Tsunami thoughts

I've been mulling over this piece over the last several days:

We were having a late breakfast and watching CNN yesterday morning when the news broke about the earthquake. . .

The CNN report mentioned the possibility of tsunamis, but there wasn't any warning to stay out of the water. There was no sense of urgency, at least not in the initial report I saw. It wasn't like, say, a tornado warning.

I can't help but think that a number of tourists in Phuket and the Maldives and other places watched that report before turning off the TV and heading to the beach. (The tsunami danger that was mentioned was only for India and Bangladesh.) If the report had been a very specific warning not to go near the water, I think some lives would have been saved.

There's been some discussion about how a tsunami warning system could be put in place for the countries impacted by this catastrophe. Some official government-sanctioned system would probably be a good idea, but failing that an educated media would certainly help. If CNN and the BBC had immediately begun broadcasting a warning that all coastal areas within the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea were in danger of imminent tidal waves, hundreds or even thousands of lives may have been saved. It's true that there are millions of poor in Indonesia and Bangladesh who live in remote areas and probably don't have access even to BBC radio, much less CNN. But local broadcasters would have quickly picked up the news, as would law enforcement and other agencies. Word of mouth could have accomplished quite a bit.

Subsequent news reports have noted that the magnitude of the quake was not appreciated immediately by seismologists; the problem of false alarms (even with a full range of expensive sensors, as in Hawaii) has also been pointed out. Nonetheless, the emerging consensus is that an early warning system can be and should be installed:

The technology to detect earthquakes under the sea and predict their consequences already exists in the Pacific and must now be extended to the Indian Ocean, said Sálvano Briceño, director of the United Nations disaster reduction office based in Geneva. . .

"I want to see that every coastal country around South Asia and Southeast Asia has at least a basic but effective tsunami warning system in place by this time next year," Mr. Briceño told a news conference in Geneva. . .

What was needed, he said, was a network linking governments with earthquake warning centers in the United States and Japan and ways for those governments to speed word to their coastal communities.

Alas, this call to action once again seems to omit the potential role of the BBC, CNN, etc mentioned at top. The NY Times articles linked above recount how seismologists just didn't know who to contact to give the alarm (also here). Did any of them think to call the big broadcasters?

I don't mean to cast blame, just to understand what can be done. But it does strike me that the UN has fallen down on the job here: how difficult would it have been to have forseen the need for warnings to be widely and swiftly disseminated? This is a matter of organization, setting up lines of communication -- not a costly business. And though it has been noted that tsunami are rare in the Indian Ocean, apparently there was another disastrous one in the 1940s -- in living memory [this may be incorrect -- but the 19th-century records were certainly clear enough. D.]

I am acutely aware of the clarity of hindsight, but if you run an international agency devoted to disaster prevention and relief, at some point wouldn't you put together a team to make a list of potential calamities and basic measures to deal with them? A dozen intelligent participants and a couple of months of hard work might have made -- might yet make -- all the difference.

UPDATE: More in today's NY Times.

Posted by David on December 31, 2004 1:44 PM