Word: oceans
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Aesih Irawan was drinking iced tea at a friend's house near the beach in Pangandaran, a resort town on the Indonesian island of Java, when the ocean crashed through the living room. The 27-year-old housewife was seized by the churning water and carried hundreds of meters down the beach before she became tangled in cable, which prevented her being swept out to sea. Irawan survived, but almost 700 people were killed, nearly 1,000 injured and some 20,000 families left homeless by the July 17 tsunami that hit a 177-km stretch of Java. Triggered...
...wasn't supposed to be a surprise this time. Soon after the 2004 disaster, the international community began work on a regional tsunami-alert system for the Indian Ocean similar to the one already operating in the Pacific Ocean. Germany, Japan, the U.S. and others helped to upgrade the region's shore-based tide-gauge stations, which can measure the sea-level changes caused by a tsunami, and planned to install sophisticated deep-ocean buoys off Indonesia to detect tsunamis when they're still out to sea. By last month, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO...
...level of readiness also varies among other nations around the Indian Ocean. Thailand, which lost 8,000 people in the 2004 tsunami, has worked hard to improve local warnings, erecting 62 sirens on towers along beaches in six provinces, each capable of alerting people as far as 2 km inland. Those alerts are issued by the government's National Disaster Warning Center, the first such command post opened in the region after the 2004 tsunami. Sri Lanka, too, has earned plaudits for coordinating with UNESCO's regional efforts, and developing a strong system for disseminating warnings from the capital, utilizing...
...often, however, politics have trumped practicalities. Initially the Indian Ocean warning system was supposed to be truly regional, with a single center processing and sending out alerts to endangered countries. But that plan collapsed as various nations balked at sharing data and responsibility; instead they competed to host the headquarters. The result is a net of national tsunami centers, hopefully sharing data but currently less integrated than the system in the Pacific. India has decided to go it virtually alone, investing $30 million to create a detection system that will in many ways mirror UNESCO's. Unlike the Pacific, "this...
...Pariatmono says that same "non-destructive" warning was on the PTWC website three hours after the magnitude 7.7 undersea quake erupted in the Indian ocean off the coast of Java, Indonesia's most-densely populated island. He points out also that the nationwide system is still three years from completion and is currently functioning only in Sumatra. "Even in Sumatra, the only place that is really prepared is in Padang," he says,referring to the capital of West Sumatra, where drills have been carried out and a program put in place. "The rest of the country is still very vulnerable...