Word: tsunami
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...What went wrong? Patricio Bernal, executive secretary of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Committee, says the response to the Java tsunami actually represented a success for the interim warning system?and in a sense, he's right. Just 17 minutes after the earthquake struck off the coast of Java, scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) in Hawaii crunched the seismological data and sent a bulletin to colleagues in Jakarta, warning of the possibility of a local tsunami for land within 100 km of the temblor's epicenter. In the 2004 tsunami, those simple lines of communication did not exist...
...What came next was a failure to communicate. About 20 minutes after the quake, the Indonesian Meteorology and Geophysics Agency's technical department for tsunamis received the e-mail bulletin from PTWC in Honolulu that included a warning about the risk of a local tsunami, according to Fauzi, the department's chief. Fauzi told Time his agency subsequently relayed text messages warning of the quake to about 400 Indonesian officials in disaster management, but there was little they could do: there were no alarm bells to ring on the beach, no emergency broadcasts to transmit over the radio...
...That last mile is the hardest one, and even rich countries can be caught off-guard?witness Hurricane Katrina. Indonesia, with its 54,716 km of often densely populated and earthquake-prone coastline, is particularly exposed to the threat of local tsunamis. "There need to be sirens or SMS messages on cell phones or even Internet warnings," says Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of the Center for Hazards and Risk Research at Columbia University. "The public has to be aware of what to do, and that's education." In Indonesia, such educational programs are only in place on Sumatra, which bore...
...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...
...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 is not a region that has a history...