Major tsunami 'before end of the century'

The Mediterranean region – particularly the area around Greece – could be hit by a major tsunami before the end of the century, a scientist said today.

Because of the region’s tourism boom over the last five decades, the consequences would be devastating, said Gerassimos Papadopoulos, a scientist at the Athens Institute of Geodynamics.

According to data presented at the First European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology being held in Geneva this week, a major tsunami occurs in the Mediterranean about every 136 years.

The last one happened in the south Aegean sea in 1956, killing four people and causing shipwrecks and widespread coastal damage.

An even worse tsunami, which hit the Sicilian city of Messina in 1908, killed 1,500 people. An additional 60,000 lost their lives because of the quake that triggered it.

However, with growing coastal populations and the region’s massive scale-up in tourist infrastructure, “if such a tsunami occurred today, the consequences would be dramatic,” Mr Papadopoulos said in an interview with The Associated Press.

A Mediterranean tsunami would unlikely be as strong as the one that spread across the Indian Ocean region in December 2004, which killed over 220,000 people, because the nature of the sea basin means it would not spread across the whole sea.

A tsunami near the Greek or Italian coast would travel very quickly and hit land within minutes – “definitely in under an hour,” Mr Papadopoulos said.

He said the risk to people and property cannot be ignored as there is “no doubt that tsunamis threaten coastal communities".

“We need to aspire to the preparedness level of the US west coast or Japan,” he said, adding that global statistics show about 10% of the world’s tsunamis occur in the Mediterranean.

The United Nations, which has helped coordinate early warning systems for the tsunami-hit regions of Asia and Africa, also has initiated a similar system for the Mediterranean.

An EU research project starting next month aims to produce a map of possible tsunami sources in the Mediterranean region.

Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and even landslides can cause huge waves that wreak havoc along coastlines. In 1979, at least a dozen people in the French resort of Nice drowned when an undersea landslide – attributed to the construction of a new airport – caused a tsunami.

Reid Basher, an official at the UN disaster reduction office, said governments need to be prepared for the possibility of a tsunami.

“It’s not big money either,” Basher said, noting that even basic measures can save lives. “In Europe there is enough historical evidence to know that these things occur, and how and why they occur.”