Fatal gap in tsunami warning system

Volunteers and workers remove debris from tsunami-battered Patong Beach on Thai resort island of Phuket. Picture / Reuters

MAURITIUS - Red tape stopped scientists from alerting countries around the Indian Ocean to the devastating Boxing Day tsunami racing towards their shores.

Scientists at the Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii - who have complained about being unable to find telephone numbers to alert the countries in peril - did not use an existing rapid telecommunications system set up to get warnings around the world almost instantly because the bureaucratic arrangements were not in place.

Senior UN officials attending a conference in Mauritius of small island countries - some of them badly hit by the tsunami, now recognised to have been the deadliest in history - revealed that the scientists did not use the World Meteorological Organisation's Global Telecommunication System to contact Indian Ocean countries because the "protocols were not in place".

The system is designed to get warnings from any country to all other nations within 30 minutes.

It was used to alert Pacific countries to the tsunami, even though it affected hardly any of them, and could have been used in the Indian Ocean if the threat had been from a typhoon, officials said, but it could not be used to warn about a tsunami.

Dr Laura Kong, the director of the International Tsunami Information Centre which monitors the warning system in Hawaii, said: "The [meteorological organisation's] system has been set up but the protocols are not available for tsunami warnings except in the Pacific. So it was used on 26 December but only in the Pacific."

A senior official at Unesco, which runs the information centre and the warning system, explained that this meant no agreement for information-sharing on tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.

But there were "approved communication channels" for warnings about tropical cyclones in the area.

Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the meteorological organisation, said the system had proved to be particularly valuable last year, which was bad for hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

But the Governments around the Indian Ocean rejected repeated pressure from Unesco and other UN bodies for a tsunami early-warning system in their area because it was expensive, they had many calls on their resources and there had been no tsunamis in the ocean for more than 100 years.

The UN now says that the Boxing Day tsunami was the deadliest ever. The only one that even begins to rival it smashed through the Mediterranean around 1400BC after the destruction of the island of Santorini. On that occasion 100,000 people are estimated to have died.

* This week several international UN meetings begin in order to establish tsunami warning systems in the Indian Ocean and worldwide over the next 2 1/2 years.

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