The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Tsunami: experts for early warning centre

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 07, 2005

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Tsunami: experts for early warning centre

By Our Staff Reporter

HYDERABAD, JAN. 6. The time difference between the first quake off Sumatra on the Pacific coast with an intensity of 9.0 on the Richter scale and the first tidal wave that hit the East Coast off Visakhapatnam was a clear two and a half hours.

"When tremors of the first quake at 6.29 a.m. on that fateful Sunday were felt by people on the East Coast, seismologists should have recognised the magnitude as a killer tsunami producer and alerted all district collectors along the coast for emergency evacuation of people from coastal villages," J.V.M. Naidu, chairman, Visakhapatnam chapter, Indian Meteorological Society, told presspersons here on Thursday.

Dr. Naidu said people started telephoning since 6.40 a.m. saying they had felt tremors and sought more information. This made experts move and by 7.30 a.m., he could brief the electronic media and alerts began scrolling, he said, adding the second quake hit the coast at 9.51 a.m. with an intensity of 7.3 on the Richter scale.

A centralised early warning and disaster management agency could well prevented damage, said experts including K. Purushotham Reddy, Citizens' Against Pollution, and T. Shivaji Rao, environmentalist.

Monitoring system

Prof. Reddy said it was imperative for a Central Emergency Management Agency here, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency in USA, which reports directly to the US President in the event of a calamity. The CEMA could work with the Prime Minister's Office, provide early warning and coordinate rescue, relief and rehabilitation, he said.

Dr. Naidu underscored the need for an exclusive earthquake/tsunami early warning centre at Visakhapatnam to monitor seismic activity and related disturbances in the depths of the oceans and provide early warning about tidal waves that follow. This would go a long way in containing loss of human life by evacuating them in time, he said.

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