Neither of the latest earthquakes–a 6.5-magnitude temblor off the south-east coast of Japan, and another near India’s Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean that measured 7.6–triggered a tsunami.
But fears of possible massive waves caused some places in South-east Asia that were hard hit by the 2004 tsunami to evacuate citizens. In Ban Nam Khem, a village on Thailand’s west coast, 400 people were moved to an upper story of a local school for safety after village leaders received cellphone text messages overnight from Thailand’s National Disaster Warning Center about a potential tsunami.
Thai authorities also used 76 towers erected in six provinces along the Indian Ocean to broadcast warning messages.
Warning more-remote villages, such as those in parts of Indonesia or Myanmar, remains a challenge. Authorities in Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India–the four countries hardest hit in 2004–are working to build capacity to spot tsunamis early, which they say is necessary to give them more time to evacuate people.
Currently, the region relies on the US Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, which since 2004 has monitored seismic activity in the Indian Ocean and sent alerts to almost 30 countries in the region when a tsunami looks imminent.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission is working to create an Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning Center that could issue more timely and specific alerts for the region.
Indonesia, India, Malaysia and Thailand have shown interest in hosting such a centre and have invested in seismic and oceanographic monitoring systems. In October, the nations will hold the region’s first realtime tsunami drill to test systems put in place to share information quickly.
These countries also recently placed $250,000 buoys out at sea that pick up changes in water pressure from sensors on the ocean floor.
In 2004, the epicentre of the 9.2-magnitude earthquake-on a massive tectonic fault line that lies not far offshore from Indonesia’s Sumatra and Java islands–was identified quickly by seismologists, but the data didn’t predict the tsunami’s force or direction.
In Indonesia, which bore the brunt of that disaster with at least 120,000 deaths, a recently launched system partially funded by the German government plans to anchor 10 buoys with global-positioning system devices that can measure how fast a tsunami is moving toward shore. German scientists are helping to train staff and finetune the system before handing it over to the Indonesians in 2010. The eventual goal is, for scientists at a new tsunami early-warning centre in Jakarta, to be able to issue alerts within five minutes of receiving information from the buoys and other seismic data.
“It’s a big change since 2004.
There’s substantial investment in looking at the source of the tsunami,” says Sanny Ramos Jegillos, an expert with the United Nations Development Programme who is coordinating a programme to help tsunami-affected countries build their disaster management capacity.
Challenges remain, especially in making sure better warning systems lead to quick action once a tsunami is detected. Indonesia’s government was criticized in 2006 when a 7.7-magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Java caused a tsunami. Despite alerts, authorities didn’t evacuate inhabitants until too late and almost 700 people died.
Since then, Indonesia has invested in better local monitoring of earthquakes and has put in place systems to relay tsunami warnings via mobile phones, radio and television.
Yet the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, a state research body, estimates that only four of 139 local governments in the country have adequate emergency blueprints on how to evacuate citizens during a tsunami.
One problem is fishermen tying their boats to the monitoring buoys or stealing solar panels needed to keep them operating, reducing their effectiveness.
Of the handful of water-pressure-monitoring buoys that Indonesia has purchased, none are currently operational, according to Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, an expert in earthquakes at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.
wsj@livemint.com Wilawan Watcharasakwet contributed to this story.
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