, bringing together American philanthropists, local and national government officials, industry leaders, and the experts necessary to develop a detailed conservation plan. Once GHF approves the plan, it establishes a financial trust for the site. "We'll basically put in $250,000, get local donors to match that, then we say to the government, ‘You match us.'We're able to leverage a small amount of U.S. funds to generate long-term financial support." Since 2001,Morgan has raised $2.5 million, plus an additional $1.8 million in matching grants.

The son of Silicon Valley executive James Morgan '60, MBA '63, and former California state senator Rebecca Quinn Morgan '60, the Palo Alto native studied city planning on the Hill, but followed his father into the high-tech industry after graduation. He spent a few years in Japan with Mitsui, worked for Sun Microsystems, launched a French start-up, married, started a family. Then, in the late 1990s, a friend and former nonprofit director asked him how he planned to make the world a better place.

Morgan's travels had already taken him to some of the world's poorest regions. On a vacation to Tikal, Guatemala, he'd seen first-hand how tourism could bolster a sagging economy. "I'm basically a sales and marketing guy," says Morgan, who wanted to combine his business savvy with the enthusiasm for history he'd discovered in his favorite undergraduate class--Historic American Cities, taught by regional planning professor John Reps, MRP '47. He approached Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder to develop the idea, and the two launched Global Heritage Fund in March 2001.

Over the next year,Morgan identified some 160 sites that met the GHF criteria, then narrowed the list with help from the nineteen museum directors and archaeologists from around the world who make up GHF's senior advisory board. "We are basically cherry-picking the world," says Morgan. "Absolutely the most spectacular sites and they're sitting out there rotting." In Guatemala's Mirador Basin, where Mayan ruins are threatened by deforestation and looting, GHF spearheaded the creation of a 525,000-acre biopreserve and provided funding for park rangers and guards. For Lijiang Ancient Town, where China's ethnic Naxi minority live in a labryinthine city largely unchanged since the Ming Dynasty, GHF developed a matching-grant program to help residents restore their crumbling homes and protect them from encroaching development. "We're doing three things really well," says Morgan. "We're bringing great science to the conservation, we're bringing new financial mechanisms into place, and we're involving the communities around the sites and helping them get up to speed."

The challenges of preservation in the developing world are on vivid display in Hampi, India, once seat of the huge Vijayanagara Empire. The region's largest employer, Jindal Steel, brought an airstrip and a highway to the once-remote area, and pollution and stone quarrying have already taken their toll on the centuriesold ruins. GHF successfully launched a partnership with Jindal executives, community members, and the local government to create a master plan for land use and monument conservation. "Jeff has a magnetic personality, an infectious enthusiasm that I have yet to see anywhere else on the globe," says GHF academic advisor Michael Tomlan, PhD '47, director of Cornell's historic preservation program. "I can't tell you how impressive he is in a public forum in raising one's consciousness. He's young and very bright."

The task in Iraq is particularly daunting. GHF began in June by assembling thirty experts for a ten-day conference, co-sponsored by the World Bank, to identify preservation sites in the north, which has been largely spared the post-war plunder. "All of the looting has been in the southern part of the country, in these tribal no-man's lands," says Morgan. "It's a disaster." In July, Iraq's State Board of Antiquities signed a multiyear partnership with GHF to develop master conservation plans and training programs. Already, the conservancy has hired guards to protect the sites at greatest risk from looters and partnered with University of Chicago archaeologist McGuire Gibson to create detailed maps for further planning.

There's still the matter of the current hostilities, but, as Morgan says, "things can change very quickly."As proof, he cites Peru, terrorized for decades by the Maoist insurgent group Shining Path, now home to a thriving tourism industry anchored by the Incan ruins at Machu Picchu. "Peru, fifteen years ago, was the Shining Path," he says. "They'd taken over half the country; they were killing everybody. Now Shining Path's gone and Machu Picchu brings in one million people a year." With the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia now generates 30 percent of its GNP from visitors to the temple complex of Angkor Wat. In a decade or so,Morgan hopes, Iraq could be hosting busloads of tourists instead of truckloads of soldiers.

But the first priority is developing a sustainable strategy.Of the sixteen historic sites considered by Iraq experts, only five--the fortified Parthian city of Hatra; Samarra, famed for its great mosque; Ctesiphon, home to the tallest free-standing arch in the ancient world; the fortress at Al-Ukhaidir near Baghdad; and the Sumerian capital city of Ur--met all of GHF's criteria. Or, as Morgan calls it, "the Picasso Test."

"If you could save only three Picasso pieces, out of all of his paintings, pottery, everything else, which are you going to save?" he asks. "You lose these sites and you lose a huge piece of mankind."

--Sharon Tregaskis '95

Food Fight | FINE DINING TRANSFORMS LAS VEGAS

EPICUREANS FROM COAST TO coast are mourning the sudden disappearance of their favorite chefs. In Beverly Hills, Wolfgang Puck protégé Eric Klein vanished from Maple Drive in December. In Chicago, Italian food lovers are in the dumps about the departure of Paul Bartolotta from Spiaggia. And French food fanatics are feeling snubbed at the loss of Jimmy Sneed from his Virginia restaurant, the Frog and the Redneck.

They've all packed up and gone to-- where?--Las Vegas. The culprit: Elizabeth Blau, MPS '95, who coaxed them away to open new restaurants at the $2.4 billion Wynn Las Vegas complex, slated to open in April with 2,700 rooms and nineteen dining outlets.

Wynn Las Vegas is the newest--and most ambitious--venture of casino mogul Steve Wynn. Last year, he hired Blau as executive vice president of restaurant marketing and development, a job that entails the conceptualization of new restaurants and their design, menu planning, marketing, and public relations.

Blau faced little competition: she had made her name in restaurant development in the late '90s while working for Wynn's former company, Mirage Resorts. There, she made the restaurants of the swank Bellagio casino the envy of Sin City, in large part by convincing celebrity chefs to open branches of their famous eateries. (She pounced on such superstars as French food master Jean-Georges Vongerichten, celebrated Boston chef Todd English, and seafood guru Michael Mina, among others.) Blau also developed restaurants at Treasure Island and Mirage in Las Vegas and at Beau Rivage in Biloxi,Mississippi-- where she met her husband, Kim Canteenwalla, its executive chef.

She went on to develop other successful restaurants for Mirage and, beginning in 2002, her own consulting company, Elizabeth Blau and Associates. Blau's strategy of recruiting big-name chefs and investing in top-notch design, management, and technology has become a recipe for success in Las Vegas.

Typical Vegas fare used to consist of ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktails and budget buffets. The idea was to lure gamblers to the casinos with cheap rooms and food. That notion has been turned on its head--the new emphasis is on high-end non-gambling operations such as condos, upscale supermarkets, and expensive restaurants. The local economy has been transformed, and only half of the city's revenues now come from gambling, down from 70 percent in the 1970s, according to Reneta McCarthy, a casino industry expert at the Hotel school.

That has happened because gambling has become more commonplace in America, so Las Vegas has needed new draws to keep the visitors coming. Real estate prices have also jumped so high that developers realized it would be more profitable to own mini-cities where people live, eat, shop, and gamble, rather than running casinos only. And developers have been spurred on by the city's culture of "one-upmanship," says McCarthy. In this environment, luxury restaurants have proliferated.

"Restaurants in Las Vegas used to be amenities," Blau says. "If you wanted to use the restroom or get a drink at the bar, you had to go into the casino. But restaurants aren't amenities anymore--they're attractions in themselves, and people come into the casinos, and come to Las Vegas, because they are drawn to the restaurants."

With Wynn Las Vegas, Blau is about to raise the stakes again. Blau and Wynn realized that the most successful restaurants they established in the '90s-- Bellagio's Picasso and Mirage's Renoir, which have won numerous awards--were run by chefs who lived in Las Vegas and oversaw the restaurants on a day-to-day basis, rather than from afar. So Blau convinced top chefs to move to Vegas and manage their restaurants on-site. Hefty pay packages helped, she admits, but "it was mostly about camaraderie"--a valuable perk in the food-and-entertainment business.

"I didn't come here for the money," says Eric Klein, speaking on a cell phone while searching for a new home in Las Vegas. Klein (who met Blau through his wife, fellow Hotelie Tory Rogers Klein, MPS '94) will run the steakhouse at the new Wynn resort. "I came to start a new adventure and work with Elizabeth, who's a visionary," he says. "She made Las Vegas food what it is today."

Blau has always had a passion for food. As a teen in West Hartford, Connecticut, she was a cook at a beer-and-burrito outlet. After college at Georgetown she sold the designer water Clearly Canadian, learned confectionery arts working at a candy shop, and, during a Cornell summer, worked for the James Beard Foundation in New York, where she met dozens of chefs and restaurant owners. Among them was Sirio Maccioni, owner of Le Cirque and Osteria Del Circo.His restaurants intrigued her, and for her master's thesis Blau wrote a strategic marketing plan for Le Cirque.After graduation, she went to work for the Maccioni family. (Son Mario Maccioni '93, who also attended the Hotel school, helps run the restaurants.) When Wynn hired her in 1997, she brought the family's restaurants to Bellagio.

When Wynn sold Mirage Resorts to MGM Grand in 2000, Blau stayed on for a while. She eventually resigned because, she says, "I had been used to working in close relationships with owners. MGM felt like a big, impersonal corporate entity to me." So she started her own consulting firm and found that chefs, developers, and financiers were soon knocking at her door. And then Steve Wynn called again.

"Elizabeth has her finger on the pulse of what people want when they come to Las Vegas," says Max Jacobson, the restaurant editor of Las Vegas Life magazine. "She can anticipate that and then deliver."

-- Tamar Morad

Labor of Love | TIME FOR WORK, THE MAGAZINE

Who wants to read a magazine about work?

Diana Lind '03 did. And she's guessing that other young people do too. "When you graduate from college, it's the thing everyone is talking about," says the former English major. "You become one of those Americans who spend all their time talking about their jobs." Sensing an unexploited niche at the newsstand, Lind launched a quarterly magazine that explores work culture--called, naturally, Work--in fall 2004. With contributions from a half-dozen Cornell classmates, the inaugural issue included a scholarly analysis of workplace fashion, a photo essay on Istanbul street vendors, and a riotous discussion of office washroom habits. Lind reasons that there's room for a serious publication aimed at rookie cubicle-dwellers still fascinated by the novelty of employment. "That's why it's geared toward people in their twenties," she says. "At that age, people are still figuring out what they're doing."

Running her own magazine might seem a tall order for a Columbia grad student whose own job-world experience is limited to an internship at Architectural Record. Student loans, unpaid contributors, and free advice from the Nation's Victor Navasky, one of Lind's Columbia profs, helped get the slick-looking first issue off the ground; issue two is due in March. "This is trial-by-fire," says the first-time editor/publisher. "I wanted to learn on the job."

Visit Work online.

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