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Reducing The Death Toll From Tsunami
Sydney, Australia (SPX) Jan 04, 2005 The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26th December 2004 was caused by the largest earthquake that has been recorded in 40 years. Within minutes of the quake occurring the Tsunami Warning Centers in Hawaii and Alaska knew of the potential for a severe tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The Centers have fast and efficient methods off alerting Pacific nations of an approaching tsunami but there is no system in place for warning countries bordering the Indian Ocean. SBS World News reported that staff at the Centers tried in vain to contact officials in the affected countries but the warnings did not reach the coastal areas in time. Travel time for the first tsunami wave Location Travel Time Sumatra: 10s of minutes Thailand: 1 Hour Sri Lanka & India: 2 Hours East African Coast: 7 Hours
Lack of warning According to the Sydney Morning Herald, staff at the Indian Meteorological Department also knew of the earthquake within minutes but the Department's first warning, by fax, was not issued until after the tsunami hit the Indian Coast. The Indian Air force has a base on Nicobar Island, just 200km from the devastated Indonesian city of Banda Aceh but, reportedly, no alarm was raised when the base was inundated shortly after the earthquake. The international organisation, UNESCO is associated with the "International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific" (ITSU). ITSU was set up in 1968 and 26 nations are members. The ITSU website quotes Allen Clark, senior research fellow and executive director of the Pacific Disaster Center: "The real tragedy of all this is that the system is there, the technology is there, the capability is there, it just wasn't in place in the Indian Ocean when the thing hit." The ITSU will examine the possibility of extending the successful Pacific warning system to the Indian Ocean. UNESCO Director-General, Mr. Matsuura, emphasized the absolute necessity of bringing about a "genuine culture of prevention on a world scale." The ITSU system makes use of the hundreds of seismic stations throughout the world that are available in real, or near-real, time to locate earthquakes capable of generating tsunamis and analyze the faulting properties of the earthquake in order to ascertain the dominant direction of energy release and propagation. It has near real time access via satellite and telephone to over 100 water level stations throughout the Pacific that can be used to verify the generation and possible severity of a tsunami. The system disseminates tsunami information and warning messages to well over 100 points scattered across the Pacific. A tsunami warning that could have saved thousands of lives was issued, but not acted upon, more than an hour before giant waves hit Sri Lanka and southern India, according to SBS World News. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world," said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration director Charles McCreery. None of the countries most severely affected had a tsunami warning mechanism or tidal gauges to alert people to the wall of water that followed a massive earthquake, said Waverly Person of the USGS National Earthquake Information Centre. "Most of those people could have been saved if they had had a tsunami warning system in place or tide gauges." Tsunami warning systems and tide gauges exist around the Pacific Ocean, for the Pacific Rim as well as South America. Mr Person said because large tsunamis, or seismic sea waves, are extremely rare in the Indian Ocean, people were never taught to flee inland after they felt the tremors of an earthquake. Since a tsunami is generated at the source of an underwater earthquake, there is usually time, from 20 minutes to two hours, to get people away as it builds in the ocean. "People along the Japanese coasts, along the coasts of California, are taught to move away from the coasts. But a lot of these people in the area where this occurred, they probably had no kind of lessons or any knowledge of tsunamis because they are so rare."
Not so rare
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