RI concerned about cost of tsunami warning system
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
An official has questioned whether the government can afford to operate and maintain the planned Indian Ocean Tsunami Early Warning System (TEWS).
The director of the Geophysics Data and Information Center at the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG), Prih Hajardi, said the operation and maintenance costs could be as high as US$300,000 per month for each deep-sea tsunami assessment and reporting (DART) system.
"The operational and maintenance costs will be quite high because we need to check and clean the system on a weekly and monthly basis. Regular maintenance is important because the regional and national transmission of tsunami monitoring requires satellites," he said on Thursday.
Prih said that in the Indian Ocean alone, at least 10 DART buoys were necessary for accurate and fast warnings.
The Indian Ocean tsunami on Dec. 26 that killed hundreds of thousands of people led to calls to set up a tsunami early warning system in the region. Indonesia's Aceh province was the hardest-hit region by the tsunami.
Germany earlier this week agreed to provide 45 million euros ($85.85 million) worth of equipment for the development of a TEWS in Indonesia for monitoring, assessments and the online and real- time transmission of data through a satellite system.
Visiting German education and research minister Edelgard Bulmahn said that under a bilateral agreement, Germany would provide the TEWS technology, while Indonesia would be responsible for operating and maintaining the system.
The TEWS components consist of 10 global positioning system (GPS)-based buoys, 25 seismographs, 10 GPS stations, 10 GPS tide gauges and 20 ocean bottom pressure sensors for the DART system.
A source said the operational and maintenance costs for the whole TEWS system could run as high as $60 million a year. The source added that a proposal for the operational and maintenance budget had been submitted to the National Development Planning Board.
Prih said the installation of the TEWS would require the BMG to upgrade its system.
"We will upgrade the current analog system to provide help and to back up data. The old equipment will need to be 'retired' because we need a digital system for the TEWS."
He said the BMG was currently preparing to implement the TEWS. "We are currently determining seismograph locations and planning to set up the telecommunications system for data gathering and dispatch from the BMG to regional and national meteorology and geophysics agencies, which requires a Very Small Aperture Terminal, or VSAT, to enable broadband speed Internet service through satellite."
The TEWS components will likely be located around North Sumatra, along the south-coast of East Nusa Tenggara, around the Banda Sea in Maluku, and in North and Central Sulawesi, according to Prih. (005)