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Tsunami Warnings

Would an Alert System Have Helped?

By Charles Hawley

Many see a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean as a panacea that will protect people from future disaster. But how effective can such a system be? For Sumatra, any warning would likely have come too late. While the basic technology for the system has existed for a long time, reaching "the last Joe on the beach" is still an almost impossible task.

Stories of destruction and death were everywhere on December 27. One day earlier, a gigantic tsunami wiped out hundreds of coastal villages and -- as we now know -- killed well over 150,000 people in a dozen countries on the rim of the Indian Ocean. Most victims were caught completely off guard, others had only the mysteriously receding ocean to warn them of the incoming wave. It was the most ruinous natural disaster in human memory and there was nothing humans could do about it.

Or was there?

Also on December 27, the first stories began surfacing that perhaps there was a panacea that could have saved tens of thousands from their fate on that disastrous Sunday just over two weeks ago. A tsunami early warning system -- like that which has been operating in the Pacific Ocean since 1948 -- could have warned coastal areas across the Indian Ocean region. Why, many continue to ask, was there no such system in place?

There will be soon. The plan of developing such a system for the region affected by the South Asian tsunami is rapidly gaining momentum. At the emergency tsunami conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, last week, the topic was high on the agenda. Geophysics experts from the United States to Australia have offered their expertise for the development of such a system. Now, the German government -- in partnership with the Geophysical Research Center (GFZ) headquartered in the town of Potsdam near Berlin -- is offering to take the lead on the project.

"With our concept," German Minister of Education and Research Edelgard Bulmahn told the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Friday, "we can build up an effective early warning system within one to three years. The strength of our concept is that it is based on an existing observation network. We don't have to start from zero."

Germans well equipped for a warning system

Indeed, the GFZ has plenty of expertise in earthquake research and detection. With its international partners, it already operates 48 stations worldwide that have the ability to transfer seismic activity data immediately through a broadband Internet connection to users across the globe. Their €40 million plan for the Indian Ocean rim includes building an additional 30 to 40 such stations in the region themselves and, on long term, installing 250 more earthquake listening posts in cooperation with countries committed to helping the region. The stations could automatically send e-mails and cell-phone text messages within minutes of an earthquake. The institute is planning a press conference on Thursday to announce details of their plan.

There is, of course, no doubt that such a system is long overdue for South Asia and the Indian Ocean rim. Tens of thousands of lives would have been saved had the east coasts of India and Sri Lanka been warned; the tsunami wave did not arrive there until almost four hours after the earthquake struck just northeast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. In fact, the Sri Lankan train that was broad-sided by the tsunami -- resulting in over 800 deaths -- actually left the station as the wave was already rushing toward the country's coastline. There were fewer deaths in Africa due to the fact that many beaches were evacuated before the wave struck.

But, despite the many hopes that are invested in the building of a tsunami warning system, it is hardly a cure-all. For one, as much as we would like to think that we can insulate ourselves from violently destructive natural disasters, earthquakes -- and the tsunamis they can cause -- will continue to happen. And secondly, even had there been a warning system in place on Dec. 26, the island of Sumatra -- where the lion's share of Indonesia's 105,500 victims lost their lives -- likely would not have benefited. It takes time to get the word out.

"We put out a bulletin within 20 minutes -- technically as fast as we could do it," said Jeff LaDouce, an official in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which administers the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, immediately following the tsunami disaster.

The first raw data on the Sumatra earthquake -- using technology similar to that proposed by the GFZ -- went up on the Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) Web site for the Pacific region just four minutes after the trembler struck. But at that point, it still was not clear that the earthquake would result in a tsunami. That information took an additional 16 minutes to tabulate.

Beating the wave to the beach

But Web site warnings are one thing. From there, it's a race to get the alert to the beach -- a race that, in Indonesia at least, the Dec. 26 tsunami would likely have won. Banda Aceh, for example, on the northern tip of Sumatra, was flooded a mere 45 minutes after the disaster. Further down the west coast of the island, where damage and loss of life was at its most horrifying, the gigantic wave hit land within thirty minutes or less. That, say many experts, leaves very little time for the actual work of issuing a warning in endangered areas and executing an evacuation.

Creating a warning system that can do that, Phil McFadden of Geoscience Australia -- an institute that may become involved with designing an Indian Ocean warning system -- told the BBC last week, "is going to require a lot of work. If it's a tsunami, you've got to get it down to the last Joe on the beach. This is the stuff that is really very hard."

Especially considering the communications difficulties that such a system will have to overcome. Many of the areas tsunami warnings would have to reach in the Indian Ocean region are remote and lack computers, telephones, television and even access to radio stations. A high-tech tsunami-warning system could, of course, rely on low-tech relay solutions such as sirens and a system like that in Bangladesh, which involves bicyclists with whistles to warn people of approaching cyclones. But the task of organizing the international and local cooperation necessary for such a method to work would be complicated at best, especially in areas beset by civil war and ethnic unrest such as in the Aceh Province on Sumatra or in Sri Lanka.

But perhaps the biggest challenge faced by an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system is the simple fact that, in contrast to the Pacific Ocean, the last large tsunami was well over a century ago when Krakatoa blew its top in 1883. Education and drills are a necessary part of any warning system, and while the memory of the devastation 16 days ago is now fresh in people's minds, that will fade over time.

"This is a problem," says Rainer Kind, head of the seismology department of the Geophysical Research Center in Potsdam. "On the Pacific Rim, a number of countries not only participate in the system, but they also run tsunami drills in schools, have education programs and the like; there are many more tsunamis in the Pacific than in the Indian Ocean though. The awareness in the Indian Ocean must be maintained for generations."