Warning could have saved lives, say officials
But governments insisted they did not know the true nature of the threat because there was no international system in place to track tidal waves in the Indian Ocean - an area where they are rare - and they can’t afford to buy sophisticated equipment to build one.
And what warnings there were came too little, too late. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake - the largest in 40 years - shifted huge geological plates beneath the sea north-west of Sumatra island, causing a massive and sudden displacement of millions on tons of water.
Indonesian villages closest to the quake’s epicentre were swamped within minutes, but elsewhere the waves radiated outwards, gathering speed and ferocity until they made landfall.
Waves began pummelling southern Thailand about one hour after the earthquake. After 2½ hours, the torrents had travelled some 1,000 miles and slammed India and Sri Lanka. Malaysia, the Maldives, Burma, and Bangladesh were also hit. Eventually they struck Somalia, 2,800 miles away on the east coast of Africa. Indonesian officials said they had no way to know that the earthquake had caused the earthquake-driven waves, or tsunamis, or how dangerous they might have been.
“Unfortunately, we have no equipment here that can warn about tsunamis,” said Budi Waluyo, an official with Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency. “The instruments are very expensive and we don’t have money to buy them.”
But Thammasarote Smith, a former senior forecaster at Thailand’s Meteorological Department, said governments could have done much more to warn people about the danger. “The department had up to an hour to announce the emergency message and evacuate people but they failed to do so,” Thammasarote was quoted as saying in The Bangkok Post newspaper. “It is true that an earthquake is unpredictable but a tsunami, which occurs after an earthquake, is predictable.”
Kathawudhi Marlairojanasiri, the department’s chief weather forecaster, said it had sent out warnings through radio and TV from 9am on Sunday about a possible undertow along the south-west coast of Thailand, where tens of thousands of foreign tourists were on holiday. But the warnings came after the first waves hit. A website warning went up three hours later, but by then at least 700 people had died.
India’s Information Minister, Dayanidhi Maran, said his country would consider establishing an warning system. Australia and Japan said they would lend their expertise to help build it.
Scientists said seismic networks in the region recorded the quake, but without wave sensors in oceans that would have tracked the path of the waves, there was no way to determine the direction a tsunami would travel.
