US plans global tsunami warning system

The United States is moving on several fronts toward a global tsunami warning system following the Asian catastrophe.

A design is emerging from the State Department’s Global Disaster Information Network (GDIN) for protecting huge populations in coastal areas, and will be presented to the United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Disaster Reduction this month in Kobe, Japan.

Senator Joe Lieberman is proposing legislation to have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) establish a system of up to 50 buoy-based sensors throughout the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans and the Caribbean Sea. The system would need the co-operation of other coastal nations.

“We’re already looking into the practical elements of what such a system would be, what it would cost and who would run it,” said Larry Roeder, a top State Department policy adviser for disaster management, who heads the GDIN.

“There has been talk over the years that maybe we should have a global system, but it’s expensive.”

Roeder said that because of a massive movement of population to coastal areas there are “lots of other parts of the world where you have large population centres along the coast, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve been seeing lots of disasters.”

The GDIN has conducted experiments based on real crises in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, even simulating a response to an earthquake in Russia, In the case of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake on December 26 in the Indian Ocean, however, there were no instruments to let scientists know the massive tsunami was on the way.

It was two hours after the quake that NOAA officials learned through internet wire service reports that a tsunami had hit Sri Lanka, which does not participate in the Pacific warning system.

Had those instruments been in place, NOAA Administrator Conrad C. Lautenbacher says, thousands of lives might have been spared.

Scientists in Australia also are designing an Indian Ocean warning system that they say could be built within a year for about $20m (€15.1m), but that cost doesn’t include the communications links needed to warn people in coastal communities to flee before the giant waves arrive.

Such a system would have about 30 seismographs to detect earthquakes and about 10 tidal gauges and six special buoys for deep ocean assessment and reporting of tsunamis.

The buoys are needed to determine whether an earthquake has generated a tsunami.

Only one such system, the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre run by NOAA, now exists. But it was only three years ago when that system got a half-dozen sensors on the ocean floor to transmit tsunami data to buoys on the surface, where it is then relayed by satellite to scientists.

Eventually, US officials hope to cover all of the East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea in the warning system. All those areas are unprotected now.

Often it takes such a disaster to improve warning systems. The Hawaii centre was established three years after hundreds of people were killed in 1946 when an earthquake near Alaska triggered enormous waves.

Over the years, the United Nations and other agencies that track tsunamis have endorsed a similar system for the Indian Ocean. Yet countries that suffered the highest death tolls in the latest catastrophe, such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka, have said they lack the funds to finance it.

Among the nations affected by the December 26 earthquake and tsunami, only Indonesia received any warning, and then only indirectly through Australia. Thailand, India and Indonesia now want to join a system.