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.