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.