Warnings came too late
Asian Governments admit failing to issue alertsDecember 28, 2004 Edition 1
Jakarta: Asian officials conceded yesterday that they had failed to issue broad public warnings immediately after the massive undersea earthquake in Indonesia. The warnings could have saved lives from the subsequent giant waves that smashed into nine countries.
But the governments insisted they had not known 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 could not afford to buy sophisticated equipment to build one.
What warnings there were came too late.
The earthquake - at 9.0 on the Richter scale, the worst in 40 years - shifted huge geological plates beneath the sea north-west of Sumatra island, causing a massive and sudden displacement of millions of tons of water.
Indonesian villages closest to the temblor'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 two-and-a-half hours, they had travelled 1 600km and slammed into India and Sri Lanka. Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, and Bangladesh were also hit. Eventually the waves struck Somalia, on the east coast of Africa.
Indonesian officials said they had had no way of knowing that the earthquake had caused the 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 forecaster at Thailand's Meteorological Department, said the government 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 failed to do so," Thammasarote was quoted as saying in the Bangkok Post.
"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 television 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.
