RI to establish tsunami early warning system

Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Indonesia, the nation most affected by last year's tsunami, will be the second country in the world to establish an early warning system for tsunamis by end of the year, thanks to a grant from the German government, which has pledged to provide 10 sensor buoys to detect tidal waves in the Indian Ocean.

Two of the 10 pledged sensor buoys will be handed over by German Minister of Education and Research Edelgard Bulmahn to Indonesian State Minister for Research and Technology Kusmayanto Kadiman at Tanjung Priok Port on Monday.

The two ministers attended a ceremony in Hamburg on Aug. 25 to discuss the first shipment of sensors buoys, which were developed by Potsdam researchers.

Equipped with a global positioning system (GPS), the buoys will be able to detect tremors under the seabed and abnormal waves on the surface of the sea in real time and transmit the warnings to tsunami alarm centers on land so that communities have time to escape to higher ground before the waves hit.

Currently, there is only one tsunami early warning system in the Pacific Ocean, which is operated by the U.S. and Japan.

Assistance to Deputy Minister for Assessment of Science and Technology at the Ministry of Research and Technology, Idwan Suhari, said the sensor buoys would be installed in the most earthquake-prone areas.

"We are still studying the exact locations. They might be installed near the west coast of Sumatra island," he said on Thursday.

He said the buoys would be placed about 1,000 kilometers from shore.

The Dec. 26 tsunami, resulting from a marine earthquake measuring 9.3 on the Richter scale, killed an estimated 220,000 people in the Indian Ocean region, including 557 German citizens.

Indonesia, according to Idwan, is working hard to upgrade equipment to avoid further loss of human life should the country be struck by another tsunami like the one in December, which devastated Aceh and Nias island and left 129,000 people dead.

"When the disaster hit Aceh and Nias, Indonesia had no equipment to monitor the sea level in real time," he said.

"But with the help from the international community through the International Oceanographic Commission in April, we built a sea level monitoring station with real time in Sibolga, North Sumatra," he said.

He said that countries like Germany, Japan, Australia and China had agreed to provide assistance for the development of an early warning system in Indonesia.

He said that the German government, for example, had agreed to provide 25 seismometers, 10 GPS stations, 10 GPS control tide gauges, 10 GPS buoys and 20 ocean bottom pressure sensors.

He added that the government would also establish more seismograph stations to help speed up any quake warnings.

"By December 2005, we will have 28 seismograph stations from the current eight, so we will be able to detect the location and scale within five to 10 minutes after a quake," he said.