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.