Tsunami needs more than a warning system
GOUTAM ARYABHUSAN
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We must also focus on follow-up tasks like dissemination of the message to the population at risk
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IT HAS been two years since we realised our helplessness in the wake of the tsunami, which killed more than 2.5 lakh people in minutes.
Tsunami has been a new guest in the disaster map of India. It has been an established fact that the rate of devastation due to a disaster is directly proportional to the rate of human tampering with nature. The loss of protective barriers due to human intervention in the coastal zones has been the prime cause for manifold devastation in the Indian mainland.
A large part of the Indian subcontinent sits on a geologically unstable arc, marked by hundreds of seismic fault lines responsible for earthquakes close to the shoreline, some triggering tsunamis. Areas near the eastern and southern coasts along with the islands in the Bay of Bengal are more prone to what is popularly known as local tsunamis, where the time interval between an earthquake and the arrival of tsunami waves is very brief.
Though an earthquake is mostly unpredictable, we can devise systems for an early warning of tsunami as it is normally followed by a submarine earthquake and the time lag between the occurrence of a quake and the subsequent tsunami is enough to issue an early warning.
During the immediate aftermath of the great South Asian tsunami in 2004 people across the world considered preparing an early warning system, utilising modern day technology to disseminate the message of any threat.
India has also declared to come up with such systems by September 2007, which would trigger warnings within 10 minutes of an earthquake hitting the seabed with a fair degree of accuracy.
By now in India, 17 automatic tide gauges have been installed in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, allowing tidal activity to be monitored round the clock, though the number is too small in view of the spread of the coastline of the Indian mainland. We need to install many more.
The present warning system being adopted worldwide is Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART). The DART Project is an effort by the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of America to develop a capability for real time reporting of tsunami measurements in the deep ocean.
First real test
The effectiveness of the early warning system for tsunami was exemplified in the case of the tsunami that hit the Indonesian coasts recently. The tsunami waves reached the coast 40 minutes after the quake. It was the first real test of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System which functioned well according to reports by UNESCO-IOC, the body coordinating the implementation of the Indian Ocean System.
The first regional warning information was transmitted to the Indonesian Meteorological and Geophysical Agency (BMG) by the United States Pacific Tsunami Warning Center 19 minutes after the earthquake, but the devastation could not be minimised as expected.
This gives a clear indication that only a warning system is not sufficient to avert human and economic losses. We need to integrate many other aspects along with the warning system, laying primary emphasis on post warning follow-up tasks like dissemination of warning through all possible means to the population at risk, etc. Systems such as Simultaneous Announcement Wireless Systems (SAWS), mobile announcer systems, television and radio, siren and bells, telephone/mobile network and most importantly the Internet and intranet facilities may be made use of.
The world is fast developing technologically and dissemination of information has become much faster. It is believed that the warning alone can reduce the magnitude of devastation to half by preparing the community. Readying the people at risk to face a tsunami and imparting to them proper training in evacuation and rescue methods would further the fight against natural calamities.
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