Tsunami warning buoys installed

Tsunami warning buoys installed

Reuters, Jakarta

Indonesia has activated the first stage of a tsunami early warning system off the coast of Sumatra to prevent a repeat of last year's death toll in huge quake-triggered tidal waves that left 164,000 people dead or missing, officials said on Thursday.

Indonesian and German scientists installed two buoys and planted a pressure sensor on the seabed off the coast of western Sumatra this week as part of a five-year plan to prepare the country's vulnerable coastlines for tsunamis, they said.

"The buoys will transmit data of sea tremors and pressure from the ocean sensor device," Edi Prihartono of the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) told Reuters.

Another official from the same agency, Rahartono Fari, said information from the buoys could be uplinked to a satellite and transmitted to a monitoring station near the city of Padang, halfway along the western coast of Sumatra.

Another said authorities were aiming to install 20 buoys along Sumatra's coast by early 2009.

India and Thailand are setting up similar systems.

The 9.3 magnitude earthquake off Sumatra on Dec. 26, the strongest in four decades, unleashed the most devastating tsunami on record.

There were no warning systems when the earthquake triggered an unprecedented tsunami that is feared to have killed as many as 232,000 people in a dozen Indian Ocean nations and left more than a million homeless.

The worst affected area was Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra, where the waves crashed up to eight kilometers inland.

Indian Ocean nations agreed at a meeting in August in Perth, Australia, to set up seven regional tsunami warning centers, whose job will be to send out advisories about potential tsunamis to countries around the Indian Ocean rim.

In documents seen by Reuters last May, the government spelled out a five-year plan for upgraded equipment for measuring quakes and detecting tsunamis, with analysis of the information before it is sent out to communities via text messages and other means.

The documents showed any quake above magnitude 7 would trigger a warning from the Meteorological and Geophysical Agency. Data would be studied to see if it could spark a tsunami, and a decision made about whether to issue an alert -- all within five minutes.