USGS: Warnings could have saved thousands
LOS ANGELES--U.S. officials who detected a massive earthquake off Asia's coast on Saturday tried frantically to warn the deadly wall of water was coming, the head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said Sunday.
But there was no official alert system in the region because such catastrophes only happen there about once every 700 years, said Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's center in Honolulu.
"We tried to do what we could," McCreery said. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world."
Within moments of detecting the quake, McCreery and his staff were on the phone to Australia, then to U.S. Naval officials, various U.S. embassies and finally the U.S. State Department.
They were unable to reach the thousands in the countries most severely affected--including India, Thailand and Sri Lanka--because none had a tsunami warning mechanism or tidal gauges to alert people, he said.
The 8.9-magnitude underwater quake--one of the most powerful in history--off the Indonesian island of Sumatra devastated southern Asia and triggered waves of up to 30 feet high, killing more than 11,300 people.
"We actually issued a bulletin about the quake but it only went to the countries in the Pacific...that subscribe...and that would include Australia and Indonesia," McCreery said.
Because of the lack of monitoring mechanisms, U.S. officials had no access to government or scientific information in the areas affected by the latest tsunamis and were relying on more general information.
A warning center such as those used around the Pacific could have saved thousands of lives, Waverly Person of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center, told Reuters.
"Most of those people could have been saved if they had had a tsunami warning system in place or tide gauges," he said.
"And I think this will be a lesson to them," he said, referring to the governments of the devastated countries.
Person also said that because large tsunamis, or seismic sea waves, are extremely rare in the Indian Ocean, people were never taught to flee inland after they felt the tremors of an earthquake.
Tsunami warning systems and tide gauges exist around the Pacific Ocean, for the Pacific Rim as well as South America. The United States has such warning centers in Hawaii and Alaska operated by the U.S. Geological Survey and NOAA. But none of these monitors the Indian Ocean region, McCreery said.
It takes a substantial investment and long-term commitment to set up a 24-hour communications infrastructure, operational capabilities and specialized training, he added, declining to estimate the cost.
In addition, U.S. seismologists said it was unlikely the Indian Ocean region would be hit any time soon by a similarly devastating tsunami because it takes an enormously strong earthquake to generate one.
But Person said governments should instruct people living along the coast to move after detecting a quake. Since a tsunami is generated at the source of an underwater earthquake, there is usually time--from 20 minutes to two hours--to get people away as it builds in the ocean.
A major tsunami, a Japanese word meaning "harbor wave," occurs in the Pacific Ocean about once a decade. It is generated by vertical movement during an earthquake and sometimes incorrectly referred to as a tidal wave, according to the Web site of the U.S. National Geophysical Data Center.
U.S. officials are now trying to help officials in the region set up some sort of informal warning system and feeling badly that more couldn't have been done, McCreery said.
"It took an hour and a half for the wave to get from the earthquake to Sri Lanka and an hour for it to get...to the west coast of Thailand and Malaysia," he said. "You can walk inland for 15 minutes to get to a safe area."
News Source:
News.com
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Saw this yesterday.
