Friday, December 31, 2004

The popularity contest

Page views per day

Traffic statistics for the ITSU (Pacific Tsunami Warning System) website for Dec 2004.

So it seems every one and their neighbor is interested in learning about Tsunami warnings. Will this translate into concrete action ? India's already declared that it's building a Tsunami early warning system. And, is that the right answer ?

Investor's dilemma
Which of these would you invest in if you were the Prime Minister of India ?
Tsunami Early Warning System
Better communication infrastructure in the affected areas

How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly


Tourists try to rush to safety before the tsunami hit the Hat Rai Lay Beach in Thailand. The water had receded before the deadly wave struck.

Advance notice of the wave's approach would have saved thousands of lives, according to officials and residents.

The New York Times is carrying a lengthy story on the helpless apathy of the scientists monitoring the calamity and the victims who were caught in the middle.

Devastating Asian Tsunami Darkens World's New Year

NEW YEAR MOURNING
Australia led the world in a global minute of silence, New Year parties were canceled and trees on Paris's grand Champs Elysees were shrouded in strips of black cloth.


This blog exists for a reason. It would be really some solace if the powerful did something concrete about the tragedy, instead of glossing over it as the fate of the less economically developed.

Welcome gentle readers to the New Year!

Detail maps of Tsunami affected areas in India

FROM: Sashikumar N <sashikumar.n AT gmail.com>
DATE: Friday, December 31, 2004 5:51 PM
SUBJECT: Tsunami: India maps

Hi All,
I am just sending link for the maps. These maps are just first cut, i
am trying to put alternate maps. The maps are also large size. please
give me a feed back. (I don't know if anybody will be able to download
at all). Best viewed in firefox.

http://hydro.civil.iisc.ernet.in/~tsunami/index.html


regards
sashi

Seeking profit in tsunamis

There are news stories breaking here [IHT], here [Houston Chronicle] and here [Boston Globe] on the rising stock prices of companies that make tsunami early warning systems. This in of itself is fair enough, but given that there are no free lunches in this planet, the countries that make these devices (and no marks for guessing that the 800lb. gorilla is indeed the USA) are hoping that in return for all the kindly help they've extended, the disaster hit nations will be decent enough to buy the early warning systems from their saviors.

In a related news worthy action, India refused all aid from the Western Saviors. Now, I wonder why ? (hmm...are you thinking what I am thinking ?)

I suspect all of the public angst that's being generated around the world at the tragic loss that was surely preventable is being channeled into profit.

It would be a travesty of the humanitarian aid effort if not only are the poor Asian countries left to deal with the after effects of the Tsunami, but are also forced to buy hand-me-down early warning systems at inflated prices from the west!

Thursday, December 30, 2004

But for a phone line...

NEW YORK, DEC. 30. A working telephone line in a specialised seismographic station in the Indonesian island of Java could have provided an early warning about the deadly tsunamis set off by a huge earthquake and might have saved lives in India and Sri Lanka, a media report said today.

But the monitoring station lacked the telephone connection needed to relay news of the impending disaster to Jakarta, news@nature.com said.

A seismograph designed to detect earthquakes that cause tsunamis was installed on the island of Java in 1996, but the data it collected was not sent to the central government in Jakarta because the telephone line had been disconnected since 2000, it reported.

Better-equipped warning systems elsewhere also failed to alert the relevant authorities. A network of seabed pressure sensors and seismographs, run by the United Nations, can detect Pacific Ocean tsunamis within minutes, the report said.

The system issued a warning about the earthquake 15 minutes after it was detected, but the network is designed to serve countries around the Pacific Ocean, such as the United States and Australia. Officials in charge were unable to reach authorities in the Indian Ocean nations. Officials in Jakarta were alerted about the earthquake that caused the giant waves by readings from the country's other 60 or so seismographs, but a lack of data from the specialised Java station prevented them from issuing a tsunami warning, Nanang Puspito, head of the earthquake laboratory at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, was quoted as saying.

— PTI [Link]

Lack of phone numbers, staff stymied alert to tsunami-hit nations

US: Lack of phone numbers, staff stymied alert to tsunami-hit nations

By John Heilprin, Associated Press, 12/30/2004 19:07

WASHINGTON (AP) The U.S. weather agency didn't have the phone numbers nor staff to alert all Indian Ocean coastal countries when it saw the first signs that tsunamis could be heading their way, its top official said Thursday. He cautioned that the Caribbean and Atlantic also lack an early warning system.

In the face of stern questioning by some in Congress over whether enough was done, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said his agency did all it was responsible for doing in warning 26 countries in the Pacific.

''We cannot watch tsunamis in the Indian Ocean,'' said Conrad C. Lautenbacher, the Commerce Department's undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere and a retired Navy vice admiral, noting that no warning system exists for all 11 countries where the death toll has now topped 117,000.

''Folks out there tried to contact people that they thought would be interested. ... They did what they thought at the time were the most prudent things to do,'' he said. ''If we can improve it, believe me, we will improve it.''

In an interview with The Associated Press, Lautenbacher said he had ordered an internal review of its response to the quake and tsunamis. He said he also has asked NOAA staff to look at creating a ''rapid reaction'' emergency team and a more global warning system.

Lautenbacher said the chances of a major earthquake in the Atlantic Ocean ''are small, but they're not zero.''

''There is the potential of tsunami damage'' in the Caribbean, he said, ''and we believe that (warning) coverage should be extended to those areas as well.''

In the past 150 years, the Caribbean has had more than 50 tsunamis and the Atlantic more than 30, about half off the U.S. and Canadian coasts but none since 1964, NOAA figures show.

Some scientists had urged both the Clinton and Bush administrations to create a tsunami warning system in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, but they say nothing much happened.

''One option we explored as recently as a few months ago was to ask for money to have the seismic network at the university here become a 24-hour operation. ... But again there is no money,'' University of Puerto Rico oceanographer Aurelio Mercado-Irizarry said Thursday from Mayaguez.

''Based on the magnitude of what happened in the Indian Ocean, I think something must be done, but at what level and what expense is the question,'' Mercado-Irizarry told the AP.

A huge earthquake off Lisbon, Portugal's coast in 1755 generated tsunamis that crossed the Atlantic and wreaked havoc in the Caribbean and the West Coast of Africa, he said.

Lautenbacher might be called to testify about the U.S. response to the tsunamis and what can be done to beef up warnings for the Caribbean and Atlantic regions before the Senate Commerce Committee's oceans, fisheries and Coast Guard subcommittee.

Fifteen minutes after Sunday's quake near Sumatra, NOAA fired off a bulletin from Hawaii to 26 Pacific nations that now make up the International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System, alerting them of the quake but saying they faced no threat of a tsunami.

Fifty minutes later, the U.S. agency upgraded the severity of the quake and again said there was no tsunami threat in the Pacific, but identified the possibility of a tsunami near the quake's epicenter in the Indian Ocean.

After nearly another half hour, NOAA contacted emergency officials in Australia as a backstop, knowing they would quickly contact their counterparts in Indonesia. It wasn't until 2½ hours after the quake that NOAA officials learned from Internet news reports that a destructive tsunami had hit Sri Lanka.

''The fact that the potential danger rose to the level of prompting a swift warning to two nations, while others could be faced with a potentially devastating impact, raises serious questions,'' the Senate oceans subcommittee chair, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said in a letter to Lautenbacher.

Lautenbacher said there was only so much NOAA can do.

''The system is set up for the Pacific, and it is resourced and it is staffed to operate for the Pacific. It is not resourced or staffed to do the world,'' he said.

Among the 11 nations reporting deaths, only Indonesia received any warning from NOAA, and then only indirectly through Australia. After reports of casualties in his country, a Sri Lankan Navy commander called the Hawaii warning center to ask about the potential for more tsunamis. The U.S. ambassador in Sri Lanka also called the center asking to be notified of any big aftershocks.

Meanwhile, India's science and technology minister requested an investigation into a report that his country's air force base was told of a massive quake an hour before the tsunami hit its southern shore but disaster officials were notified too late to take action to protect people.

On the Net:

NOAA: http://www.noaa.gov

University of Puerto Rico: http://poseidon.uprm.edu

NPR: Shortcomings of Monitoring Systems

NPR Home PageNPR's news analysis show "All things considered" ponders on the shortcomings of the early warning systems that prevented early relief efforts. [Link]

Listen to this story...

SMS text messages save the day

CASE (1) - Sri Lanka:
This is in from smart-mobs:
Phone companies used call patterns to track down mobile phone users in Sri Lanka, then sent SMS messages to the phones and got 2,321 responses. One response led to 36 stranded Britons, and several others have been tracked down, inlcuding some who didn't know exactly where they were. [Link]


CASE (2) - Kenya:
This is from reader Patrick Hall:
Hoteliers in Kenya have accused the government of failing to alert them on the tsunami. Ms Lucy Karume, general manager of the Indian Ocean Beach Club, said hoteliers learnt of the waves approaching Kenya through phone text messages from friends and foreign missions. [Link]

Tsunami devastates Somali island many hours after hitting SE Asia

Clearly it's not the ability to warn that saves lives, but the ability to take action on the warning. Why did Somalia suffer even though the waves took over 12 hours to travel to the East African shore line ? The truth is blindingly simple, but our mandarins in the corridors of power think the solution is to merely have sensors humming away on the ocean bed.



Tsunami devastates Somali island

Roads washed away by the sea are hampering the delivery of food aid to some 4,500 islanders affected.

Waves which swept 7,000km (4,000 miles) from the epicentre left a trail of smashed buildings and boats along the East African coast.

More than 130 people in East Africa are known to have died in the floods. [...]

The politics of early warnings

No national leader wants to evacuate the entire coast for an indefinite period of time, causing an economic and refugee crisis on the scale of a world war, for what might be a false alarm. But nobody wants to ignore a warning, and perhaps be responsible for tens of millions of deaths. From a political standpoint, it's better not to have the warning at all.

Gwynne Dyer, Journalist
In Unstoppable Gee-Gees

New tsunami alert triggers panic in India

The panic in the air was very visible today as the news spread like wild fire by word of mouth here in Chennai. One local television station in particular contributed largely to the panic frenzy by broadcasting the voices of agitated amateur correspondents from various parts of the state while playing file images of the tsunami from the 26th (Sunday). For the better part of 4 hours the city was at a stand still, offices closed down, people fled onto the streets causing traffic jams and sane voices (including me) who could plainly view it as an irrational panic response were never heard.

This is what happens when a structured disaster management system isn't in place and warnings are issued. The cost of a false alarm can be very high, and unfortunately I suspect that today will be the first of several false alarms for this region in the coming days. There were also opportunistic looters raiding abandoned business districts. The phone lines were jammed with frantic callers hitting busy tones and further adding to the frenzy. Rumors flew thick and fast - it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that many were under the impression for a few hours that all other parts of Madras except their own was under water!

A few eager Police units broadcasted an evacuation message on their bull horns, this was according to some the start of the panic attack that gripped the city.

It's pretty clear - not all tsunamis are destructive, and given the current infrastructure it's pretty darn difficult to give an accurate early warning. Yet the message that went out to the public was designed to induce fear. Immature news media only serve to increase the panic.

Mark Tran and agencies
Thursday December 30, 2004


People run for higher ground in Cuddalore, 115 miles south of Madras, after hearing of possible further tsunamis. Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty

Thousands of people in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu today fled to higher ground amid reports that the Indian government had issued a fresh tsunami alert.

The reports came despite the absence of any large aftershock and, as police sirens blared on beaches in Tamil Nadu - one of the areas hardest hit by Sunday's tidal waves - people streamed inland on foot or crammed into any vehicles they could find. Some shouted: "Waves are coming! Waves are coming!"

However, there were no immediate signs of giant waves, and the US Geological Survey said it was unaware of any aftershock large enough to trigger a fresh tsunami. The Indian government subsequently downgraded the alert, but the warning had already created panic.

A home ministry official said an alert had been issued as a precaution. "It is for a precautionary measure based on some information we have," the official said, without giving further details.

"A number of experts outside [the] country are suggesting that another tsunami may hit [the] Indian Ocean today afternoon in the event of an earthquake of high intensity, which may happen near [the] Australian region," the home ministry said in a message to state governments.

Adding to public concern, police in Tamil Nadu said aftershocks in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, near the epicentre of the quake that triggered the tsunami, were "likely" to cause high waves. They evacuated hundreds of residents from some coastal areas.

However, in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, local officials drove through the streets appealing for calm over loudspeakers, saying there was no imminent danger. "There is no reason to panic," an official in the back of a jeep said through a megaphone. "You can go back to your jobs or your home, wherever you please. There is no imminent danger."

As officials tried to calm growing fears, rescuers plied the dense forests on the islands, where authorities fear that as many as 10,000 people could be buried in mud and thick vegetation.

Many hungry villagers were surviving on coconut milk, rescuers said. Mohammad Yusef, a 60-year-old fisherman who fled his village and was sheltering in a Catholic church in Port Blair along with around 800 others, said all 15 villages on the coast of Nicobar island had been destroyed.

"There's not a single hut which is standing," he told the Associated Press. "Everything is gone. Most of the people have gone up to the hills and are afraid to come down."

Officials estimate that Sunday's tsunami killed at least 13,230 people in India, although only 7,330 deaths have been confirmed. In some areas, whole communities have been wiped out. The waves killed more than 87,000 people from Asia to Africa.

Panic was fuelled by one television station that reported a tsunami had hit and showed file footage of large waves. In Nagappattinam, on India's mainland - where more than 4,000 people died on Sunday - thousands of terrified residents, some carrying their last remaining belongings in suitcases balanced on their heads, ran through the streets and streamed out of the town in cars, buses, trucks and tractors.

"It's coming," resident Thamil Vanan said as he headed for safety, carrying his toddler son. "We saw what happened here - I don't want to stay, I'm not mad." But some people gathered on bridges to watch for waves.

Meanwhile, India has become the first country stricken by the Indian Ocean tsunami to decide to set up an early warning system, despite the expense and the fact that another tsunami may not occur for another 50 years or more.

Affected countries had no warning of Sunday's devastating sea wave in the area and are, therefore, not tracked. However, a system to raise the alarm and save lives already covers much of the Pacific Ocean.

As the death toll has risen, calls for a warning system have grown and India, which closely monitors other weather dangers such as monsoons, said it would now set one up.

"India will have deep ocean assessment reporting systems to monitor any change in the deep ocean ... data will be fed to a satellite which will provide real-time information on any change in ocean behaviour," Kapil Sibal, the minister for science and technology, told a news conference.

India had previously ruled out such a system because it had never been hit by a tsunami. "No government thought of it ... the last recorded tsunami has been in 1883. It was not in the horizon of our thoughts. Besides, tsunamis are not seen in the ocean, and these gain height only when they approach the shore," Mr Sibal added.

Although the authorities knew of the earthquake that had hit Sumatra, they could not assess that it would cause the tsunamis that struck the Indian coast two and a half hours later.

Economic analysts said that, although India was one of worst-affected countries in terms of deaths, the economic impact of the disaster would be minimal.

Private economic think-tanks and industry groups said Asia's fourth-largest economy would comfortably meet the costs of reconstruction and relief, estimated at £238.3m.

"Neither manufacturing nor any other economic activity is going to be adversely affected, barring shipping and tourism in Kerala and Andaman and Nicobar," Mahendra Sanghi, the president of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a leading industry lobby group, said.

Kalam calls for tsunami warning system

President Kalam makes an important point when he underscores the need for academic involvement in analyzing these disasters. The disconnect and academic apathy towards real life problems in South Asia is disheartening.


Kalam calls for tsunami warning system
By Our Staff Reporter


HYDERABAD, DEC. 29. The President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, called for a tsunami warning system along the entire Indian coastline on the lines of the one in the 27 Pacific nations, safeguarding them from distant source tsunamis.

``We can either have an Indian control centre that is connected to the Pacific tsunami warning centre or an indigenous integrated technological solution as a long term disaster management option,'' he suggested, addressing students of the University of Hyderabad from New Delhi over a videoconference, at its ninth convocation here on Tuesday.

In the 1970s, India had kept away from the Pacific tsunami warning system, which gives significant advance notice of the impending disaster to as many as 27 nations today, sometimes as much as three full hours.

``After an earthquake occurs beneath the seabed, it takes three hours for the dynamic waves of great height to build up. All communities within a three-hour travel time from the epicentre of the earthquake can be evacuated to safety thanks to the tsunami warning system. This only means that technologically there is a solution,'' Mr. Kalam said.

More challenges

He exhorted the Indian universities to work in tandem with the national research institutions, Indian Space Research Organisation, Departments of Science & Technology, Ocean Development and Atomic Energy to evolve an integrated technological solution in the form of sensor, communication system, networking and high intensity tidal wave warning system. ``Forewarning systems are a must to face the fury of nature,'' he said, adding that there were several such challenges on the national scene faced by the people in their day-to-day life.

The President underscored the need for university teachers and students to be sensitive to such grave national disasters and development needs to enable universities `productively' and directly participate in the welfare of the people.

Highlighting its immense research potential, the University Vice-Chancellor, a former colleague of Mr. Kalam and space scientist of repute, Kota Harinarayana, said the National Assessment and Accreditation Council of the University Grants Commission had awarded the university its highest rating on a five point scale qualifying it for a special UGC development grant of Rs. 30 crores for promoting research and interface studies.

While the university's research and development funding for 92 projects in the year 2000 was Rs. 15 crores, it had increased to Rs. 40 crores covering 160 projects this year. The University also signed as many as 127 Memoranda of Understanding with different public and private organisations.

The University Chancellor, Justice P.N. Bhagwati, conferred degrees on 3,687 graduates of which, 311 were Ph.Ds, 551 M.Phils, 290 M.Techs and 2,480 postgraduate degrees in various disciplines.

Needed: a coastal hazard study

Needed: a coastal hazard study
By N. Gopal Raj


THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, DEC. 29. It is essential to study the level of seismic hazard along the Indian coast and examine the possibility of such earthquakes setting off tsunamis, says R.N. Iyengar of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

The last tsunami to hit the Indian subcontinent was caused by an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 to 6.7 off the Mekhran coast in present day Pakistan, says Dr. Iyengar, who is a former director of the Central Building Research Institute. He quotes from a 1948 report published by the India Meteorological Department that investigated the quake that occurred on November 28, 1945 and the "disastrous seismic wave" that followed.

The tsunami left a trail of destruction along the Mekhran coast. Pusni town, an important trading post, was washed away by a 15 m-high wave. In Karachi, more than 400 km away, the port was damaged, and there was loss of life and property along the Karachi coast.

People were killed by the surging waters even in Mumbai, about 1,000 km away. The high waves created tangible effect in Karwar in Karnataka, about 1,600 km away. It was the farthest place to be affected. There, the waves flooded creeks and inlets, and boats were ripped from their moorings.

"We have many important industrial units and installations close to the coast, and we must not be caught napping," Dr. Iyengar told The Hindu. A detailed hazard assessment had to be made keeping in mind the past seismic activity all along the coast.

Indian Army took six hours to get ready for relief

Clearly the response would have been more effective had their been better information, and more importantly better co-ordination.


Army took six hours to get ready for relief
By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, DEC. 29 . The first Army columns took six hours to get started for relief operations after the tsunami stuck the Coromandel coast on Sunday.

"The State Government asked for relief at approximately 0915 hrs on Sunday. That's the first time the information came in ... but the information was very vague at that stage," said the Southern Army Commander, B. S. Takhar. "We have to go by the information that trickles in and builds up over a period of time ... in every situation the complete picture is built up over a period of time," Lt. Gen. Takhar said.

There was no delay on the part of the State Government in seeking help. "There has been total coordination between the Chief Secretary and my Area Commander right from the day one," he told presspersons here today.

Government sources, lauding the Army for relief efforts, said it delayed providing relief to areas outside Chennai. It began effectively only on Monday. The Local Area Command was unwilling to move personnel out of Chennai without clear instructions from New Delhi. Finally, it required the intervention at the highest level of the State Government to move the units.

On December 26, the Army only knew which areas were affected but nothing more. This was because communication was cut off from the affected areas. "The initial information was that casualties had taken place and the number was less than what was now being quoted."

Then information built up on December 27 and 28. At 1 p.m. on December 28, the Army decided to deploy "much more resources than the earlier two days," said the Southern Command General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, who is camping here to oversee relief operations. The total number of people killed in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, "as of information available at 0800 hrs today" was 5,237. In Nagapattinam, the toll was 2,933, while in Kanyakumari 806 and in Cuddalore 507. In Pondicherry, according to the Army, 478 people were killed. As many as 1,199 were injured.

Now there were 2,000 personnel working round the clock in the badly affected areas of the State. The Territorial Army battalions in Tiruchi and Coimbatore had very few personnel, and hence they were not moved. These battalions were deployed in Jammu and Kashmir. There was no dearth of manpower, equipment, rations or medicines. In his opinion, it will take three-four days to restore some semblance of normality. If there is any area that needs relief, the Army could be contacted (phone: 044-2531 6106, 2536 8685).

An army engineering team carried out a reconnaissance of an east coast road bridge at Karaikkal, part of which was washed away. A 100-feet bailey bridge was moved to the area on Tuesday. Construction will begin tomorrow, and is likely to be completed by afternoon. The class-nine bridge will be thrown open to traffic on Thursday evening.

The Army has sent two ships with ten tonnes each of supplies and medicines to Sri Lanka. It has also readied a team of 136 personnel and medical specialists. They are waiting in Bhopal to be airlifted.

Rations, drinking water and communication equipment has been despatched to the Car Nicobar island. The Navy has deployed 11 ships in the area.

He said that in all affected areas, there was effective coordination between the security forces and the civil administration. "I expect the relief work to go on for a few days before the situation stabilises."

Install tsunami warning system within a year: UN

IANS[ THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2004 03:45:33 PM ]

NEW YORK: The United Nations has set a one-year deadline for Asian countries to install a tsunami early warning system even as it made an emergency appeal for $130 million for relief work in tsunami-devastated countries.

Sálvano Briceño, director of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), has called for immediate work to install a tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean such as already exists in the Pacific.

"Such a system would allow quick evacuation of threatened areas before a tsunami strikes," said Briceno.

ISDR is a UN initiative for increasing knowledge sharing in areas of risk management.

"I want to see that every coastal country around South Asia and Southeast Asia has at least a basic but effective tsunami warning system in place by this time next year," he said in a statement on Thursday.

Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland told a news briefing that the issue of installing early warning systems would be discussed at next month's World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan.

The UN also issued the first appeal for immediate relief of $130 million.

UN estimates that the undersea earthquake Sunday off Sumatra, Indonesia, which sent the giant waves crashing on to nearly a dozen countries has so far taken toll of 80,000 lives with hundreds of thousands injured too.

"Coordination is now vital. It is one of the biggest relief operations ever," Egeland said of the effort to bring in medicines, shelter, sanitation and water purification equipment to forestall deadly diarrhoeal diseases and acute respiratory infections among the millions of survivors.

The present relief operation is expected to surpass that launched after Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in 1998, when the $155 million flash appeal for relief for the first six months was followed by a "mammoth" longer-term reconstruction effort undertaken by the UN and the World Bank.

"I think this will be bigger and as such it is unprecedented," Egeland said.

Egeland said overall donations pledged so far included some $220 million in cash and an equal amount in kind, some of which would help cover the $130 million emergency call issued.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to launch the much vaster flash appeal for the next six months on Jan 6.

According to figures released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the two largest UN flash appeals to date have been $1.6 billion for Iraq following last year's war and $350 million for the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago.

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Tunnel vision as policy

Did I mention - 'Biting criticism' ?

Tunnel vision as policy

Moral of the tsunami story: self-reliance can be the perfect recipe for self-destruction

Wiser in hindsight as always, India is now considering measures to protect itself against the kind of natural disaster that rocked the nation on Sunday. The tsunami brought with it the realisation that it does not pay to be isolated from scientific collaboration on an international scale, given the indubitable fact that had we been linked to systems like the Pacific Tsunami Warning System, we may have been able to save thousands of lives. Escaping a tsunami is, after all, a fairly simple exercise which involves running away for a kilometre or so from the shoreline when it hits. Therefore monitoring its progress and warning vulnerable communities becomes absolutely crucial.

But for this to happen India needs, first of all, to discard one of its most valued mantras which has become a national ideology: self-reliance. Self-reliance can sometimes be the perfect recipe for self-destruction, as the recent tragedy demonstrated. We are justifiably proud of our pool of scientific talent but if it should result in a fortress mentality, or cause us to reject the option of benefitting from enormous advances in the technology and methods of weather prediction, it does not help us. Tunnel vision cannot be policy, especially in an area like weather forecasting, where developments taking place hundreds of kilometres away crucially impinge on national welfare and well-being. At least twice in the last two decades, India has been the victim of its own ignorance. In 1987, we were clueless about the El Nino phenomenon and paid a heavy price because we were unprepared for the unprecedented drought that descended upon us. While the US had intimation of a major El Nino visitation at least six months in advance, we were left staring blankly at the cruel blue skies which signified a failed monsoon. On Sunday, we had to learn that lesson all over again.

It is time, then, to seriously consider a tsunami alert system for the Indian Ocean that is linked with the one that is already in operation for the Pacific Ocean. Such systems read and put out relevant data which monitors around the world — from undersea gauges to satellite transmitters — pick up. Indeed the tragedy behind the present tragedy, as this newspaper has reported, was that 26 countries were alerted within 15 minutes of Sunday’s disturbances on the Pacific Ocean floor but India was not on that list. In our moment of grief and shock, let us seize the moment and work towards instituting such a monitoring system which will help not just India but all the nations in the region.

Putting in the sensors is the easy part...

Hear! Hear!



Putting in the sensors is the easy part - the difficult part... would be coordination between emergency response agencies in the region.

Harley Benz
US Geological Survey

URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4132327.stm

India first in region to set up tsunami warning system

I'll believe it when I see it! The point this blog makes in almost each post is that a warning system is meaningless without a disaster management plan. Disaster management infrastructure is not nearly half as easy as setting up an early warning system. I see a lot of hand waving here; will the authorities listen to reason ?


India to set up tsunami warning system
By: Agencies
December 30, 2004

New Delhi: India became the first nation stricken by the Indian Ocean tsunami to decide to set up an early warning system, despite the expense and the fact that a tsunami may not occur for another 50 years or more.

Affected countries had no warning of Sunday’s devastating sea wave that killed over 80,000 people because tsunamis are rare in the area and are, therefore, not tracked.

However, a system to raise the alarm and save lives already covers much of the Pacific Ocean.

As the death toll has risen, so have calls for a warning system and India, which closely monitors other weather hitches like monsoons, said it would now set one up in response.

“India will have deep ocean assessment reporting systems to monitor any change in the deep ocean... data will be fed to a satellite which will provide real-time information on any change in ocean behaviour,” Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal told a news conference.

He said the system would cost around Rs 125 crore — one-eighth as much as a system considered by the government but ruled out because “India is not a Pacific country and it never had a history of tsunami”.

“No government thought of it... the last recorded tsunami has been in 1883.

It was not in the horizon of our thoughts. Besides, tsunamis are not seen in the ocean and these gain height only when they approach the shore,” he added.

Though the authorities knew of the earthquake that hit Sumatra at 6.29 am IST, they could not assess that it would cause tsunamis which hit the Indian coast after about 2.5 hours, he said.

Asia's devastation

Asia's devastation
Dec 29th 2004
From The Economist print edition


Reflections on a rare but terrible calamity

THE clue lies in the Japanese name that has been adopted for them around the world: tsunami. Formed from the characters for harbour and wave, and commemorated in the 19th-century woodblock print by Hokusai that decorates so many books and articles about the subject (see article), the word shows that these sudden, devastating waves have mainly in the past occurred in the Pacific Ocean, ringed as it is by volcanoes and earthquake zones. Thanks to one tsunami in 1946 that killed 165 people, mainly in Hawaii, the countries around the Pacific have shared a tsunami warning centre ever since. Those around the Indian Ocean have no such centre, being lucky enough not to have suffered many big tsunamis before and unlucky enough not to count the world's two biggest and most technologically advanced economies, the United States and Japan, among their number.

So when, on December 26th, the world's strongest earthquake in 40 years shook the region, with its epicentre under the sea near the northernmost tip of the Indonesian archipelago, there was no established mechanism to pass warnings to the countries around the ocean's shores. There would have been between 90 and 150 minutes in which to broadcast warnings by radio, television and loudspeaker in the areas most affected, the Indonesian province of Aceh, Sri Lanka and the Indian chain of the Andaman and Nicobar islands. Had such warnings been broadcast then many of the tens of thousands of lives lost would have been saved. How many, nobody can know, for the task of evacuation would have been far from easy in many of these crowded, poor and low-lying coastal communities. Equally, though, it will probably never be known exactly how many people have died (see article). Whereas in many disasters the initial estimates of fatalities prove too high, the opposite is occurring in this case.

Making a virtue out of disaster

The question of whether there should now be some sort of seismic and even tsunami warning system established for the Indian Ocean is not currently the most urgent one, however. After all, big tsunamis are thankfully extremely rare occurrences. There is no reason in science to believe that they are becoming any more likely. The most urgent questions concern how much humanitarian aid can be mustered by the world's richer countries and how it can be distributed.

The Indian Ocean tsunami has been called the world's worst ever natural disaster. In terms of cold statistics, that is wrong, even as the estimated death toll climbs well past 50,000. Other earthquakes have killed more, especially in poor and populous countries such as China: probably 600,000 or more in Tangshan in 1976, and 200,000 or so on two occasions in the 1920s. Iran lost an estimated 50,000 people to a quake in 1990 and a further 26,000 in Bam exactly a year ago to the day, on December 26th 2003. It is not even the Indian Ocean's deadliest disaster, for cyclones have often brought worse, most notoriously in 1970 when the then new state of Bangladesh lost about 500,000 people.

What is special about this tsunami is the geographical extent of the devastation and the number of countries affected. Earthquakes produce terrible consequences, but normally of a highly localised sort. This time, particularly in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand, the damage stretches across thousands of miles and involves millions of people. That produces a huge logistical challenge for international organisations and aid agencies: how to get relief supplies and, later, reconstruction assistance to so many places at more or less the same time. Much more of the money and planning will have to be devoted to planes, helicopters, trucks and supply lines than in “normal” disasters and relief efforts.

But let not everything about this terrible event feel bad. For in that very geographical challenge lies also an opportunity, one that comes in three main forms. The first is that the involvement in the disaster of so many resorts favoured by tourists from rich countries in the West and the richer parts of north-east Asia has given it even more prominence in those countries than the sheer horror of the fatalities would have produced. Such selfish distortions are regrettable in theory—who noticed while millions were dying in Congo's wars?—but in practice they might as well be exploited. It ought to be possible to raise far more in charitable donations from individuals and organisations in rich countries for relieving this disaster than for single-country earthquakes or floods, for example.

The second is that the countries around the Indian Ocean itself should, on this occasion, feel motivated enough to assist each other, poor though all of them are, and to accept each other's help. Those that were less affected and those on neighbouring seas, including the Arab countries and around the Pacific, must surely be persuadable that they too could easily have been affected by such an act of God, whichever God it may be considered to have been.

That sense of mutual vulnerability brings us back to the question of warning systems and to the third way in which this disaster could be turned into an opportunity. Money and complacency are two reasons why no tsunami warning system exists for the Indian Ocean. But the region also suffers from a political fear of co-operation. Suspicions and mistrust between many of the countries bordering the ocean, and between those in the seismically turbulent region beyond, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere, mean that habits of cross-border co-operation are weak. Even the exchange of seismic data is meagre, to say the least, let alone interchange on more politically and economically charged topics.

In 1999, when Greece and Turkey both suffered earthquakes in rapid succession, the urge to assist each other led to a considerable thaw in long-frosty relations. To build a warning system, including processes to share seismic data and to pass on alerts expeditiously, would not be an expensive operation. Nor would it prevent natural disasters in the future, such is the power and unpredictability of nature. But it could be a useful, non-controversial contribution to the easing of old political tensions—and to saving some lives.

Japan offers to help build a tsunami-alert system for the Indian Ocean.

New push for tsunami-alert system:
Japan offers to help build one for the Indian Ocean.

By Bennett Richardson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

TOKYO - The estimated 10,000 people killed on the shores of Indonesia no doubt were too close to the epicenter of Sunday's earthquake to be saved by a tsunami early-warning system like the one used in the Pacific Ocean today. But experts say that such a system could have warned people in Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and on the African coast that the deadly waves were coming.

South Asian officials are calling for the creation of an Indian Ocean warning system, and Japan - home of the world's most advanced tsunami alert system - is offering to help build it.

While most systems can take several minutes to determine if a quake poses a tsunami threat, Japan has developed technology within the past year that can calculate the size, speed, and direction of a nascent tsunami within seconds.

"We know that a tsunami will occur if the [earthquake] magnitude is over 6.3, and that a tsunami will cause damage if it's over 7.0," says Yoshinobu Tsuji, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute. "Even in the slowest case, the Japan Meteorological Agency can judge within five minutes if a tsunami will occur."

Japan has an extensive system of 300 earthquake sensors that operate around the clock to relay real-time information to six regional centers. Once a tsunami threat is identified, local government officials nationwide are alerted to sound evacuation alarms and broadcast information on radio and TV. Coastal towns can also shut water gates to prevent waves from heading inland via low-lying river networks.

One of the reasons Japan's system works, says Mr. Tsuji, is "because Japan spends a lot of money on information transmission." He estimates that the country spends $20 million annually on the alert system.

A tsunami that hit the island of Hokkaido in 1993 demonstrated that community education and early warning systems save lives. Though 239 died, casualties were significantly reduced thanks to a timely warning issued by the meteorological agency, and because residents fled to higher ground after feeling the initial temblor.

Along with the US, Japan is one of the founders of the International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific (IGC/ITSU). Established in 1965 after a tsunami struck Alaska, the ITSU early warning system now covers 26 Pacific-rim nations.

"But because the Indian Ocean is separate from the Pacific, there is no information on tsunamis in that area," notes Tsuji. He says that at an ITSU meeting three years ago, the point was made that there was a need for an early-warning system in Indonesia. "The main sticking point for Indonesia was cost and upkeep," says Tsuji.

In June this year, ITSU recognized that a significant threat of both local and distant tsunamis existed in the southwest Pacific and Indian Oceans and recommended that a group be set up to look into tsunami warning devices for countries in the region.

Experts say the establishment of a regional center capable of acquiring and analyzing both seismic and sea-level data would require a reliable high-bandwidth Internet connection as well as highly trained staff. "Putting in the sensors is the easy part," Harley Benz of the US Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. told the Associated Press. "The difficult part would be coordination between emergency response agencies in the region."

Reid Basher of the United Nation's Platform for the Promotion of Early Warning (PPEW) in Bonn told Reuters Tuesday: "The international community has to move ahead and build global systems to avoid a repeat of what has happened in Asia this week." He said that would now be a key topic at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction on Jan. 18 in Kobe, Japan. "It is easy to be wise after the event, but we must remember that the Indian Ocean has not had a major tsunami for over a century," said Mr. Basher.

As a nation that has a long history of dealing with earthquakes and the deadly waves that they spawn, Japan has never stopped working to improve its disaster mitigation systems. Even the current warning method has been criticized as too slow, given that many quakes occur less than 18 miles offshore, creating waves that take only five minutes to hit land.

By the time local authorities sound the alarm under the current system, more than 10 minutes has sometimes passed from the initial quake - and every second is crucial when a wall of water is moving at the speed of a jet airliner. A government study in 2003 showed that a tsunami resulting from an 8.6 magnitude quake in the Pacific south of Japan could kill up to 8,600 if evacuations were slow, spurring efforts to improve warning systems.

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology has since developed a method to accurately predict the height of a tsunami three seconds after an earthquake hits. Current systems measure the correlation between different types of seismic waves that earthquakes produce - the initial P-waves and the slower S-waves. "But we can now estimate earthquakes using Global Positioning System (GPS) precision clocks and a method that measures only the first stage of the first P-wave," says Tsuji.

The new technology uses an existing system of quake-monitoring cables on the seabed to measure changes in water pressure immediately after a quake occurs with a pressure gauge attached to the cable. This system currently covers an area in the Pacific directly south of Japan, long thought to be the area where most tsunamis near Japan originated.

The Japan Meteorological Agency was allocated funding this year to extend the tsunami warning system to an area including the Pacific coasts of the Philippines and farther south toward Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The project is set to begin in March, 2005.

Another system, recently developed by Hitachi Ltd. and the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, uses GPS technology to detect tsunami several kilometers offshore by measuring how much a giant 13-meter buoy rises or falls on the ocean surface.

• Sanae Benisty in Tokyo contributed to this story.


SOURCE: US NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION PACIFIC MARINE ENVIRONMENTAL LABORATORY, US NATIONAL DATA BUOY CENTER; © 2004 KRT

Indian government agencies knew an hour before disaster struck

An hour is just too less without the infrastructure. An efficient early warning system can at best give notice a few hours in advance. Is it not time then for a comprehensive disaster management solution ?

Govt got wind 1 hr before waves hit Chennai

Disconnect between agencies: Met runs late, guess where first alert mistakenly sent? Home of Murli Manohar Joshi!

SHISHIR GUPTA, SONU JAIN & AMITAV RANJAN

NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 29 At 7.50 am on Black Sunday, more than one full hour before the tidal waves hit the Tamil Nadu coast, the top brass of the Indian Air Force knew that the Car Nicobar Air Base had been inundated.

But it was only 41 minutes later—during which time the waves were heading west—that the first communique went out from the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) to the Government. And the Crisis Management Group, the Government’s nodal emergency response unit, met at 1 pm by when the tsunami had come, killed and gone.

And guess who got this first IMD communique? It was sent at 8.54 am to the residence of Murli Manohar Joshi, former Science and Technology Minister rather than his successor Kapil Sibal.

It’s always easier to find faults with the benefit of hindsight—especially in an unprecedented disaster like this one—but an investigation of the sequence of events after the quake hit Sumatra at 6.29 am shows a glaring disconnect between different agencies of the Government. And highlights how precious time—that could have been used to issue warnings and maybe save some lives—was lost.

Consider the sequence of events:

• ‘‘At 7.30 am, we were informed by our Chennai unit that coordinates the logistics for the Car Nicobar base about a massive earthquake near Andamans and Nicobar,’’ Air Chief S Krishnaswamy told The Indian Express today.

‘‘But communication links went down in the Island Territories, the Chennai unit could only raise Car Nicobar base on the high frequency set at 7.50 am ... the last message from Car Nicobar base was that the island is sinking and there is water all over.’’

• At 8.15 am, the Air Chief says, he asked his Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Operations) to alert the Defence Ministry.

Now cut to the civilian establishment.

• Unaware of its fax goof-up, the IMD, as per routine, sent another fax to the Disaster Control Room in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) at 9.14 am.

• Eight minutes later, Cabinet Secretary B K Chaturvedi’s private secretary was also brought into the loop.

• At 10.30, the director of the Control Room T. Swami informed Cabinet Secretariat officials.

• By then the tsunami had hit the Chennai coastline and another earthquake measuring 7.3 struck 60 miles west of Indira Point at 9.53 am.

What happened between 6.29 am and 8.56 am in the IMD is also telling: it shows how the country’s premier met agency works in isolation during an unprecedented emergency.

So even as IMD stations in Chennai, Vishakhapatnam and Kolkata began started receiving after-shock signals within minutes of the main earthquake, and while the rest of the world had already issued the exact epicentre of the earthquake—and the Pacific warning system had sounded a tidal wave alert—the IMD was doing its own calculations to find out the magnitude and epicentre of the earthquake.

Not helping the IMD was the fact that the Andaman station in Port Blair runs on an old, analog system rather than a digital one. In other words, in the event of a large earthquake and frequent after-shocks, what it registered was a ‘‘clipped seismograph’’ —a blank sheet of paper instead of zig-zag lines.

This is exactly what happened.

‘‘For computing the exact epicentre, we need data from three stations in three directions. With Andamans out of operations, it took us longer than expected,’’ explained the duty officer.

By then, the after-shocks had begun at Andamans. The first one was at 7:19 am of magnitude 5.9 on the richter scale. It is not clear whether that was enough to sound the warning bells.

‘‘Tsunamis are never recorded in Indian history, so it did not occur to us,’’ said R S Dattatrayam, director seismology at IMD, who arrived after 8.30 am to the station after being informed. ‘‘I don’t recall the exact sequence of events.’’

Sounding the Alarm on a Tsunami Is Complex and Expensive

Setting up an early warning system isn't without its problems, and then again information alone is not enough without the infrastructure to back it up. This is exactly the point that this blog makes - we need to invest in a comprehensive disaster prevention, management and recovery system in the region. Relying on the met department to get the word out through an inefficient or non-existent channel isn't meaningful.


Sounding the Alarm on a Tsunami Is Complex and Expensive
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: December 29, 2004

If only people had been warned. An hour's notice for those living and vacationing along the coastlines of the Indian Ocean might have saved thousands of lives.

But predictions, and acting on them, are not simple, geoscience experts say.

"It's an inexact science now," said Dr. Laura S. L. Kong, a Commerce Department seismologist and director of the International Tsunami Information Center, an office in Honolulu run under the auspices of the United Nations.

According to a NASA Web site devoted to tsunamis, three of four tsunami warnings issued since 1948 have been false, and the cost of the false alarms can be high.

An evacuation in Hawaii could cost as much as $68 million in lost productivity, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Since the 1960's, Dr. Kong said, there have been two warnings of tsunamis in Hawaii that ended in evacuations, and both were false alarms.

Dr. Kong said the predictions of tsunamis were, in fact, accurate: the waves do arrive, whether they are 40 feet high or a mere two inches. It is the destructive power of the wave that is hard to predict. That depends on many factors, including the configuration of the ocean floor and the shape of a bay.

Tsunamis, which are common in the Pacific Ocean, are rare in the Indian Ocean. And the earthquake that set the giant waves in motion on Sunday was uncommonly powerful.

But an Indian Ocean tsunami was, to a certain extent, predictable - and scientists from Geoscience Australia, that nation's agency for earth science research, issued a paper last fall describing the tsunami generated by sea-floor disturbances after the explosion of the volcano Krakatoa in 1883, with charts that showed an uncanny resemblance to the wave of destruction that accompanied this week's disaster.

Australia has established a tsunami warning center of its own, which issued an earthquake alert 33 minutes after the quake occurred.

Dr. Kong said her e-mail box had filled in recent days with the signs of a scramble by United Nations organizations and affected governments hoping to create a new warning system for the Indian Ocean. Such a system could be cobbled together, in part, by depending on ocean-measuring sites that are already in place, she said.

The lowest-cost components are water-level gauges, which can be had for as little as $5,000 apiece but which can cost $20,000 or more if they are equipped with better instruments and quick communication abilities. A system could be put into place relatively quickly, she said, for "millions or tens of millions" of dollars.

She said such a system would not include the gold standard for tsunami measurement, a new generation of deep-sea sensors. These devices "wake up" when a tsunami passes over, and transmit data to satellites, which then pass the signal along to warning centers. There are only seven of these "tsunameters" in use so far, and they can cost $250,000 apiece - with annual maintenance costs of $50,000.

Richard A. Posner, a federal judge and author of "Catastrophe: Risk and Response," said tsunamis in the Indian Ocean had a low probability of occurring, but a high risk of damage if they do occur.

A disaster may occur only every 100 years and kill 40,000 people, Judge Posner said, but "one way to think about it is, that's an average of 400 people killed each year."

The problem, he said, is that less developed nations "have such urgent current problems" that worrying about long-term problems is a low priority.

Warning the public of disaster is an age-old problem with modern implications, said Kenneth Allen, the executive director of the Partnership for Public Warning, a nonprofit, public-private partnership devoted to improving crisis communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Education campaigns are an essential part of any warning system, Mr. Allen said. "You need to tell people how they are going to get information in an emergency, and what to do about it," he said. "If you wait until the emergency occurs, it's too late."

Phil McFadden, the chief scientist of Geoscience Australia, said warnings without such training were useless. "If all you do is phone up the local police station, they don't know what to do," he said. "And in fact, one of the problems is that if you tell untrained people, 'Listen - there's a tsunami coming,' half of them go down to the beach to see what a tsunami looks like."

Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting fromNew York for this article,and Thomas Fuller of The International Herald Tribune from Paris.

Situational awareness and window of opportunity

A report that analyzes and dissects the need for greater situational awareness. "The window of opportunity to make a difference came when seismographs all over the world measured the quake and triangulated its epicenter."


http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/[...]


The tsunami that ripped across the Indian Ocean, smashing westward into Sri Lanka, the Indian subcontinent and eventually to Africa is an example of a rare event, like an asteroid strike, which is often considered uneconomical to prepare against until it happens. In hindsight, a few simple precautions could have saved thousands of
lives.

...

Now that a tsunami has struck the Indian Ocean there were will probably be a clamor to invest in monitoring and warning systems costing billions. Ironically, these magnificent systems will probably go unused for years, perhaps centuries, before politicians in the future elected by voters whose memory of these tragedies has faded say 'what are these White Elephants for?' and abolish them in favor a more immediately beneficial project. The characteristic of rare events is that they are rare.

Although the geological record shows that large asteroids occasionally strike the earth and that tsunamis sometimes ravage coastal areas, the rarity of their occurrence often precludes the formation of a political consensus to sustain preparations against them. There will be momentary interest, a search for scapegoats and then a gradual return to forgetfulness. ... [T]he trivialization has
started already.

The window of opportunity to make a difference came when seismographs all over the world measured the quake and triangulated its epicenter. Then, and surely after the first giant waves crashed ashore in Phuket, Thailand it would have been evident that a tsunami danger existed across the whole Indian Ocean. The Indian subcontinent,
still some hours distant from the ocean monster which was then bearing down at airliner speed, might have received the benefit of warning. The communications technology existed to theoretically raise the alarm, but like an organism whose nervous pathways exist yet do not meet in a central place where the impulses can be collated to make sense, no one knew what to make of the data. And the waves crashed down on unsuspecting thousands.

In an abstract way, the information flows surrounding the Tsunami of December 2004 structurally resembled those preceding the Pearl Harbor and September 11 attacks. The raw data announcing the unfolding threat was there, yet the pattern so evident in hindsight was invisible to those who were not looking for it. But if tsunamis and asteroid strikes are rare events, they are comparatively more common than that still rarer object, the unprecedented event: the something that has never happened before. Threats like that can emerge suddenly out of chaotic systems, like WMD terrorism or new viral plagues. Against such events, specific precautions are impossible because no one can prepare for what cannot be foreseen. The real challenge is not so much to create a new dedicated network of staring systems against known threats but to tie current sensors to systems which are capable of cognition. The most valuable survival asset is situational awareness -- the ability to recognize threats you have never seen before and respond in an evolving manner -- and that capability has not yet come to the world as a whole.

The realization of its necessity has come, at least in some small measure, to institutions which are scorned by some the sneering readers of the Sydney Morning Herald. The Internet, space based sensors, biohazard threat detection, the exoatmospheric interception of earthbound objects -- are all things deemed at one time or another as a waste of money by the more enlightened, but which may yet provide the margin for survival in a day unforeseen or unimagined. More important than the the specific technologies themselves is the watchful and precautionary mindset which created them. For some, the world is not and was never a paradaisal Gaia but a dangerous place filled with peril both natural and man-made. On the days we forget the ocean is there to remind us.

A timely telephone call saves lives

Nallavadu Community Hall

From: "Subbiah Arunachalam" <arun AT mssrf.res.in>
Date: Mon Dec 27, 2004 6:15 pm
Subject: A timely telephone call saves lives

Friends:

A former MSSRF knowledge centre volunteer, Mr Vijayakumar of Nallavadu (a coastal village in Pondicherry), did a wonderful thing. He received some training with the help of MSSRF(as a village knowledge centre volunteer) and now lives and works in Singapore. As soon as the tsunami reached Singapore and he came to know that it was moving towards India, he called people at Nallavadu by telphone and alerted them. People living in huts close to the shore moved out immediately. Not a single life was lost in this village. Our heart felt and grateful thanks to Mr Vijaykumar.

Position paper on Disaster Management Systems

India-GII is a mailing list of technocrats, IT professionals and policy makers that keeps an keen eye on the Internet and telecommunications space in India.

The India-GII Wiki makes a start at a position paper on early warning and Disaster management systems. Please contribute your suggestions, and help the effort along.

26 nations knew of tsunami threat within 15 min, India not one of them

The anger that exists in the news media is quite palpable. This story is no different:

26 nations knew of tsunami threat within 15 min, India not one of them
Tuesday December 28 2004 00:00 IST

NEW DELHI: After Sunday’s earthquake, there were 90 minutes before the first wave of the deluge crashed into the Indian coast. Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, scientists running the tsunami warning system for the Pacific had issued a cautionary from their Honolulu hub, to 26 participating countries. India was not among them.

This tsunami warning stated, ``Revised magnitude based on analysis of mantle waves (8.5). This earthquake is located outside the Pacific. No destructive tsunami threat exists for the pacific basin based on historical and tsunami data... There is the possibility of a tsunami near the epicentre.''

The last part of this warning was crucial to India, as it was this very ``possible tsunami'' that ravaged the east coast of the country killing thousands.

But such was the level of ignorance about the oncoming tsunami here, that officials at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) - the premier institute in its field in the country - got to know about it only after it had hit the east coast. Said Satish R Shetye, director of NIO, speaking to this website’s newspaper in Dona Paula, said, ``I got to know about the tsunami at around 10 am on Sunday, when crew on board the NIO research ship Sagar Sukti, which was anchored off the coast of Visakhapatnam, called me to say they had been told to move offshore. I was completely taken by surprise.''

The irony could not have been sharper. One of the people who helped set up the Pacific Tsunami Warning System and the Canadian Tsunami Warning System three decades ago was a Canada-based Indian, Tad Murty.

Now attached to the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Murty says key equipment and computer models could have helped save thousands in southeast Asia on Sunday. He has personally taken up the issue of setting up a 24-hour tsunami warning system with the Indian government.

“I have tried several times with the Indian government, but they have said they do not have enough money to sustain a full-fledged system,'' Murty said from Manitoba, ``It is largely seen as a Pacific country problem.''

Murty's ``full-fledged system'' requires a seismograph, tide gauges and computer models. ``It will be difficult for India to do it alone. They should get together with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Thailand, and come under the umbrella of the UN to set up this round-the-clock warning system,'' says Murty.

Immediately after an earthquake, computer models can calculate how fast the waves will travel, as well as their amplitude. Murty has developed computer models for the Indian Ocean on his own initiative. The lack of these is exactly what has the Indian Seismological Central Receiving Station complaining.

According to Murty, in spite of speeds of 400-500 miles per hour, it is possible to make warnings practicable.

The Indian Met Office has its own explanations. ``Unless we have computer models, we cannot issue a tsunami warning after every earthquake,'' says R S Dattatrayam, director (seismology), Indian Meteorological Department. Every major earthquake in the ocean does not result in a tsunami.

There was a major earthquake on June 26, 1941, of a magnitude of 8.1 off the coast of the Andamans. But it did not result in any tsunamis, Dattatrayam says, ``It is a question of science. We cannot issue a warning causing panic, unless we can establish it scientifically.''

But the need for a permanent warning establishment has been voiced earlier: ``With population increasing on the coasts, these systems should have been set up long time ago,'' says Murty, ``anything more than an earthquake of 6.5 on the Richter scale can trigger a tsunami.''

As recently as June 2004, a meeting of the Inter-Governmental Oceanographers' Commission, a UN expert body, concluded, ``The Indian Ocean has a significant threat from both local and distant tsunamis.''

In Hawaii, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre was set up in 1965 and has almost mastered the art of forecasting the destructive waves. These countries receive specific early warnings with exhaustive data on tsunamis and can bank on an extensive network of seismic stations to locate potentially tsunamigenic earthquakes in near real-time.

The system is connected via satellite and telephone to nearly 100 water level stations throughout the Pacific that can be used to verify the generation and possible severity of a tsunami.

India will have to start from scratch.

Tsunameters and other warning systems

Worldchanging.com has a fairly detailed story on the technology that's currently available to detect Tsunamis.

However the most noteworthy point that the story makes is this:

One of the downfalls of the tsunami warning system is that it assumes centralized emergency infrastructures for member nations, so that when the ITIC sends an alert, responsible parties pay attention and respond appropriately. While this kind of centralized structure is effective when it works, it is open to the single-point-of-failure problem witnessed this week. If the emergency authority is not available, there's nowhere to turn.

Scientists in USA saw tsunami coming

Scientists in USA saw tsunami coming
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Minutes after a massive earthquake rocked the Indian Ocean on Sunday, international ocean monitors knew that a tsunami would likely follow. But they didn't know whom to tell.

"We put out a bulletin within 20 minutes, technically as fast as we could do it," says Jeff LaDouce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. LaDouce says e-mails were dispatched to Indonesian officials, but he doesn't know what happened to the information.

The problem is that Sunday's earthquake struck the unmonitored Indian Ocean. An international system of buoys and monitoring stations — the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center based in Hawaii — spans the Pacific, alerting nations there to any oncoming disasters. But no such system guards the Indian Ocean.

(There isn't one in the Atlantic Ocean because there are comparatively few earthquakes there. LaDouce says efforts are being made in the Caribbean to set up a warning system after last year's tsunami caused by the volcanic collapse on the island of Montserrat.)

"Sumatra has an ample history of great earthquakes, which makes the lack of a tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean all the more tragic," says geologist Brian Atwater of the U.S. Geological Survey. "Everyone knew Sumatra was a loaded gun."

On Monday, Asian government officials, notably in India, discussed plans to coordinate efforts to develop an Indian Ocean system. "It's a people problem, not a technology problem," says geophysicist Teng-fong Wong of the State University of New York-Stony Brook. "Governments just have to cooperate."

In fact, the detector buoys that monitor tsunami surges have been available for decades. They record water heights and send measurements throughout the Pacific network. False alarms are a concern, slowing the speed with which bulletins can be released. A 1986 false alarm in Hawaii cost more than $30 million in evacuation costs.

LaDouce notes that warnings are of little use without evacuation plans, given how quickly a tsunami can travel. Tsunami waves struck Sumatra minutes after the quake and hit Thailand within an hour.

"Even if you give the tourist resorts in Thailand a half-hour's notice, it is no easy matter to evacuate vast swaths of coastland," he says. "You have to plan and train people. And then do it all over again."

Contributing: The Associated Press

Lack of emergency infrastructure renders French blogger helpless

Loic Le Meur's blog has this to say:

Philsland (in French) is a subscriber to an earthquake prevention alert: USGS earthquake. He was warned about the earthquake three hours before the waves touched the coasts:

"A great earthquake occurred at 00:58:49 (UTC) on Sunday, December 26, 2004. The magnitude 9.0 event has been located OFF THE WEST COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA. (This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.)"
It's shocking that Philsland is not alone, there are countless stories similar to his, and yet nothing was done!

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Creating awareness about Tsunami Warning Systems

The tragedy that struck the shores of S.E. Asia on December 26th, 2004 is heart rending, especially because most of the human lives that were lost could have been saved.


The tragedy struck islands, atolls and nations that were least prepared for it. These are poor nations that can ill afford to invest in early warning systems, and quite tragically it seems to take a disaster of this magnitude to create public awareness.

Initial reflex reactions would naturally be to set up tsunami prediction center. However, it is imperative to step back and consider the ground realities. Most nations in this region lack comprehensive disaster warning and recovery infrastructure. It logically follows then that a Tsunami warning center working without the infrastructure to deliver the message is quite meaningless.

This blog is being set up to collect news and opinions on the rationale for a comprehensive early warning system in such situations. Please send your news contributions and opinions to tsunami AT cheeni DOT net for publication.