SINGAPORE – The next time a tsunami strikes the Indian Ocean rim – and scientists say that could happen anytime – an early warning system should detect it and trigger warnings to millions in coastal communities.
That’s the plan anyway.
A $53 million interim warning system using a string of tidal gauges and undersea sensors is nearing completion in the Indian Ocean with help from the U.N’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.
Tsunami national warning centers are being planned for 27 countries around the Indian Ocean rim.
Thailand and Indonesia are installing warning towers on vulnerable beaches. Sri Lanka has established model “Tsunami Protection Villages.” India is setting up a $27 million regional warning center.
But when a tsunami strikes again, will the warnings cascade down to remote villages? Will the centers be staffed 24 hours, seven days a week? Will authorities be able to put evacuation plans into effect? Can governments, in the words of the IOC, “manage tsunami risk?”
“The latter implies emergency preparedness planning, legal and administrative frameworks, awareness campaigns and education, and the development of the operational capabilities to act in an emergency,” IOC Executive Director Patricio Bernal said after a conference on a regional warning system last week in Hyderabad, India.
Some of the 1.8 million people displaced by the tsunami say they are worried about another monster wave striking their communities.
The Sumatra fault will rupture again with potentially equally devastating consequences to that of the Dec. 26 earthquake and resulting tsunami, one leading geophysicist said.
“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” Barry Hirschorn of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. “It’s an elastic band, waiting to snap,” he said of an unstable Indian Ocean fault line that caused the quake-triggered tsunami.
“What is called ‘unzipping’ of the fault is fairly common and that is what is being seen here. It could be in a few years or a few decades. It is impossible to say,” said Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Center at University College London.
There were no warning systems when one of the strongest earthquakes in recorded history, centered off northern Sumatra and south of the Nicobar islands, unleashed a tsunami that killed or left missing 231,000 people in a dozen Indian Ocean nations.
The U.N.-backed warning system must be coupled with effective community planning, McGuire said.
“There is little point in satellite technology alerting a center in Delhi or Jakarta that a tsunami is on its way, if that message can’t be passed immediately to someone in every town, village and neighborhood who can rouse people from their beds or alert them in their fields,” he said.
Barry Drummond, the head of the earth-monitoring group at Geoscience Australia, said Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Japan have started to share real-time earthquake and ocean-level data since the 2004 tsunami.
“In the tsunami business, you can go to a meeting anywhere, with all sorts of cultures and backgrounds there, and the one thing in common is everyone wants to work with everyone else,” Drummond said. “It is really striking.”