U.S. Plans to Expand Tsunami Alert System

Spurred to action by the devastating southern Asian tsunami, top Bush administration science officials Friday pledged to double the country’s investment in a warning system by greatly expanding detection technology in the Pacific Ocean and extending it into the Atlantic.

By spending $37.5 million over two years, the government would add 32 buoys for deep-ocean monitoring to its tsunami detection and warning system. Five would be deployed in the Atlantic, two in the Caribbean Sea and the rest in the Pacific.

The funding must be approved by Congress; the initial reaction on Capitol Hill was positive.

There currently are six buoys in use for the tsunami detection system -- all of them in the Pacific, where most of the world’s tsunamis have taken place. The Dec. 26 tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and other nations occurred in the Indian Ocean.

Administration officials said that when the new buoys were in place by mid-2007, the system would provide tsunami detection for nearly all of U.S. coastlines. Many other countries would benefit as well.

“What we’re offering is going to cover a good part of the globe,” said Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which would deploy the buoys.

With so many more buoys in the Pacific, government scientists would receive “an alert within minutes, and in some cases, within seconds, of a tsunami’s formation,” said John Marburger III, science advisor to President Bush.

Marburger said that the government would not be making the investment at this time were it not for the recent disaster.

“What made this event even more tragic is the fact that [many fatalities] might have been prevented if only a warning system had been in place to alert the communities that were in harm’s way,” he said.

The new proposal is “about doing everything we can to prevent a similar disaster in the future.”

Bill Knight, a scientist at the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska, said Friday that several of the new deep-ocean buoys probably would be deployed off the coast of Southern California.

The buoys work in conjunction with scores of gauges along the coast. The buoys and gauges provide different kinds of data, and interpreting that data enables oceanographers to determine the size, location and movement of a tsunami, said Charles McCreery, director of the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

McCreery said the current buoys covered only “major source zones” -- areas with a lot of seismic activity. The additional buoys would cover more of the deep ocean basins around the clock, Knight said.

U.S. officials said the government had no plans to expand its system into the Indian Ocean, but would work with other nations and international organizations on efforts to create a tsunami warning system there and in other vulnerable areas.

Other nations have tsunami detection programs that use tide gauges and seismic monitors, but not buoys.

Government officials in southern Asia proposed a tsunami warning system for the region. And German officials have volunteered to play a leading role in providing a system for the Indian Ocean.

The recent disaster has sparked fears in other areas of the world.

The Greek government announced plans to beef up the tsunami warning system for its islands, which are among the most vulnerable to tidal waves in the Mediterranean.

The funding for the enhanced U.S. tsunami warning system also would enable the U.S. Geological Survey to improve its seismic monitoring and information delivery systems.

Most massive tidal waves are generated by earthquakes beneath the ocean floor. Seismic data are key to predicting a tsunami.

Over the last decade, a global seismic network has been developed to measure earthquakes. But about a third of the stations, including the ones in the Indian Ocean, are not linked up to a satellite. So experts in places like the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., do not receive real-time information about the scale of quakes in the region.

In the case of the earthquake that triggered the southern Asian tsunami, it took about 15 minutes to get the information because the seismic waves had to reach other monitors in the region.

With the increase in funding, all of the monitors would be linked with satellites and nine or 10 monitoring stations would be added in the Caribbean, according to P. Patrick Leahy, an associate director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Some of the funding also would be used to improve the tsunami warning system so people on the coasts could be told as quickly as possible when a dangerous wave was on the way.

“This is designed to pick up signals all over the ocean, and it’s designed to help us get out the word in the proper amount of time so people can react,” Lautenbacher said.

Three of the six existing buoys in the Pacific Ocean are malfunctioning, Lautenbacher said, because the harsh weather off Alaska’s coast is rough on the technology. Two of the new buoys would be used as backups for existing ones off the Aleutian Islands.

Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Science Committee, said he expected little trouble getting Congress to approve the Bush administration’s proposal.

He said $37.5 million was a “small price to pay to help ensure such a human catastrophe never occurs on our shores.”

Times staff writer Eric Malnic in Los Angeles contributed to this report.