A tsunami that killed more than 600 people on Java island less than two weeks ago will weigh on a group of global weather scientists when they meet in Indonesia this week to discuss a system aimed at reducing such deaths.
The Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System was formed after the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami that killed around 230,000 in a dozen Indian Ocean nations.
With the tragedy of this month’s tsunami on the southern coastline of Java as a backdrop, the group’s third session -- scheduled for Monday through Wednesday on the island of Bali --will be critical for progress on tsunami warnings.
Failure to notify
UNESCO said that when the Java tsunami struck on July 17, communications functioned well after 18 months of work by the group in the sense that national authorities received a tsunami advisory just 19 minutes after the quake that sparked the massive waves.
“However, several hundred people still lost their lives and tens of thousands more have lost their homes and livelihoods. The system still has big gaps, notably in getting the warnings to coastal communities in time,” UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said in a statement.
An Indonesian minister said he had received the advisory but there was not enough time to get the information to those actually living on Java’s southern coastline.
No sirens alerted them after a 7.7 magnitude quake struck around 180 km (112 miles) offshore. Just before the ensuing waves crashed ashore, children and tourists still frolicked on Pangandaran beach, the worst-hit area.
In fact, no sirens have been installed on the beaches of Java, Indonesia’s most crowded island, and its two existing tsunami buoys had been damaged months before and were still in repair.
“Certainly, it has made us want to speed up the project. Our timetable must be tightened now,” Fauzi, head seismologist at Jakarta’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, told Reuters.
The Indian Ocean group plans initially to have more than 10 tsunami buoys floating off Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and India by the end of the year.
Coverage gaps
“We won’t be happy until we install the buoys,” Samith Dhammasaroj, Thailand’s tsunami warning project chief, told Reuters, adding that that country’s first one would be in place in November with help from the United States.
By 2008, the group’s plans call for 15 more buoys to be added to the initial 10-plus, but even then coverage gaps may remain.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago with more than 17,000 islands, needs at least 22 buoys with deep ocean sensors, 120 tide gauges with digital recordings, and 160 seismographs to secure the entire country from tsunamis, officials say.
Technology is not the only issue. How warnings are worded and communicated are also challenges.
Currently, officials in Indian Ocean countries tend to look to the Japan Meteorological Agency or the U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii for notice of tsunamis.
The latter’s warning on July 17 said “a destructive widespread tsunami threat does not exist based on historical earthquake and tsunami data.”
But it added that there was “the possibility of a local tsunami that could affect” nearby coastlines, a possibility of which authorities “should be aware.”
‘A test of grit’
Indonesian officials in Jakarta took that nuanced warning seriously enough to relay it to local counterparts, but by teletext and only a few minutes before the waves struck, too late to reach those on the beaches, according to a local report.
“It is a test of grit for 10 minutes,” said Shailesh Nayak, head of the Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services.
“If we have all the networking and broadband connectivity in place within the year we can issue a tsunami warning within 10 minutes,” after a quake, he said, adding “if the data is clear.”
Sometimes it is not.
Indonesia’s state meteorology agency initially underplayed the strength of the July 17 quake and said it would not cause a serious tsunami, while the authoritative United States Geological Survey was later than usual in providing any data.
