Posted on 12/26/2004 4:09:30 PM PST by backhoe
|
|
||
| APOCALYPSE GETS WORSE AS EPIDEMIC MAY DOUBLE DEATH COUNT | ||
| -- If this is just for the one country and they still haven't searched it all the way , the body count is going to be way over 100,000 dead just from the event. Not counting diseases. God Bless these poor people. | ||
Scientists knew in advance that south Asia was going to be hit by a tsunami but attempts to raise the alarm were severely hampered by the absence of early warning systems in the region.
Within 15 minutes of Sunday's earthquake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii had sent an alert to 26 countries, including Thailand and Indonesia, but struggled to reach the right people. Television and radio alerts were not issued in Thailand until 9 a.m. -- nearly an hour after the waves hit.
"We tried to do what we could. We don't have any contacts in our address book for anybody in that particular part of the world," said Charles McCreery, director of the center.
Communication Failures
The United Nations' International Tsunami Information center, which is also run from Hawaii, confirmed the absence of basic emergency-planning systems to get locals off beaches and seafronts and up to higher ground. "Outside the Pacific, these things don't occur very often at all so the challenge is how to make people and government officials aware," said the center's director, Laura Kong.
Scientists on Australia's remote Cocos Island, 1,000 kilometers from Sumatra, which has a warning station designed to give Australia three to four hours' notice of a tsunami, also detected the fast-moving waves on Sunday and alerted emergency planners on the mainland within half an hour. But key officials within Indian Ocean nations could not be reached. Their lack of preparedness comes in sharp contrast to Pacific nations such as Japan, where the entire public transport system can be halted, and the east coast of the United States.
Australia's agency for geological research, Geoscience Australia, indicated that effective communication Relevant Products/Services from Sprint -- With Sprint, business is beautiful. systems in south Asia might have bought 15 minutes for parts of the Thai coast and longer for Sri Lanka, which was hit two and a half hours after the earthquake.
Tsunamis have been known in the Indian Ocean, most notably one that killed several hundred people in Bombay in 1945, and scientists have been urging countries in the region to protect their high population densities by being prepared. At a meeting of the UN's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in June, specialists concluded that the "Indian Ocean has a significant threat from both local and distant tsunamis" and should have a warning network. No action was agreed upon.
Tad Murty, a tsunami specialist affiliated to the University of Winnipeg in Canada, said that officials in India, Thailand, Malaysia and other countries perceived tsunamis as "a Pacific problem" and had "never shown the initiative to do anything."
The head of India's National Institute of Oceanography said the likelihood of a tsunami hitting Madras had seemed as unlikely as New York's Fifth Avenue being inundated in the film "The Day After Tomorrow."
Unnecessary Death
"There's no reason for a single individual to get killed in a tsunami," Murty said. "The waves are totally predictable. We have travel-time charts for the whole of the Indian Ocean. From where this earthquake hit, the travel time for waves to hit the tip of India was four hours. That's enough time for a warning."
Governments in Asia conceded that they had failed to issue warnings after the initial earthquake but said they could not afford to buy the sophisticated equipment needed to track giant waves. Indonesia said it had no way of knowing that the earthquake had caused tsunamis -- or how dangerous they might have been. "We have no equipment here that can warn about tsunamis," said Budi Waluyo, an official with the country's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency. "The instruments are very expensive and we don't have money to buy them."
The Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, refused to answer questions about tsunami alerts -- but the nation's Seismological Bureau said it could not give a real-time warning because it did not have the satellite technology to do so. Thammasarote Smith, a former senior forecaster at Thailand's Meteorological Department, said governments could have done much more to warn people of the danger. "The department had up to an hour to announce the emergency message and evacuate people, but they failed to do so," he told The Bangkok Post. "It is true that an earthquake is unpredictable, but a tsunami -- which occurs after an earthquake -- is."
Indian and Sri Lankan officials said they would consider establishing a tidal-gauge warning system -- a project which would cost millions of dollars and take at least a year to install.
Thanks! You always do such a good job of compiling links on important topics.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
