Word: tsunamis
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...Ranjani, a nurse in the southern Indian village of Akkaraipettai?which lost 2,000 residents to the tsunami?was delivering a baby when she heard about the earthquake on TV. "I just managed to complete the job," Ranjani says, and then nurse, mother and baby boy headed for higher ground. Even more critical, seismologists from Hawaii to Japan had the relevant phone numbers at hand to get in touch with officials in Indian Ocean nations. They, in turn, exhibited little of the indecisiveness that cost countless lives in December. "We were calling harbor masters, civil-defense people, and people...
...networks were broadcasting warnings. In coastal areas, police and soldiers went out on the streets with loudspeakers. But Dharmmasaroj still sees room for improvement. He had trouble getting through to some of the largest TV networks. "It took them longer to get the message out," he says. "If a tsunami had hit, then many people still would have lost their lives." Thailand will have a more sophisticated system in place by the end of the month, Dharmmasaroj says. Warning towers are now being installed in areas hit by December's tsunami; they will use sirens and loudspeakers to sound...
...however, the region must make do with makeshift solutions. To be effective in the long run, the countries rimming the Indian Ocean need a system that can determine not only when a tsunami might occur, but also when it won't, so that warnings can be issued judiciously. In Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, hundreds of thousands of people spent hours waiting for a tsunami that never came. In Nias, the fear of a tsunami probably cost many lives of people who were trapped in rubble because their relatives had headed for high ground. The local government was paralyzed from...
...Pacific, deep-ocean pressure sensors are able to measure passing tsunamis, and coastal gauges take water-level measurements that are relayed in real time to a region-wide warning center. Nothing like that exists in the Indian Ocean. The U.N.'s International Oceanographic Commission is now working on creating an independent regional warning system that it hopes to have installed by the end of 2006. But that may prove difficult. The system will be expensive to establish and maintain, and pledges from donor countries in the tsunami's aftermath have not materialized. India has balked at the idea...
Last week's earthquake was large enough to create a tsunami, but it didn't. That may have been a matter of pure luck...