Strides Made to Rig Up Tsunami Alert Systems

A warning from Hawaii flashes across computer screens -- a mammoth earthquake has been detected off Indonesia.

As an alarm screams through the center just north of Bangkok, analysts punch in numbers, consult matrixes and, within 15 minutes, send off already prepared cellphone, telephone, fax and media messages.

One of them automatically activates sirens on three towers along Phuket’s Patong Beach, 435 miles to the south, and a special 19-man Royal Thai Navy team races into action among the crowds of sunbathers and swimmers on the resort island.

“My teams will run out to the beach with whistles and megaphones. If the tourists hear the word ‘tsunami,’ they’ll know what to do. They’ll run,” says Lt. Chamnan Chansuwan.

They’ll be driven by the haunting memories of the mammoth waves that struck without warning Dec. 26, killing nearly 180,000 people and leaving 50,000 missing in countries around the rim of the Indian Ocean.

Six months later, Thailand and other Indian Ocean nations have made important strides in implementing warning systems like the one described by Chamnan.

But gaps, perhaps lethal ones, remain where the danger is greatest -- on the beaches. Some are elementary: Chamnan’s team has yet to be issued loudspeakers and whistles.

Still, experts are confident that interim measures like those Thailand has implemented would sharply reduce casualties.

“Clearly, if a new tsunami strikes it would not be the same because now there are not only much better systems in place but greater awareness,” said Salvano Briceno, director of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

Throughout the region, the level of preparedness is uneven.

In Indonesia’s Aceh province, where about 128,000 died, a formal plan to warn people at the village level about an impending tsunami exists only on paper and coordination among different government agencies remains poor, said Syahnan, a local official with that nation’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency.

“The tsunami system is only a plan for now,” said Syahnan, who like many Indonesians uses only one name. “The only way we would find out about a tsunami is if we hear from the police on the sea.”

A countrywide warning system that would be firmly connected to coastal communities in the earthquake-prone Indonesian archipelago could take three years to put into place, said Stephen Hill, who heads UNESCO’s operations in Indonesia.

Briceno conceded it will be several years before adequate alarm systems exist for all vulnerable villages along Indian Ocean coastlines, many of them in impoverished areas barely linked to the outside world.

Alerts won’t be enough by themselves, experts say.

“You can have a good warning system, but if people don’t know how to react, they will get hurt. You have to educate the people -- fishermen, villagers, hotel operators -- how to escape,” said Smith Thammasaroj, a meteorologist brought out of retirement to oversee Thailand’s tsunami strategy. “I’m not fully happy. But three, four months ago we had nothing to warn the people.”

Initial warnings of a possible tsunami are now sent to Indian Ocean countries from Japan’s Meteorological Agency and the 56-year-old U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, which came under criticism for not reporting more aggressively on the Dec. 26 disaster. Unlike the Pacific, the Indian Ocean has no region-wide tsunami center.

After the disaster, Asian nations squabbled about where an Indian Ocean center should be, so they settled for a network of several offices, each contributing its own expertise and resources for the benefit of all.

This network should be in place sometime next year, Briceno said, although how effective it will prove remains questionable given the problems in some countries and a possible dearth of funds. “Donors all pledge a lot of money but many don’t want to pay,” Smith said.

In the meantime, countries have cobbled together stopgap measures and are working on national warning systems with the help of Briceno’s organization, UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and some Western governments.

Most Buddhist shrines, Hindu temples and Muslim mosques along Sri Lanka’s coast have been fitted with loudspeakers to relay warnings from radio and television stations. The government has advised state-run radio stations to immediately broadcast such alerts.

India expects to have a $26.7-million early warning system in place by September 2007, centered along fault lines in the Arabian Sea and one stretching north from the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra to Myanmar.

In India’s Tamil Nadu state, village leaders can now be alerted by telephone and in turn can immediately contact nearby officials trained in evacuation. The system worked well during a March 28 earthquake off Sumatra that didn’t spawn a tsunami. Most villages in the state, where 8,000 perished Dec. 26, were evacuated within 90 minutes.

Other Indian Ocean nations also gave themselves passing marks for evacuations after the March quake.

In Indonesia, local and German scientists will begin installing tsunami sensors off the west coast of Sumatra in October. Among a number of such detectors to be set up in international and territorial waters of the Indian Ocean, these systems consist of a sensor planted as deep as 6.2 miles on the ocean floor connected to a floating buoy that in turn communicates with a satellite.

An observation center on the Indonesian coast will receive the satellite-borne warnings for relay to villages via mobile telephone text messages or to religious leaders, who will broadcast them from speakers at mosques normally used to call Muslims to prayer, said Idwan Suhardi, a Ministry of Research and Technology official.

At the forefront of preparedness, Thailand opened its National Disaster Warning Center in the Bangkok suburb of Nonthaburi in May, modeling itself on the Hawaii center.

The U.S. center, Smith said, takes three to five minutes to detect an Indian Ocean earthquake and send out a rough description since the proper equipment is not yet in place. The Thai center, staffed around the clock like the facility in Hawaii, will need 10 to 15 minutes to analyze the information. It will send alerts after any earthquake of magnitude 7.4 or higher.

If the epicenter is along the main fault, coastal residents in Thailand would have 60 to 90 minutes to evacuate before the tsunami hit -- enough time, Smith said. The Dec. 26 waves took 80 minutes to reach southern Thailand and kill 5,300 Thais and foreign tourists, who were almost all unaware of the onrushing mass of water.

The center has communication links to 10 television and more than 500 radio stations as well as 20 million mobile phones. It can break into TV and radio broadcasts with a warning bulletin and rush 5,000 text messages to cellphones within two minutes. Three offshore sensors and 60 warning towers are planned.

But experts like Smith foresee dangers.

Maintaining equipment will be expensive -- a single sensor costs $1 million and must be replaced every 18 months -- and complacency may set in if no tsunami strikes for decades.

Other experts worry about all the emphasis being put on one natural disaster in a region that suffers regularly from cyclones, floods, landslides and droughts.

“If we focus only on the tsunami hazard itself, I fear that we will be, like the proverbial general, planning for the last war,” said Eileen Shea, climate expert at Hawaii’s East-West Center.