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Tsunami Raises Questions About Warning Systems
BANGKOK, THAILAND (AP) - A tsunami early warning system would have been of little
use for the thousands of people in the Solomon Islands hit by deadly waves since
they had only minutes to escape, an American earthquake expert said.
An Australian official meanwhile acknowledged that a tsunami warning issued
for the Queensland coast was undermined by widespread panic and a lack of clear
information
about whether the waves were actually headed their way.
“
We got the emergency people together and we were trying to ascertain, ‘Is
there really a tsunami coming; if so, how big is it; and, how far are we going
to need to encourage people to leave the coastline?’” Queensland
Premier Peter Beattie told the Seven Network.
“
We couldn’t get that information. ... We didn’t know the extent of
the problem. We were shooting blind,” Beattie said.
Critics said the tsunami, which killed at least 28 people, exposed the limitations
of a warning system that supporters have championed as the best means of avoiding
a repeat of the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster.
That disaster, which left some 230,000 people dead or missing in a dozen
countries, prompted the United Nations and six governmental donors, including
the United
States, to create a $130 million Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation
System, which is expected to be operational at the end of 2008.
Indonesia, which was hit hardest by the 2004 disaster, is in the process
of installing dozens of tidal gauges and deep-ocean tsunami monitoring buoys
to
detect tsunami
waves as well as more than 150 seismometers to detect earthquakes.
The United Nation’s Michael Rottmann, special coordinator for the tsunami
early warning system in Indonesia, told The Associated Press that he is confident
the system will alert most people within 10 minutes of an undersea temblor.
“
I think a lot of lives can be saved if you have a warning in less than 10 minutes,” Rottmann
said, noting that it took 15 minutes for waves from the 2004 quake to reach the
coastline of Sumatra. “If you have five minutes and you have a reliable
warning, you can get very far. You could go up into a hill or get away from
the beach.”
Yet critics of the early warning system are not confident.
U.S. earthquake expert Kerry Sieh, who has studied the 2004 disaster, said
coastal communities near a quake epicenter would be better off putting their
resources
into disaster response education and efforts to permanently relocate vulnerable
communities to higher ground rather than counting on an alert system to save
them.
“
When you have a tsunami coming in so quickly after an earthquake, it doesn’t
do much good to have an early warning system,” he said. “It could
still be valuable for people who are at greater distances. That is the main
reason for a warning system in the Pacific.”
Sieh said the South Pacific tsunami was a perfect example of the “limits” of
such a system, since witnesses reported that a wall of water 16 feet high plowed
into the Solomons’ shores within about five minutes of the quake.
The tsunami was triggered by a magnitude 8.0 quake that struck shortly after
7:39 a.m. six miles beneath the sea floor, about 215 miles northwest of the
Solomons’ capital,
Honiara, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The quake set off tsunami alarms from Tokyo to Hawaii. It also prompted the
closure of beaches, schools, and business on Australia’s east, more than
1,250 miles from the epicenter.
The disaster left thousands homeless.
Australian federal government officials dismissed suggestions that they overreacted
to the tsunami threat, saying it was an “appropriate reaction” to
the quake that resulted in a tsunami 20 to 30 centimeters high off its east
coast.
“
In certain areas ... one may have had a larger impact,” said Ray Canterford,
who is leading the implementation of the country’s 69 million Australian
dollars alert system for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. It will be completed
in 2009.
“
I believe it was a sort of marginal event but it was better to act a little more
carefully than to ignore the threat,” he said.
Beattie, however, called on the federal government to speed up the introduction
of early warning systems in the Coral Sea to provide vital information that
would aid evacuation.
“
This is not a game. The truth is, if there had been a (larger) tsunami, we would
have lost lives,” Beattie said.
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