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| Southeast Asia |
| Tsunami warning system hitch |
| 2005-01-05 |
| EXPERTS have warned that an Asian tsunami warning system would be rendered useless unless affected countries beef up their communications infrastructure. Australian government experts said the system could be built in the Indian Ocean in a year and cost as little as $US20 million ($25.73 million). But they warned that many coastal villages that bore the brunt of tsunami lack modern communication networks required to support the high-tech network of sensors and buoys. "There's no point in spending all the money on a fancy monitoring and a fancy analysis system unless we can make certain that the infrastructure for the broadcast system is there," Phil McFadden said, chief scientist at Geoscience Australia, which has been tasked with designing an Indian Ocean system. "That's going to require a lot of work. If it's a tsunami, you've got to get it down to the last Joe on the beach. This is the stuff that is really very hard." Mr McFadden said the system would take 12 months to build, require 30 seismographs to detect earthquakes, ten tidal gauges and six special DART (deep ocean assessment and reporting of tsunamis) buoys costing $US250,000 each. "My guess at this stage is probably about six DART buoys, which is a fair amount of money," he said. "But this amount of money is nothing compared to the cost of what has happened." But Mr McFadden's figures do not include the cost and time needed to upgrade communications networks in many countries nor the process of educating local populations unfamiliar with the dangers of tsunamis. Prih Harjadi of the Indonesian Meteorological & Geophysical Agency agrees. "It's a problem of infrastructure," he said. "We could produce information but we would just send it to local governments. It is up to the authorities there to evacuate the people. Right now, there is nothing." |
| Posted by:God Save The World |