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December 28, 2004
Indian Ocean tsunami
Everything seems insignificant compared to the (as yet unnamed) tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean, especially as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, India, and Sri Lanka are all countries that I know, some of them well.
The news services are now saying that more than 55,000 are dead, but there are still incomplete reports from islands near the epicentre and from much of the west coast of Sumatra. The final toll must be very high.
There has been talk of starting monitoring systems for the Indian Ocean (and the Atlantic) so that people can be warned about tsunami before they hit.
There are systems for the Pacific. I have seen how they operate in Japan. Even small earthquakes are reported immediately on television. The programmes do not stop, there is simply a news flash text displayed at the bottom of the screen. At first you are informed that an earthquake has occurred, then after a minute or two more information comes through to pinpoint the position of the quake and its intensity.
If the quake is offshore and sufficiently powerful to cause a tsunami, people are told to avoid the coast. (There are also sirens on beaches.) The amount of warning given varies. Sometimes it is only a matter of minutes. Tragedies occur when the news doesn’t reach the people in danger, but in general the system works well.
In the case of very large tsunami, like the ones in the Indian Ocean, there is more time to organize evacuations - if there is a warning given in the first place. I don’t have an accurate chronology of this disaster, but it seems the tsunami hit Phuket (Thailand) about 30 minutes after the earthquake. Sri Lanka was hit two and a half hours after that.
The Indonesians do have a system of earthquake monitoring. The Meteorological and Geophysical Agency of Indonesia have stations throughout the seismically active archipelago and projects in which the Japanese, French, and Americans are involved.
What is needed is a system of sharing the information internationally when there is a large quake. This really shouldn’t be too difficult to set up. There are issues about interpreting data - some earthquakes are followed by tsunami and some are not - but clearly the greater the magnitude and intensity, the greater the danger.
Posted by Simon Holledge at December 28, 2004 06:12 PM
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