Word: tsunami
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...Nobody wants to take any chances anymore, so if one person screams, everyone runs." --PAK ADITYA, resident of Java, Indonesia, after a magnitude-6.0 earthquake last week that sparked fears of another tsunami, just two days after a tsunami claimed at least 650 lives on the island...
...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 by a magnitude-7.7 undersea earthquake about 200 km offshore, the 2-m waves that slammed ashore were a frightening flashback to the December 2004 tsunami that claimed the lives of 230,000 around the Indian Ocean. Now, as then, the victims were...
...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...
...Those centers, which rapidly interpret earthquake data sent in by seismic observatories around the world, detected last week's Java tsunami. But due to gaps in the way a tsunami alert is broadcast to the public, no warnings reached the people on the Javanese beaches?underscoring just how difficult it still is to protect the most vulnerable countries from killer tidal waves. "Let's not kid ourselves and think we solved the warning problem because we can detect a tsunami and say, 'It's coming,'" says Laura Kong, head of the International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu. "We have...
...Comparing the vast archipelago of Indonesia to tiny Sri Lanka may be unfair, but Jakarta's failure to coordinate government agencies and officials has been apparent since the tsunami in Aceh two years ago killed more than 170,000 people and an earthquake left more than 5,800 people dead in central Java last May. Indonesia has made it clear that it will take millions of dollars, new technology and increased manpower to develop a tsunami warning system to cover the sprawling country. Integration into a regional system will also be critical to avoid the blame game now unfolding between...