KL to probe lack of tsunami warning

KL to probe lack of tsunami warning

Agencies, Kuala Lumpur/New Delhi/Washington/Geneva/Singapore

The Malaysian government has pledged a post-mortem on why the public was not warned about tidal waves which smashed into its northern coastal areas and killed at least 65 people.

"We need to re-examine if there was any way we could have saved lives that day in our assessment of how we tackled the disaster," Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said in comments published on Thursday.

At present, there are no guidelines for authorities on how to handle a tsunami disaster, and these would be formulated, he said.

"Also we will work closely with our ASEAN neighbors to see how best we can cooperate to monitor any future occurrences.

"To get a clearer picture, we will communicate with Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore to work on an early warning system," he said.

"To assume and say that tsunamis will not happen again will not be fair. Our main task now is to ensure we are prepared to handle it when it happens again and not overreact."

The Indonesian island of Sumatra, which bore the brunt of the Sunday's tidal waves sparked by a massive earthquake off its west coast, protected most of Malaysia's beaches from the full force of the tsunamis.

Although Malaysia lies closer to the quake's epicenter than many countries worse hit, it suffered just 65 of the more than 80,000 deaths so far recorded in the disaster.

But the authorities have been criticized for failing to alert the public on the possible risk of massive tidal waves which battered the northern resort island of Penang and neighboring Kedah state.

On the other hand, India's tangled bureaucracy reportedly bungled the first alerts on the tsunami strike losing precious time which could have saved lives. An international expert told the Indian Express that India had turned a deaf ear to repeated warnings it needed a tidal wave alert system similar to that used by many countries because of the costs.

Science Minister Kapil Sibal has said that India will now install systems to detect tsunamis at the cost of more than US$27 million.

In Washington, the U.S. weather chief is calling for a global surveillance system to detect and forecast disasters like tsunamis, hoping the tragedy in Asia will build the political resolve to buy and deploy equipment.

"It just hasn't happened, it hasn't gotten enough priority inside of each nation to support it," Conrad C. Lautenbacher, a retired Navy vice admiral who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "It's a matter of priorities and resources. There's nothing to stop us from doing it in a technical sense."

Talk about a worldwide observation system has gone on for decades. An international warning system for tsunamis began in 1965, the year after tsunamis associated with a magnitude 9.2 quake struck Alaska.

Lautenbacher said it could save tens of thousands of lives in the future -- and might even have predicted the tsunamis that hit Asia and Africa this weekend.

"They would have known where the areas of danger are," he said, adding that some studies have shown as much as four-fifths of a population could be saved. "You could have evacuated or moved people out of these areas. They could have walked out of the areas, quite frankly."

President George W. Bush said on Wednesday it was important to build an early warning system for tsunamis worldwide. Closer to home, he directed Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Commerce Secretary Don Evans to check if the West Coast is adequately protected.

Twenty-six countries now make up the International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System. India and Sri Lanka, hit hard by the latest catastrophe, do not participate.

The system tries to predict where tsunamis will strike up to a half-day in advance, using earthquake seismic sensors, tidal gauges and buoys attached to instruments on the ocean floor that measure small changes in pressure.

But there are no such buoys and few tidal gauges in the Indian Ocean, the world's third largest, where the latest tsunamis struck. Only Thailand had any warning system among the 12 countries ravaged by tsunamis, but India said on Wednesday it would install such a system.

For its part, NOAA oversees an $800 million-a-year environmental satellite network and $8 million-a-year system of ocean monitors for tsunami warnings in the Pacific Ocean. The agency hopes to add 15 more buoys to the six it has there, which cost about $200,000 each, so that it can cover all that ocean's major fault zones.

Beyond tsunamis, a system for sharing thousands of measurements of the Earth is being created by 54 nations that plan to sign a U.S.-backed agreement in February in Brussels, Belgium. Lautenbacher urged more nations to join in the efforts, aimed at sharing useful information based on data gathered worldwide -- much of it already collected.

That would provide huge benefits for agriculture, energy, transportation, fisheries management, coastal zone development, and climate science, he said.

The United Nations on Wednesday urged that a tsunami warning system be extended to countries around the Indian Ocean within a year.

Experts meeting at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction next month in Kobe, Japan, will have a special session to lay the groundwork to extend the tsunami warning system beyond the Pacific Ocean, said Salvano Briceno, an official of the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

What is needed is establishment of a network linking national authorities with earthquake warning centers in such places as Hawaii and Japan, he said. The national centers also must establish ways of relaying the word to coastal warning systems.

Briceno said the tidal waves that spread out from the earthquake near Sumatra, Indonesia, took from one hour to reach land in Indonesia to six hours to reach Africa, which should have provided ample time for warning.

Singapore's Transport Minister Yeo Cheow Tong on Thursday backed recent suggestions for a regional early warning system aimed at lessening the impact of such disasters in the future.

"There's enough interest now among the regional countries to pursue this objective," Yeo said.

"I think all the countries will have to get together and pay for the system, plus we hope that the developed countries will also chip in," Yeo said.

Backed by the United States, international geologists have had a tsunami early warning system since the 1960s in the Pacific Ocean. Tsunamis are more common there than in the Indian Ocean, hit by this week's disaster.