Malaysia to adopt 'Baywatch' alert towers: minister says
Malaysia to adopt 'Baywatch' alert towers: minister says
Agencies,
Penang, Malaysia/Geneva
Malaysia said on Wednesday it will build beach towers nationwide
as an early warning system modeled on that used by lifeguards in
the U.S. television series Baywatch.
Tourism Minister Leo Michael Toyad said the towers would be
built as soon as possible and the respective state tourism
authorities would supervise their management.
"We hope the towers manned by volunteers will monitor the sea
conditions from time to time. It will give reassurance to
beachgoers," he was quoted as saying by Bernama news agency.
Local media reported that such towers helped save the lives of
tourists on Malaysia's island of Penang when massive tidal waves
swept across much of Asia.
Lifeguards at the tower in front of Shangri-la's Golden Sands
Resort in popular Batu Feringghi, which was hard-hit by the tidal
waves, noticed rough and choppy waters around noon on Sunday,
said Malaysian Association of Hotels spokesman Suleiman Tunku
Abdul Rahman.
"They raised a red flag to warn the people that the beach was
not safe, following which all beachfront hotels warned their
guests to keep away from the beach and stop all activities
there," he was quoted as saying by The Star.
"So, when it happened, most of the guests were far from the
beaches," he said. Toyad said Baywatch towers would be built at
all beach hotels.
At least 65 people, all locals were killed in Malaysia by huge
tidal waves triggered by a massive earthquake off the Indonesian
coast on Sunday, with 50 dead in the island of Penang.
In a related development, a Red Cross website to aid contact
between survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and their
families in the region and across the world went into service on
Wednesday.
The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) said its site -- www.familylinks.icrc.org -- was already
getting an active response and registrations were building up
fast as its existence became known.
"It is important that both families at home and people in the
tsunami region who have survived get to know about it quickly,"
ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal told Reuters.
The site has special sections for the four worst-affected
countries -- Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and India -- where
the overwhelming majority of the nearly 70,000 deaths so far have
been reported.
Tens of thousands of tourists escaping the winter chill in
Europe and North America were holidaying in resorts around the
region when Sunday's huge underwater earthquake off the western
tip of Indonesia caused the deadly waves.
Some 3,500 visitors from outside the region are still
unaccounted for -- more than 2,000 of them from Scandinavia alone
-- and government disaster officials in Thailand say at least
473, and perhaps many more, died there.
Most registrations so far show people being sought from the
U.S. west coast state of California and Canada's Yukon Territory
through Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia,
Kuwait and Abu Dhabi in the Middle East to Japan.