Tsunami Warning tracker

Why Indonesia's tsunami alert system is far from ready

2006-07-19T03:16:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5191190.stm
Indonesia tsunami system 'not ready'

By Laura Smith-Spark
BBC News

Eighteen months after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, hundreds have died after a giant wave struck the Indonesian island of Java.

Some villagers say there was little or no warning ahead of the tsunami

Their deaths have raised questions about the failure of a promised Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system to sound an adequate alert.

More than 500 people died when the tsunami struck Java's southern coast on Monday.

Witnesses have said people had little or no warning to flee the 2m-high wave triggered by an undersea earthquake.

Java resident Elan Jayalani, whose village of Batukaras was one of those affected, told the BBC: "There was some confusion about the warning.

"We were told that there had been an earthquake and the tsunami might come in a couple of days... we never expected it."

The new Indian Ocean early warning system - proposed after the December 2004 tsunami which claimed 200,000 lives - was said by the UN to be "up and running" late last year.

So why did a warning not reach Java's affected communities in time?

Indonesian earthquake official Fauzi told the BBC News website that although progress had been made, there were still serious shortcomings in Indonesia's monitoring systems and communications network.

Many people have been displaced after their homes were destroyed

These were compounded by the speed at which Monday's tsunami struck, said Fauzi, who works for Indonesia's Bureau of Meteorology and Geophysics (BMG).

It currently takes scientists up to 60 minutes to receive and analyse the data from 30 seismological stations and send out a warning.

With only a 20-minute interval between the magnitude 7.7 undersea earthquake and the arrival of the waves on shore, there was just no time to warn people, Fauzi said.

However, work is under way to improve the system.

Thirty more seismological stations are to be installed this year

A total of 160 will be in place when the network is completed in 2009, cutting the time taken to receive and process earthquake data to less than five minutes

At present two ocean pressure sensors - part of the Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (Dart) system - are in place. Another 15-20 Dart buoys are planned by 2009

Four land-based tide gauges are now in place in Aceh, Nias island, Padang and Bali. An international network spanning the Indian Ocean continues to be updated and expanded

'Unexpected'

The final part of the jigsaw is getting the warning message from tsunami monitoring centres to Jakarta and - in a matter of minutes - to often isolated communities.

[It's] a hard thing to keep up that level of awareness and to have people be able to react quickly when an event occurs

Charles McCreary
Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, Hawaii

Fauzi said: "We don't have the systems yet so what we do is call by telephone. But sometimes the lines are busy and it's very difficult to get through.

"We need to set up an exclusive communication system because otherwise it's going to be the same problem. If we use public communication systems, it's not going to work very well."

In the meantime, officials were making use of SMS messages to contact communities at risk, he said.

Networks of sirens are also being set up this year in the Aceh, Padang and Bali regions to alert people who may be too poor to own TVs, radios or mobile phones. Another is to be built in Java next year.

Awareness level

Educating vulnerable coastal communities so they know how to react if an earthquake strikes or a tsunami warning is issued is also key.

It remains difficult to get warning messages to all vulnerable people

When the waters receded before the giant waves hit Java's coast, witnesses reported people running on to the exposed seabed to look - a reaction that cost many lives in the 2004 tsunami.

Charles McCreary, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, told BBC News that, despite improvements in warning systems, basic safety messages had still not reached everyone.

"The strategy has always been that if you're near the ocean and you feel a strong earthquake, that is your warning and you need to move to high ground or inland as quickly as possible.

"But that's a hard thing to keep up that level of awareness and to have people be able to react quickly when an event occurs - and it looks that there was a failure of that today."

Financial help continues to come from governments and organisations including Germany - a partner in building the Dart system - Japan, China and the UN, Fauzi said.

But, he added, establishing such a complex new monitoring system inevitably "takes time".

"Also, right now, there are difficulties with our human resources because this is our first experience of setting up a tsunami system," he said.

"What we need is to ask the developed countries also to assist us with expertise."

INDONESIA TSUNAMI WARNING SYSTEMS

Germany, Japan, China and the United Nations, among others, are contributing towards Indonesia's tsunami warning system

Between 15 and 20 Dart buoys are expected to be in place by 2009

Indonesia also has 30 seismographic stations and plans 30 more by end of 2006, 160 by 2009

Indian Ocean tsunami warning system

Asia tsunami warning system ready

2006-06-29T04:15:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5126710.stm

Most had no warning of the 2004 tsunami until giant waves appeared

A tsunami warning system covering the Indian Ocean region is now "up and running", Unesco has said.

The UN organisation, which has overseen the project, says the whole region can now receive and distribute warnings of possible tsunamis.

The system is in place 18 months after the devastating tsunami of December 2004 that killed more than 200,000.

The Pacific region has had a system for 40 years and others are planned for the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Caribbean.

Work unfinished

Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the UN's scientific and cultural organisation, said the nations involved should be "justly proud of having done all this and much more".

The UN says people must know what to do when warned

There are 26 national tsunami information centres receiving information from 25 new seismographic stations.

There are also three deep-ocean sensors to detect and report tsunamis.

But Mr Matsuura warned the work was not yet finished.

He said the system would suffer if there was no coordination between the different nations.

"The open and free exchange of data and the full interoperability of national systems is absolutely crucial for success," he said.

Mr Matsuura also said that even a 100% successful warning system would be ineffective "if people do not know how to respond to the emergency".

The system is being overseen by Unesco's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

A massive earthquake beneath the ocean on 26 December 2004 sent giant waves crashing ashore in places as far apart as Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Somalia.

The only warning most people had was the sight of the waves heading towards them. About 1.5 million people were left homeless in the region after the wall of water stripped away trees, houses and whole communities.

Reconstruction could take between five years and a decade.

Pacific states hold tsunami test

2006-05-18T04:52:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4988492.stm

Scientists were pleased with the high participation in the test

More than 30 countries around the Pacific Ocean have tested a system to warn them of approaching tsunamis.

The exercise began with a mock alert at the Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii.

According to the scenario, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake had struck near the coast of Chile, sending a tsunami racing across the eastern Pacific.

A second mock alert, involving a make-believe earthquake north of the Philippines, has been testing responses in the western Pacific.

The drill is thought to have been broadly successful, although there was some delays with communications systems in Thailand.

'Success'

Governments are reporting back on how efficiently they received the tsunami warnings, relayed through various circuits including weather services, emails and faxes.

They've contacted each country that is participating and just about every single one of them have received the bulletins

Delores Clark
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The aim of the drill, co-ordinated by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, is also to measure how well the message is relayed through local emergency systems.

At the start of the test, a beeping noise sounded throughout the warning centre on Hawaii's Ewa Beach, and within minutes the first alerts were sent out to 30 participating countries.

In a second part of the drill, officials in Thailand, Malaysia, American Samoa and the Philippines staged real tsunami evacuations.

On Wednesday morning, a mock warning of an earthquake north of the Philippines sent nearly 1,000 people in the coastal village of Buhatan scurrying for the hills.

In Malaysia, villages along the coast of Sabah state on Borneo were also evacuated as part of the drill.

"It's gone very, very well so far," a spokeswoman for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told AFP news agency at the end of the first stage.

"They've contacted each country that is participating and just about every single one of them have received the bulletins," Delores Clark added.

The second part was not quite as smooth. A crucial link in the communications chain to alert people in Thailand failed to work, a disaster response official said.

The country's National Disaster Warning Centre said the problem was caused by an overloaded telephone system which delayed public text message alerts for several hours.

"This is something we need to improve, otherwise it may cause great damage," Samith Dhammasaroj, the head of the centre, told Reuters news agency.

Real thing

Correspondents say governments' interest in tsunami alerts had waned before the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, which took more than 200,000 lives.

Some countries planned evacuations at coastal areas

Two actual earthquakes struck on Tuesday during the test - a magnitude 7.4 quake north of New Zealand, and a magnitude 6.8 off Indonesia. No casualties were reported.

Another mock test on Wednesday is envisaging a magnitude 8.8 earthquake north of the Philippines.

Officials there, and in Thailand, Malaysia and American Samoa, will go one step further by staging real evacuations.

A Pacific warning system has been in place since 1965, but this is largest test of the system since its inception.

The exercise may serve as a model for future tests in the Indian Ocean.

GPS Could Speed Tsunami Warnings

2005-12-19T22:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69847,00.html?tw=rss.TOP

By Elizabeth Svoboda
02:00 AM Dec. 19, 2005 PT

GPS satellite receivers are already navigational must-haves for hikers and drivers. Now scientists are hatching plans to press them into service as tsunami predictors.

International organizations like the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, or PTWC, in Hawaii currently depend on coastal seismic stations to record deep-sea earthquakes that could cause giant waves. But according to Jeff Freymueller, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, data from GPS receivers could provide quicker, more accurate estimates of the magnitude of a tsunami-causing quake, buying time for evacuation. Freymueller presented his findings at this week's American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.

Unlike seismometers, GPS receivers can measure the movement of the ground in real time. Because quake magnitude is a direct function of how much the earth shifts, Freymueller has demonstrated that the receivers can obtain precise measurements of a massive quake's severity in as little as 20 minutes.

"Seismometers measure the velocity of the ground, and you have to collect a number of cycles of the important wave in order to get that measurement," he said. "GPS receivers measure the static displacement of the earth, and after the first few minutes of a quake, that doesn't change much."

Freymueller envisions a new tsunami-warning strategy that would use seismic and GPS data in tandem to calculate a wave-causing quake's strength soon after its onset. This would enable more-accurate computer simulations of the coming wave, allowing more-targeted evacuation strategies. Planting the receivers every hundred miles in tsunami-prone areas, he added, could be done in a matter of months, and each receiver would cost less than $10,000.

"Early warnings from GPS could save thousands of lives," he said. "In last year's Indian Ocean tsunami, there were potentially one to two hours for evacuation, had an accurate warning system been in place. Every minute counts."

Seismic measurements of very large quakes like the one that caused last year's Indian Ocean tsunami take several hours to fine-tune, because the moving vibrations must be recorded at a variety of stations in different locations. When the quake that caused the giant Southeast Asian wave first hit, scientists at the PTWC estimated its magnitude at 8.0, but revised their estimate to 8.5 an hour later. After a few more hours passed, a team at Harvard University pegged the quake at 8.9. The final reading, 9.2, was not agreed upon until months afterward.

Yehuda Bock, a geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has also investigated the possibilities of using GPS receivers in tsunami-warning systems. His results are similar to Freymueller's, indicating the receivers can gauge the ground movements created by tsunami-causing quakes with unprecedented precision and speed.

"With GPS, the displacements are measured second by second," said Bock, who also presented at the American Geophysical Union conference. "Within 70 seconds you have a good idea of the final deformation." In addition to predicting tsunamis, he thinks GPS modules could be used to monitor the activity of volcanoes and landslides in real time.

Like Freymueller and Bock, Peter MacDoran, a GPS expert who works for George Washington University's Space and Advanced Communications Research Institute, wants to make GPS receivers part of disaster-prediction networks. But he foresees using them in a different way: to track the movement of tsunami-associated pressure waves in the Earth's atmosphere.

"Quakes that cause tsunamis create deformation on the surface of the water, and that causes an atmospheric 'thump,'" MacDoran said. "A compression wave travels into the upper atmosphere, and that disturbance causes subtle changes in the way GPS signals travel." Digital processing of the changed signals coming from nearby receivers would indicate that a tsunami was imminent.

MacDoran has proposed setting up networks of GPS-connected personal computers to monitor these signals, especially in tsunami-prone areas like Southeast Asia, the United States' Atlantic coast and the Pacific Northwest.

He emphasized, however, that his goal is to complement seismic-based tsunami-detection strategies, not replace them. "The quake sensors we have work well. Seismic sensing is a highly developed art," he said. "It just doesn't give you all the information you need."

How to Build a Global Internet Tsunami Warning System in a Month

2005-12-16T04:11:00.000-08:00

Cringley is a respected technology forecaster. Here are his words from almost a year ago, and yet we have no such system in place. His idea could work, from my personal reading of the problem statement, it doesn't seem that hard. Where have all the volunteer programmers gone?

-- tsunamiwarning

(Source: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041230.html)

December 30, 2004

Wave of Change

How to Build a Global Internet Tsunami Warning System in a Month

By Robert X. Cringely

A friend of mine is missing in southern Asia.

She isn't missing in the sense that anyone saw her swept away by this week's horrible tsunami, but she and her entire family haven't been heard from, either so of course, I am worried. That worry makes real for me a disaster of such horrific proportions that without a personal connection, it simply can't be real to most of us. By the time all the bodies have been counted and estimated, probably 100,000 people will have died. If cholera follows, as it tends to in that part of the world, another 40,000 or more could follow. That's a lot of people, 140,000 -- enough people that we ought to do something to make sure it doesn't happen again. So of course, there is lots of talk about tsunami warning systems and global cooperation, but I think that's just going about solving the problem the wrong way. We don't need governments and huge sensor arrays to warn people on the beach about the next huge wave approaching at 400 miles-per-hour. Thanks to the Internet, we can probably do it by ourselves.

Here's the problem with big multi-government warning systems. First, we have a disaster. Then, we have a conference on the disaster, then plans are proposed, money is appropriated, and three to five years later, a test system is ready. It isn't the final system, of course, but it still involves vast sensor arrays both above and below the surface of the ocean, satellite communication, and a big honking computer down in the bowels of the Department of Commerce or maybe at NASA. That's just the detection part. The warning part involves multilateral discussions with a dozen nations, a treaty, more satellite communication, several computer networks, several television and radio networks, and possibly a system of emergency transmitters. Ten years, a few million dollars and we're ready.

We can't rely on governments to do this kind of work anymore. They just take too darned long and spend too much money for what you get. Besides, since governments are almost totally reactive, what they'll build is a warning system for precisely the tsunami we just had -- a tsunami bigger than any in that region since the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. One could argue (and some experts probably will) that it might even be a waste of money to build a warning system for a disaster that might not happen for another 121 years.

What we need is a tsunami warning system not just for parts of Asia, but for anywhere in the world that might be subject to such conditions. And that decision about what beaches to protect ought to come not from Washington, D.C., or Jakarta, or any other capital city, but from the beach people, themselves. If you are concerned about a giant tidal wave taking out your village, it might be a good idea to build your own warning system, you retired engineer, you Radio Shack manager, you harbor master, you radio amateur, you nerd with a suntan.

It can be done.

The Tsunami Warning System (TWS) in the Pacific Ocean shows us how such a warning system can be run with the cooperation of 26 countries. Maybe we can do the same thing, just without all that cooperation. TWS is based on crunching two kinds of data -- seismic activity and changes in sea level measured by tide gauges. Most tsunamis begin with an earthquake, the severity and epicenter of which can tell a lot about whether a tsunami is likely, how strong it will be, and in what direction it is likely to go. From the TWS, the first warning is based purely on such seismic data. But once the big wave starts rolling it will have an effect on the level of the sea, itself, which is routinely monitored by weather stations of many types. This additional data gives a better idea of how bad the wave is really going to be, so in the TWS system, it is used to justify expanding the warning to other communities beyond those warned purely on the basis of seismic data.

Depending on where the originating earthquake is, the tsunami can be minutes or hours from crashing into a beach. This week's wave took about 90 minutes to reach Sri Lanka, just over 600 miles from the epicenter. That not only means the wave was traveling at over 400 miles-per-hour, it also means that had a warning system been in place, there would easily have been time to get the people who were affected in Sri Lanka to higher ground.

So to start, we need raw seismic data. If you take a look at the fourth of this week's links, you'll see that plenty of such data are available. Thanks to the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network, here is one place where you can find real time data from 199 seismographs around the world. There are also links to a dozen regional operations that consolidate such data. The data is available. Tide gauge data is available, too, though there is less of it, and aggregation will require more effort, so I say let's just stick to seismic data for our warning system.

Here's where we need the help of a tsunami expert, someone who can help us calculate the size and direction of a likely tsunami based on the available seismic data. Fortunately, there has been quite a bit of work done in this area of study (see link #5), and appropriate computer codes that can be run on a personal computer either exist or can be derived, perhaps by reflexively evaluating seismic data from known tsunami events. But remember that what we care about here is not global tsunami warning but LOCAL tsunami warning (Is it going to hit MY beach?), so the required seismic data sources can pretty easily be limited to those with an uninterrupted aspect of the target beach, which means half a dozen seismographs, not 199.

Since the basic question is fairly simple -- "Is my beach going to be hit by a destructive tsunami and when?" -- and the required data sources are limited, I figure we won't need a supercomputer.

The seismographs are online, we gather the data using XML, continuously crunch it using the codes I am assuming already exist, then we need the warning, which I would flash on the screen of my PC down at the surf shop using a Javascript widget built with Konfabulator, the most beautiful widget generator of all. Looking just like a TV weather map, the widget would flash a warning and even include a countdown timer just like in the movies.

You don't need an international consortium to build such a local tsunami warning system. You don't even need broadband. The data is available, processing power is abundant and cheap. With local effort, there is no reason why every populated beach on earth can't have a practical tsunami warning system up and running a month from now. That's Internet time for you, but in this case, its application can protect friends everywhere from senseless and easily avoidable death.

Links of the Week

Computerworld
Computerworld says we need a tsunami warning network.
(http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/management/
itspending/story/0,10801,98582,00.html?source=NLT_PM&nid=98582)

Krakatoa
Krakatoa in 1883 was a far bigger seismic event, but loss of life was less simply because the coastal populations then were smaller.
(http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SP134319.htm)

Tsunami Warning System
There already is a tsunami warning system for the Pacific Ocean, just not one for the Indian Ocean.
(http://www.geophys.washington.edu/tsunami/general/
warning/warning.html)

Raw Seismic Data
Raw seismic data and plenty of it.
(http://www.geophys.washington.edu/seismosurfing.html)

Konfabulator
Konfabulator, my favorite widget builder.
(http://www.konfabulator.com)

Official announcement : An Indian Tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean soon

2005-12-16T02:17:00.000-08:00

Thursday, December 15, 2005

PRESS INFORMATION BUREAU, GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

SETTING UP OF AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM FOR TSUNAMI AND STORM SURGES IN INDIAN OCEAN

16:41 IST

Rajya Sabha

The Government is setting up an Early Warning system for Tsunami and Storm Surges in Indian Ocean at the total cost of Rs. 125 crores with the following components:

Strengthening of the existing seismological network to indicate, near real time occurrence of tsunamigenic earthquakes;

Installation of tsunami warning sensors close to the ocean bottom at appropriate locales in the Indian Ocean, with real time connectivity;

Tide gauge and data buoys networking to validate arrival of tsunami waves at the coast;

Modelling of the inundation scenarios for the entire coast and mapping of potential risk areas;

Collection of information, analysis and generating status advisories.

A centre would be set up at Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (ICOIS), Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh on a 24X7 basis. The system is scheduled to be operationalized by September, 2007. The Tsunami Warning System is for the whole country.

In a written reply in Rajya Sabha, the Minister for Science and Technology and Ocean Development, Shri Kapil Sibal said there is no assistance taken from foreign firms in this regard. He said the Indian system is the best system for our country.

PRA:AD:NC

Evacuation in progress in Chennai

2005-03-28T10:23:00.000-08:00

[11:55 PM 3/28/2005]

I've heard from my family in Chennai that the residents along the Elliots beach in Chennai are being evacuated. However, news reports are indicating that the tsunami has been milder this time, and it is heading away from India and towards Mauritius.

Fresh quake reported off the coast of Sumatra - 8.5

2005-03-28T09:48:00.000-08:00

[NEWS LINK]

Quake off Indonesia triggers tsunami fears

By Associated Press | March 28, 2005

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia -- A major earthquake struck off the west coast of Indonesia's Sumatra Island late Monday, and officials warned that a tsunami could strike the area. Residents of Banda Aceh fled their homes in panic.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the temblor, described by one of the agency's geologists as an aftershock of the devastating Dec. 26 quake, measured a magnitude of 8.2.

Officials issued a tsunami warning for residents of southern Thai provinces, three months after a tsunami devastated parts of Indonesia and other countries in the region. The quake occurred at 11:09 p.m. local time at a depth of nearly 19 miles, the USGS in Golden, Colo., said.

Japan's Meteorological Agency said the quake registered 8.5.

Tremors were felt throughout peninsular Malaysia's west coast, causing thousands of residents to flee high-rise apartment buildings and hotels. There were no immediate reports of any casualties or major damage.

"I was getting ready for bed, and suddenly, the room started shaking," said Kuala Lumpur resident Jessie Chong. "I thought I was hallucinating at first, but then I heard my neighbors screaming and running out."

Chalermchai Aekkantrong, deputy director of Thailand's meteorological department, told a radio station that officials were asking people near the coast to evacuate, although there were no immediate reports of a tsunami.

Tremors form the quake could be felt in the Thai capital Bangkok for several minutes beginning at about 11:20 p.m.

The Dec. 26 magnitude-9 undersea earthquake, the world's biggest in 40 years, and the huge tsunami it sent charging across the Indian Ocean at the speed of a passenger jet killed more than 174,000 people and left another 106,000 missing.

More than 1.5 million people were left homeless in 11 countries.

Row over tsunami warning system

2005-01-30T20:32:00.000-08:00

Delegates have been seeing effects of the disaster at first hand

Representatives of over 50 countries and organisations have clashed over the location of a co-ordination centre for an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system.

Thailand proposed that the centre should be in its capital, Bangkok, but was opposed by India and Indonesia.

They agreed to set up smaller regional facilities, in response to last month's tsunami which killed more than 250,000.

Thailand is hosting the two-day meeting for affected countries on the ravaged resort island of Phuket.

The representatives decided that work should start immediately on strengthening existing national and specialised institutions.

Correspondents say national egos appear to be getting in the way of international co-operation.

Decentralised network

Delegates at the meeting discussed where to base a centre for collecting seismic and oceanographical data from nations on the ocean rim and issuing alerts to vulnerable areas.

Bangkok's proposal to set up a regional trust fund, for which it pledged $10m, was given a cool reception.

India and Indonesia also said they wanted to host the centre.

But the participants reached a compromise, that a UN agency, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, should co-ordinate a decentralised network.

"We agree that the role of the United Nations is the most important in ensuring that all aspects in building an early warning system are co-ordinated effectively and timely," said Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, quoted by Reuters news agency.

"We agree to advance the establishment of such an arrangement through organisation of expert meetings and needs assessments, to be undertaken with the support of relevant regional and international institutions and governments."

Link

Date set for India tsunami system

2005-01-12T19:59:00.000-08:00

India's tsunami warning system will be operational in two to three years' time, a government minister has said.

The $27m system will give the speed of a tsunami and the regions most at risk, said science and technology minister, Kapil Sibal.

The announcement came as the Indian navy said chances of finding more tsunami survivors were now remote.

More than 10,000 people died in India. Around 5,500 are still missing - almost all in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Swept clean

Speaking in Bangalore, Mr Sibal said the warning system would involve installing Deep Ocean Assessment Reporting Technology at a depth of six kilometres.

The warning system was formally agreed at a cabinet meeting on Sunday.

The Andaman and Nicobar islands were hit soon after the earthquake on 26 December but the tsunami took a further two hours to reach the Indian mainland.

The navy said on Wednesday it would continue rescue operations but held out little hope of finding more survivors.

Indian naval chief Admiral Arun Prakash said: "Knowing the seas as they are it is unlikely that any more bodies will be recovered and the statistical chances of finding survivors is now very remote."

After visiting several affected islands in the archipelago, the admiral said: "I saw with great awe the mind-boggling destruction. Vegetation has been swept clean and habitats totally destroyed."

Relief workers are now struggling to provide shelter for up to 40,000 homeless people in the island chain before monsoon rains begin in April.

On the mainland, villages hit by the tsunami are hoping companies will adopt them to provide funding for communications and infrastructure on a long-term basis.

Government official in the worst hit district of Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, J Radhakrishnan, told the AFP news agency: "We don't want people who come here for one or two days, do the rounds and go away."

He said leading firms Infosys and Tata were among those offering help.

How does a Tsunami Early Warning System work ?

2005-01-05T00:30:00.000-08:00

By Richard Ingham in Paris
Wednesday, 05 January , 2005, 10:29

A tsunami alert system is a combination of real-time sensors, data-crunching computers, orbiting satellites -- and the nuts-and-bolts task of training the public to respond to warnings.

This mix of silicon and psychology is already in place in the Pacific Ocean and will be the format for providing the Indian Ocean with its own early-warning system, experts say.

The first political steps towards setting up a regional warning network are likely to be taken at a major summit in Jakarta on Thursday to discuss the relief effort for the December 26 disaster.

That will be followed up with technical work among large countries at the final day of a UN-sponsored World Conference on Disaster Reduction, taking place in Kobe, Japan, from January 18-22, the organisers told AFP Tuesday.

"A tsunami early warning system is not a top-down, instrument-only initiative," Reid Basher of the UN's International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) told AFP in an interview from Bonn.

"The biggest challenge is how to get the message across to people at risk and to get them to respond." The matrix for the Indian Ocean network is the Tsunami Warning System (TWS), operating in the Pacific since 1968.

When an earthquake occurs, participating states send seismic data to a centre based in Hawaii, which assesses whether the temblor's location and severity could generate a tsunami.

If so, it sends out a warning of an imminent hazard, detailing the wave's predicted arrival at estimated coastal locations within a given time. This information is supplemented by tidal gauges, buoys and pressure sensors that are scattered around coastlines and on the ocean floor.

These detect the passage of a big wave and radio the data back to the national and regional centre, thus fine-tuning knowledge as to the size of the wave, its direction and speed. If no wave is detected, the warning is cancelled.

In many countries, setting up the system of seismographs and wave monitors will be the biggest expense, said Basher.

"In many places, the existing instruments are used for scientific research or as historical gauges of sea levels. They have to be upgraded, so that they provide real fast, real-time monitoring."

But hi tech is only one phase of a tsunami alert system. A country may well receive an early warning, several hours or more before a Great Wave strikes.

But to make use of it, that country has to have an efficient national alert system, with equipment which functions, with competent officials and a public trained to respond swiftly and without panic, Basher said.

It means carrying out awareness campaigns in homes, schools, hospitals and businesses in vulnerable regions.

This is the time-honoured business of using posters, radio and TV messages and carrying out occasional training exercises, advising people to evacuate to higher ground, not to head to the beach to watch the incoming wave and to stay tuned to local media until the emergency is over.

For a monitoring system to operate in the Indian Ocean, "at least four or five countries" would be needed to pool their efforts. Fewer than that means there would be insufficient coverage of the region, said Basher. He put costs at "at least a few million" dollars per country per year.

Such investment is worth it, says Frank Gonzalez, a tsunami researcher at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. "The commitment needed is not insignificant for a country or an international community, but there is no doubt in my mind that tens of thousands of lives would have been saved in Asia," he said last week.

The Indian Ocean is not the only place to be lacking a tsunami alert. The system is also absent in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, both of which are vulnerable to rare but potentially murderous giant waves, according to scientists.

Tsunami meet to focus on warning system

2005-01-04T03:20:00.000-08:00

An ambitious plan to set up an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system is expected to dominate the tsunami meet.

The upcoming gathering will see leaders from stricken nations and world donors seeking to prevent a repeat of last week's carnage.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizum, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and top European Union officials will attend the summit on Thursday. Japan's $500 million pledge makes it the biggest contributor so far.

Florida Gov Jeb Bush, the US president's brother, and World Bank President James Wolfensohn will be there as well. The summit in Jakarta is being organised by the 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Rebuilding communities

Governments and global organisations have already pledged $2 billion in tsunami disaster relief, according to the United Nations.

With aid and relief workers already pouring into devastated nations, Thursday's focus will be on rebuilding communities.

Thailand is pushing hard for the system, which it believes will offer peace of mind to the millions of foreign tourists its economy depends on. It will also and guarantee thousands of tourism jobs in the region, much of which was left in ruins by the Dec 26 disaster.

Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai suggested yesterday that a part of the money pledged to the relief effort from around the world should go to setting up a warning system. (AP)
[Link]

Lieberman proposes tsunami warning system

2005-01-03T19:10:00.000-08:00

By NOREEN GILLESPIE
Associated Press Writer

HARTFORD, Conn. -- To help warn against another deadly tsunami, the United States needs to pursue the development of a global detection and warning system, Sen. Joe Lieberman said Monday.

Lieberman, D-Conn., said he will introduce legislation in Congress that would fund development of such a system.

"When you set the impact of a tsunami in terms of life lost and the cost of repair against the relatively modest investment of the detection and warning system, you just ask yourself, 'Why haven't we done this globally yet?"' Lieberman said.

The Dec. 26 tsunami in the Indian Ocean was triggered by the world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years. The death toll has risen at least 139,000 across 11 countries.

Scientists at warning centers in Hawaii and Alaska have been monitoring waters for more than half a century for earthquakes and tsunamis that could affect their two states, as well as other nations.

But the Indian Ocean did not have the sophisticated equipment that can detect and warn residents about the powerful waves. Other uncovered areas include the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean.

Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that 50 tsunamis have hit the Caribbean in the past 150 years. In the Atlantic, there have been more than 30, but none since 1964. Scientists have expressed concern about seismic activity near Puerto Rico.

Deep-sea sensors can help detect when tsunamis are forming. Buoys also can warn about a change in sea level. Lieberman estimated that the flat cost of such a system _ without maintenance and other operational costs _ would be about $10 million.

"We ought to take the tragedy in Asia as a warning and try to get this done quickly," Lieberman said.

Other officials have also warned that tsunami warning and detection systems need improvement in recent days.

Conrad C. Lautenbacher, chief of the NOAA, said in a recent interview that he has ordered an internal review of the agency's response to the quake and tsunamis. He said he also asked staff to investigate creating a more global warning system.

"If we can improve it, believe me, we will improve it," he said.

The next frontiers in tsunami science

2005-01-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

from the January 03, 2005 edition

APPROACH: A tourist's photo shows the approach of tsunami waves last week, as seen from a hotel on the Malaysian coast. Resort personnel saw the waves approaching and called in beachside guests inside.
ERIC SKITZI/AP

Research offers new hope - from timely forecasts to building codes and maps of potential destruction.
By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

A quiet technological revolution is under way that could significantly improve scientists' ability to gauge undersea earthquake and tsunami hazards.

Researchers are pinging the seafloor with advanced sonar. Others are cross-examining coral to establish a region's offshore earthquake history. Still others are designing and testing sophisticated computer models for predicting how a tsunami could affect a broad segment of seacoast or a specific waterfront, block by block.

The goal is to help marine geophysicists track the restless motions of Earth's crust - especially the strain that waxes and wanes along submarine faults and plate boundaries - with a precision that only their landlubber colleagues have achieved.

The results, researchers say, could lead to more timely tsunami warnings, a clearer idea of the effect a tsunami could have on specific locations, and building and zoning codes that could significantly reduce the loss of life when a tsunami strikes.

The effort is now goaded by a sterner resolve since tsunamis swept across the Indian Ocean following an enormous earthquake off the coast of Sumatra early Dec. 26, killing well over 100,000 people.

Researchers note that an untold number of lives could have been saved if existing techniques, such as coastal tide gauges or undersea pressure sensors that detect a tsunami's passing, had been operating.

Yet, they add, warnings are virtually worthless without a local civil-defense infrastructure to receive and act on them. Indeed, reports emerging from the region over the weekend talk of misrouted government faxes, low-level officials not knowing whom to call, and governments failing to relay warnings for fear of antagonizing tourists with false alarms.

"Scientists, technologists, people who work in disaster management have been too complacent about prioritizing areas that need preemptive action," says Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of the Center for Hazards and Risk Research at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "If there's any good to come out of a situation like this, it will provide a wake-up call to take these threats seriously and make preemptive investments in warning technologies and mitigation strategies to reduce the vulnerability of populations."

Typically, tsunamis are triggered when large earthquakes alter the height of the sea floor where the quake occurs. This means that unlike wind-driven surface waves, which also can reach towering heights, a tsunami involves the entire water column from sea floor to surface. This gives it its destructive punch.

"People don't appreciate how powerful water can be," says Peter Raad, a professor of mechanical engineering at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who is working on ways to forecast a tsunami's impact on structures. A 10-foot wall of water moving at 30 miles an hour can strike with an initial force of 5 million to 6 million pounds, he says. The sustained flow behind the initial strike reaches hundreds of thousands of pounds of force.

While earthquakes are a primary source of tsunamis, undersea landslides, collapsing cliffs, and calving ice floes have also triggered them. Even human activities - from the explosion of a loaded ammo ship in Halifax Harbor during World War I to the collapse of landfill for an airport runway extension off Nice, France, in 1979, which set off a larger submarine landslide - have been responsible.

The East Coast has been hit by several small tsunamis, thought to have been triggered by submarine landslides or quakes along the mid-Atlantic ridge. The Mediterranean Sea and the Caribbean also have been hit. A subduction zone - an undersea trench where one plate of the Earth's crust plunges beneath another - stretches across the sea floor north of Puerto Rico and shows evidence of large-scale undersea landslides.

"The Puerto Rico Trench and the Scotia Trench in the South Atlantic have caused us to rethink the tsunami hazard in the Atlantic," says Jian Lin, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass.

Scientists face multiple challenges in characterizing earthquake risks on submarine faults and their potential for tsunamis. For instance, it's difficult to establish rupture histories. "Great" earthquakes, such as last month's, happen too infrequently in any one place to build a reliable statistical picture, Dr. Lerner-Lam says. "And you can't just send down a back hoe" to dig a trench along a fault and read the history written in layers of sediment.

Moreover, on land, satellite telemetry can relay data from sensors near a fault at the blink of an eye. At sea, data typically have to be recorded and retrieved later, unless sensors are linked to buoys or tied into undersea cables.

And it remains difficult to watch stress patterns change along faults in the seafloor crust - something terrestrial seismologists are doing for many land faults. Such patterns help researchers pinpoint faults likely to experience the next snap.

In addition, the time delay in refining estimates of earthquake strength can be troublesome. Fifteen minutes after the quake occurred, it was deemed strong enough to generate tsunamis - enough time for a "head for high ground" warning in many places. But it took several hours to determine that what initially had been pegged as a magnitude 8 earthquake actually was magnitude 9 - 10 times more powerful. That can make an enormous difference in how far inland waves actually go or how destructive they can be, Dr. Raad says.

For the tsunami problem itself, the most immediate payoff will come from deploying more buoys similar to those the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is using off the West Coast and Hawaii. Pressure sensors on the sea floor are linked to the buoys, which can relay data to warning specialists on land.

Armed with that data, computer models currently running as prototypes could yield estimates of where and when a tsunami would make landfall and how far inland it would run, says Vasily Tito of NOAA's Pacific Marine and Environmental Laboratory.

Meanwhile, researchers are testing new high-frequency sonar techniques to monitor large-scale shifts in strain patterns around submarine faults and to "dig" into sea floor sediment for evidence of breaks in the layers. The breaks would reveal the sizes and relative history of temblors at a given location. Core samples would then allow scientists to date the quakes.

Others are working on how to minimize tsunami fatalities. With colleagues from six universities around the US, Raad is developing computer -simulation capabilities that will allow for more effective tsunami building codes and zoning practices. He notes that merely placing parking lots on a waterfront gives a tsunami steel-and-rubber ammunition to knock out buildings that might have withstood the tsunami itself.

Within the next five to 10 years, he says, the group hopes to have developed tools that will allow planners to play "what if" as they look for ways to reduce vulnerability - with scenarios tailored to the layouts of communities, undersea geography, and the direction from which a tsunami strikes.


KEY SUBDUCTION ZONES The major trenches on the map are located where tectonic plates meet, with one being driven under another, and are among the key areas where earthquakes can trigger tsunamis. SOURCE: UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY SURVEY; SCOTT WALLACE - STAFF

Asia Toll Rises to 155,000; Tsunami Warning System Sought

2005-01-03T04:43:00.000-08:00

Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The death toll from Asia's earthquake and tsunamis climbed to 155,000 as more bodies were uncovered in Indonesia, the country worst hit by the deadliest disaster in almost three decades.

Asia's leaders may ask the U.S. for help setting up the Indian Ocean's first tsunami warning system, after the Dec. 26 earthquake of magnitude 9 triggered giant waves from Thailand to Somalia, destroying everything in its path to leave about 5 million people homeless.

``We need the U.S. government's help for the installation of an early tsunami warning system,'' Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told reporters, a day before he meets U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Florida Governor Jeb Bush tomorrow in Bangkok as they start their four-day trip to the region.

Indonesia raised its death toll by a fifth to more than 94,000 as rescuers reached remote areas in Aceh province for the first time. Aid began to reach the survivors as ships, planes and helicopters bearing food, clothing, clean water and medicines converged on Indonesia and other countries.

U.S. Marines scheduled to arrive in Sri Lanka this week will boost relief efforts by airlifting clean water, food and medicine to coastal communities in the Asian nation second-hardest hit nation. Almost 30,000 Sri Lankans perished in the giant waves, with more than 600,000 homeless.

``They're helpless,'' said M.B. Harasgama, 74, a teacher who organized the distribution of supplies donated by Sri Lankans unaffected by tsunamis which struck the island more than a week ago. ``They lost everything and have to begin their lives.''

No Warning

Indonesia and Sri Lanka, where Powell and Bush are also scheduled to visit, were the two countries worst affected Thaksin, whose country's death toll passed 5,000 today, said the lack of warning that giant waves were about to hit coastal areas contributed to the high death toll.

``The country must have the system at any cost because damage was enormous without it,'' he told reporters.

The installation of an Indian Ocean warning system will be on the agenda when Powell and Bush meet world leaders at a tsunami summit in Jakarta on Jan. 6, Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda told MetroTV in Jakarta yesterday. Coordinating more than $2 billion dollars in aid pledged to relief efforts and possible debt restructuring for affected countries will also be discussed, he said.

Thailand's Deaths

Thailand's death toll from tsunamis that hit the nation's six southern coastal provinces rose to 5,046 today. About half of the deaths have been overseas tourists, the Disaster Prevention Department said yesterday. About 3,810 people remain missing and 8,457 were injured, the department said.

Thaksin said the Thai government doesn't want financial aid from foreign donors because it can fund relief and reconstruction with its own money and domestic donations.

Powell and Bush, brother of President George W. Bush, left for Asia yesterday. They will participate in the summit to be hosted by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono that will include Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and other world leaders. Thaksin will send his Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai to the summit.

The prime ministers of Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea have said they will attend. United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan also will be there.

Need Organization

Annan will visit Aceh on Jan. 7 as well as other regions hit by the tsunami, including Sri Lanka, said United Nations emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland.

``I think it's great that they're getting together because there are so many parties on the bandwagon now,'' said John Crawford, a member of the council for the Hong Kong Committee of Unicef, the United Nations children's fund. ``Money is one thing, but you have to get the aid on the ground, and that requires organization.''

At least 9,451 people died in India in four states and the Andaman and Nicobar islands, with at least 5,511 people still missing, a government official said today.

More than 386,000 people have taken shelter in at least 551 camps that have been set up, said V.P. Pasrija, a consultant at India's National Disaster Management Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Monsoon Rains

Hampering efforts of relief agencies are monsoon rains, washed-out roads, flattened infrastructure and destroyed communications facilities.

The death toll may rise as monsoon rains threaten to create breeding conditions for mosquitoes, which can spread malaria and dengue fever, doctors said. The threat of disease is being compounded by the decomposition of unburied bodies.

``There were about 1,500 bodies but not enough space in the mortuary,'' said K.G. Krishantha, 26, a volunteer relief worker standing outside Karapatiya General Hospital where injured tsunami victims are treated. ``Bodies were piled outside.''

The Asian Development Bank today pledged up to $325 million in aid to be made immediately available to help finance reconstruction and rehabilitation work after receiving requests from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Maldives, the agency said in an e- mailed statement.

``This is an unprecedented disaster and we are moving quickly to assist these countries in their hour of need,'' said bank President Tadao Chino in the statement.

Aid Pledged

Japan is the biggest donor nation of the 44 that have promised aid, pledging $500 million. The U.S. has promised $350 million, the U.K. $96 million and Sweden $75 million. Canada doubled its aid promise to $80 million yesterday. China increased its contribution 23-fold to $60 million, and Taiwan upped its pledge 10-fold to $50 million. The list of donations took up 16 pages single-spaced, Egeland said.

The overall number of dead from the quake and tsunamis would make the Asia quake the worst natural disaster since the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, China, that killed more than 250,000 people. Confirmed deaths reported by countries affected by tsunamis totaled 138,940 at 6 p.m. in Hong Kong, with about 16,000 listed as missing, according to a compilation of government reports by Bloomberg News.

World Bank James Wolfensohn said on ABC's ``This Week'' program in the U.S. that the aid pledged so far will go to ``immediate reconstruction needs. And after that, there will be a great deal more coming.''

The UN must provide food to 1.8 million people in areas affected by the disaster, Egeland said. That figure includes 700,000 people in Sri Lanka and 1 million in Indonesia.

To contact the reporters on this story:

Soraya Permatasari in Jakarta at  soraya@bloomberg.net

Sri Jegarajah in Singapore at  sjegarajah@bloomberg.net



To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Sue Hill in Hong Kong at  shill6@bloomberg.net

Tsunami Warning Failed to Get Through-Thai Expert

2005-01-03T04:40:00.000-08:00

By Crispian Balmer

PHUKET, Thailand (Reuters) - A Thai expert said on Monday he tried to warn the government a deadly tsunami might be sweeping toward tourist-packed beaches, but couldn't find anyone to take his calls.

Samith Dhammasaroj said he was sure a tsunami was coming as soon as he heard about the massive Dec. 26 earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island that measured magnitude 9.0 -- the world's biggest in 40 years.

"I tried to call the director-general of the meteorological office, but his phone was always busy," Samith said as he described his desperate attempts to generate an alert which might have saved thousands of lives.

"I tried to phone the office, but it was a Sunday and no-one was there," said the former chief of the meteorological department now charged with setting up an early warning disaster system for Thailand.

"I knew that one day we would have this type of tsunami. I warned that there would be a big disaster," he told reporters.

"Everyone laughed at me and said I was a bad guy who wanted to ruin the tourist industry," he added.

The tsunami took just 75 minutes to hit the beaches and islands of Thailand's Andaman Sea coast, 375 miles from the earthquake's epicenter.

Now more than 5,100 people are dead, nearly half of them foreign tourists who abandoned Europe's cold, dark winter for golden sands and turquoise seas, and left 3,800 missing, nearly 1,700 of them foreigners.

Downstairs from where he spoke, dozens of foreigners were still scanning message boards, trying to match grisly photos of bloated, battered bodies to the smiling pictures of missing friends and relatives.

"I feel very sorry for the people who died," Samith said. "I will make sure this thing does not happen again."

The early warning system for Thailand -- which has not had a natural disaster in living memory worse than floods during the annual monsoon -- would be ready in six months, Samith promised.

"We will make the system very efficient," he said.

ROARING SEA

Preliminary investigations by a team of six Japanese experts showed that the wall of water hit beaches along the Thai coast at different speeds and heights, with the phenomenon exacerbated by a high tide that fed the tsunami as it neared land.

Khao Lak beach, lined with hotels and resorts especially popular among Scandinavians and Germans just north of Phuket, took the worst hit from waves up to 10.5 meters (34 ft) high.

They roared up Khao Lak's gently sloping beach at speeds of up to 8 meters a second (29 kilometers an hour), said Professor Hideo Matsutomi, who led the Japanese team.

"There have been six major tsunami in this region since 1797, but I think this last tsunami was the biggest," he said.

Tsunami are much more frequent in the Pacific Ocean and countries there have long established an early warning system to protect them from disaster.

Samith said countries in the Indian Ocean had to follow suit and set up a network of underwater sea monitors which might cost as little as $20 million to build.

Warnings of imminent inundations would be sent out automatically on television and radio and by text messages to mobile phones.

The system would help woo back tourists scared away by the mass loss of life, Samith said.

"No-one can predict an earthquake, but you can predict a tsunami," he said. "We will build a good system."

"We will help tourists come back to Thailand."

Tsunami warning systems: The Indian context

2005-01-03T01:35:00.000-08:00

Tsunami alarm: desi model or global club?

Ashok B Sharma

Is technology the ultimate solution? Could a monitoring and warning system have prevented the large-scale destruction that one witnessed last week? Why didn’t India install a warning system so far? These are among the questions being asked, both within and outside the scientific community, post-Tsunami. Even as answers are few and far between, Tsunami has come as a wake-up call for the government. While relevance of technology in predicting Tsunami is one of the key issues being debated right now, a way forward is clearly being chalked out.

For one, the Union ministry of science and technology is planning to hold a brainstorming session sometime this month with National Geophysical Research Institute, National Institute of Oceanography and Department of Ocean Development for devising an appropriate Tsunami warning system. Also, steps are being chalked out to strengthen the Indian station in Antarctica, Maitri, to monitor seismicity in and around Antarctica and Indian Ocean.

Commitment has come from the minister for science and technology and ocean development Kapil Sibal already. He is on record saying that proper logistics for monitoring and warning will be put in place, even though Tsunami is a rare occurrence.

The initiatives that the establishment wants to roll out include undertaking deep ocean assessment and reporting system, coastal barometry, and increasing the number of data buoys in the surrounding seas from existing 20 to 30. The buoys are expected to monitor 6 km below the ocean surface, by connecting the aquatic tidal gauges to a satellite. The project cost: a mere Rs 125 crore (~USD 28 million*)!

Meanwhile, there’s a difference in view as far as joining the Tsunami warning system in the Pacific is concerned.

For instance, the US Geological Society (USGS) has alleged that the Tsunami-hit countries has not put in place any warning system for mitigating the disaster. USGC spokesperson Carolyn Bell is reported to have said: “We support the Tsunami warning system in the Pacific only. Of course this earthquake was not in the Pacific Ocean.” According to her, creating a Tsunami warning centre in the Indian Ocean will be a challenge. “This crosses so many countries and so many boundaries in that part of the world and the warning system would have to be so geographically diverse. We’re talking about educating people to what the warning means, what you have to do,” she says.

India thinks differently. Mr Sibal says that India will not be a member of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, a body set up exclusively for the Pacific Rim countries. “Being a member of this body will not help us as the mandate of the body is for the specific region. Our seismic zone is Indo-Australian plate as distinct from the Pacific plate. We should therefore ask for relevant data from them and construct our own model for monitoring and forecast,” he says. The minister also said that India will network with Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar in future for exchange of relevant data. Whatever the arrangement, experts argue that a suitable monitoring system could have mitigated some of the colossal damages. Though earthquakes and volcanic eruptions cannot be predicted on a short-term basis, the Tsunami effect, which takes longer time to reach distant places, can be predicted at ease, they say.

But, the Indian government insists that the country did not opt for such a system as Tsunami has not been a frequent occurrence in the region. According to Mr Sibal, the first Tsunami killed the forces of Greek invader Alexander the Great, and the second Tsunami occurred in 1883. Secretary in the department of ocean development Harsh K Gupta agrees that Tsunami is rare: Noted geologist, Dr George Pararas-Carayannis, counters: “Destructive Tsunamis are not uncommon in the Bay of Bengal or along the Sunda Trench.”

* Not in original text

Post slowdown...

2005-01-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

As with every news event, the initial hype is over and people are moving on to other things. The news well is drying, and since India has announced a plan to set up an 'advance warning system' there's not much else left to cover on that front for the journalists.

As if to prove the trend - I'm travelling out of town too for the next few days. I'll still post your stories if you send them to me, but it's going to be a slow few days otherwise.

BREAKING NEWS: (?) A fresh earthquake in the Indian Ocean sets off Tsunami (yet again) (?)

2005-01-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

MORE UPDATES: (11:01 PM IST)
Thankfully it turned out to be nothing to worry about. As far as I know the Indian shores weren't affected. At least we weren't believing some kook in a pickup-truck this time!

--------------------------------------------------

UPDATE: (2:56 PM IST)
(1) Magnitude 6.5 OFF W COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA - 2005/01/01 06:25:44 (UTC)
(2) Magnitude 5.8 NORTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA - 2005/01/01 04:03:12 (UTC)

[See all observations]

--------------------------------------------------

DON'T PANIC!

I've heard unconfirmed reports that a fresh earthquake measuring about 6.5 on the richter scale (first cut conservative approximation) has just occured in the Indian Ocean. If I remember correctly 7.0 is the minimum threshold to set off tsunamis, and if indeed all of this is true, a tsunami (most probably non-destructive, yet to be treated as dangerous) might strike the shores of India around 2:30 - 2:45 PM, IST Jan 1, 2005 (which is about now!).

Guest Commentary: Allan Donaldson

2005-01-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

Professor Allan Donaldson of Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada makes a very important point on the enormous value of promoting citizen awareness on the cause and effects of Tsunamis.

From:     Allan Donaldson
Date:     Saturday, January 01, 2005 9:08 PM
To:       tsunami @ cheeni.net
Subject:  COMMENTARY ON THE 2004 BOXING DAY TSUNAMI
The Newsletter for the March 1978 (PDF, 2.71MB) International Tsunami Information Center (ITIC) contains a section outlining "Proposals for a tsunami educational programme", clearly outlining sensible ways in which to involve members of the scientific community, co-ordinators of the Tsunami Warning System and members of the general public.

Here we are, more than 26 years later, and although an impressive warning system has since been established for tsunami threats within the Pacific Ocean, little has been done for the other oceans, and it is clear that the envisioned educational program has a long way to go. Although a glossy 15 page informative brochure can be downloaded from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website, this is of little help to coastal inhabitants lacking computers (or lacking awareness of the availability of this information & advisability of acquiring it, for those who do have computers). Grassroots education at the local level is absolutely essential. One can only surmise that such education has not taken place in countries around the Indian Ocean because of the lack of support from local governments -- in spite of several such countries having sent delegates to ITIC meetings for many years.

In the few days since the devastating Indian Ocean 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, considerable rhetoric about the need for effective warning systems has focussed on continuously monitored submarine pressure sensors and tide gauges, such as those now in place for the Pacific. This is all well and good, and should be the ultimate goal for all ocean basins. In the meantime, however, a simple program of education should be given priority, and procedures for cautionary tsunami warnings should be put in place immediately. When a deepwater submarine seismic event rated at Magnitude 8.0 or higher (perhaps even >M 7.0?) -- or a volcanic event comparable to the 1883 collapse of Krakatoa that killed more than 36,000 -- takes place, provisionary warnings should be immediately issued to all shorelines within the range of a potential tsunami. Pressure sensors and tide gauges certainly serve to refine information about geometry and force of ensuing tsunamis, but precious time is lost in analysis. If local populations occupying threatened areas have been provided with advance education about the potential results of a tsunami, then straightforward notice (radio, TV, loudspeakers) that a destructive wave MIGHT strike their shore within X hours should be sufficient to get them moving to higher ground. Similarly, tourists so alerted would realize that a visit to the rain forests would be a wiser choice than the beaches, until an "all clear" notice comes through. Submarine earthquakes higher than M8.0 are relatively rare events, and because they commonly are accompanied by significant tsunami-producing offsets along faults/plate boundaries, warning of a probable tsunami immediately on detection of the epicentre would hardly be "calling wolf". Had such a protocol been in place for countries in and around the Indian Ocean at the time of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, the death toll could have been dramatically reduced.

Allan Donaldson
Professor of Earth Sciences
Carleton University
Ottawa, Canada
jadonald@ccs.carleton.ca

Is a (grass roots) Citizens' SMS network a good idea ?

2005-01-01T01:35:00.000-08:00

As reported earlier here on this site ad-hoc SMS text messages have saved lots of lives this time. This has convinced many to believe that social SMS circles may be the best option to warn people about impending tragedies. I have two messages from readers on the topic of SMS sending.

Reader, Rohit Gupta writes:

It is already being hinted that citizens' SMS networks may be the only workable solution for tsunami warnings.

Despite their unquestionable success, I see two problems with legitimizing this:
(1) Rumour control: Needless panic will result from elaborate SMS messages designed to scare.
(2)Individuals being left out: Cell phone users who are not particularly social or having few contacts in the SMS generation may never get the message from a social circle of SMS senders.

The solution I would like to see is a consortium of telcos that acts as the central contact for disseminating warnings and alerts. In addition TV and Radio stations should be set up in the region to accept warning interrupts from the law enforcement agencies like in the developed world.

And this is exactly the solution that reader Ryan M. Ferris has in mind:

Everyone has cell phones capable of receiving SMS Alerts.
Users subscribe to alerts of their choosing (tsunami, bio-terror, crime, etc.)
A system sends the alerts with instructions
People follow the instructions (more detailed instructions are found on the wireless phone browser)

What do you think, gentle reader ?

The popularity contest

2004-12-31T13:17:00.000-08:00

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

view results

How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly

2004-12-31T12:57:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-31T11:31:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-31T03:41:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-31T03:05:00.000-08:00

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!

But for a phone line...

2004-12-30T23:55:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-30T23:44:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-30T23:38:00.000-08:00

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

SMS text messages save the day

2004-12-30T21:56:00.000-08:00

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]

Ham radios that save lives are hard to find

2004-12-30T10:28:00.000-08:00

The red-tape between an aspiring ham operator in South Asia and the all precious license is thick enough to put off all but the die hard fans. The situation has killed interest in ham radio - youngsters are turning towards the Internet and other greener pastures for pleasure.

Amateur call

Sri Lanka's amateur radio operators are offering their services to any area that needs communications services.

[...]

Often Hams residing in disaster struck areas are the only link to the outside world.

But the amateur community in Sri Lanka is not getting enough young blood to keep it going partly because getting an amateur radio license is a tedious process, requiring defence clearances, in addition to an examination and licensing by the telecommunications regulatory authorities.

Tsunami devastates Somali island many hours after hitting SE Asia

2004-12-30T10:05:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-30T09:04:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-30T08:22:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-30T07:57:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-30T07:52:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-30T07:49:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-30T07:43:00.000-08:00

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.

Tunnel vision as policy

2004-12-29T20:40:00.000-08:00

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...

2004-12-29T20:33:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T20:26:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T20:24:00.000-08:00

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.

2004-12-29T20:09:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T19:58:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T08:10:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T02:38:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T02:13:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T02:04:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T01:41:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T01:33:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T01:32:00.000-08:00

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

2004-12-29T01:24:00.000-08:00

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!

Creating awareness about Tsunami Warning Systems

2004-12-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

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.