[Kabar-indonesia] 6 Tsunami Warning Reports: Glaring Gaps [+The Australian Feature; FT; Bali]

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

6 reports: 

- Tsunami official: Indonesia erred in not 
  alerting its residents
- Indonesian tsunami reveals glaring gaps 
  in local warning system: UN
- Indonesia To Build 6 Tsunami Warning 
  Systems In Bali
- FT: Effectiveness of warning system 
  questioned as tsunami kills hundreds.
- The Australian Feature: Faults with 
  the Warning
- Indonesia dusts up stalled tsunami
     warning alarm

Tsunami official: Indonesia erred in not alerting its residents

By JAYMES SONG
Associated Press Writer

HONOLULU, July 19 (AP) - The head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning
Center said an Indonesian official "did the wrong thing" by not
alerting residents before a deadly tsunami struck.

Charles McCreery, director of the Hawaii-based center, said it's
always better to be safe than sorry in issuing alerts, despite the
possible backlash from the public when a destructive wave doesn't
materialize.

The center issued a tsunami warning to Indonesia via e-mail, fax and a
dedicated telecommunication system after a powerful earthquake was
detected deep in the Indian Ocean on Monday, but Indonesian officials
chose not to relay the warning to residents.

Staff at the center also called Indonesian officials three times about
the possible tsunami, but no one answered the phone, McCreery said.

Science and Technology Minister Kusmayanto Kadiman said the nation
received bulletins from the Hawaii center and Japan's Meteorological
Agency 45 minutes before the tsunami hit but did not announce them
because they did not want to cause unnecessary alarm.

"If it (the tsunami) did not occur, what would have happened?" he told
reporters in Jakarta, noting that there was no effective way to spread
a warning without a system of sirens or alarms in place.

The tsunami crashed into Java island, killing at least 463 people.
Nearly 280 others were missing.

"The minister did the wrong thing. But if no tsunami had occurred, he
would've looked like a smart guy," McCreery said.

Whether or not Indonesian officials could have used radio broadcasts
or police, firefighters and others to help clear coastal areas was not
immediately clear.

"I'm frustrated and I'm sure the government of Indonesia is frustrated
that this thing came along and they didn't have what they needed to
have in place," McCreery said.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued its first alert at 8:36 a.m.
GMT, just minutes after the earthquake, which it reported occurred at
8:19 a.m.

"There is the possibility of a local tsunami threat that could affect
coasts located usually no more than a hundred kilometers from the
earthquake epicenter. Authorities for the region near the epicenter
should be aware of this possibility," the bulletin said.

Initial tsunami warnings are based solely on seismic data.

"You have to issue the initial warning on that information and most of
the time you're going to be wrong," McCreery said. "There's going to
be no tsunami."

On average, three of four tsunami warnings in Hawaii have turned out
to be false alarms.

In May, 14 coastal schools were closed across Hawaii after an
underwater earthquake near Tonga triggered brief tsunami warnings and
watch advisories across the Pacific. The closures caused confusion,
disruptions and Hawaii officials were criticized.

Officials in Thailand have also been criticized because of false
alerts they issued.

"We get a lot of flack," McCreery said. "We all understand that it's
the price of doing what we do."

The magnitude 7.7 undersea quake on Monday triggered walls of water
more than six feet high that crashed into a 110-mile stretch of beach
on Java island, an area spared by the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami
that killed at least 216,000 people in a dozen Indian Ocean nations.

Though Indonesia started to install a warning system after that
disaster, it is still in the early stages.

Since taking his post in 1993, McCreery said Indonesia has been hit by
at least a half-dozen tsunamis resulting in death.

"They have been making a lot of progress in their country to develop a
system, but Indonesia is a very large country," he said. "They have a
lot of complexities, a lot of languages, islands and a lot of tsunami
threat."

Hawaii has an emergency warning system using sirens across its islands
and bulletins that are immediately aired on radio and TV stations.

"This system we have here, we've been working on for 40 years,"
McCreery said. "So we have a lot of things in place here that you
can't set up instantly."

Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said there was no need to issue
an alert because most people had fled inland after the earthquake,
fearing a tsunami.

"After the quake occurred, people ran to the hills ... so in actual
fact there was a kind of natural early warning system," he said.

However, of dozens of people interviewed by The Associated Press in
Pangandaran on Tuesday, none said there was a mass movement of people
to higher ground before the tsunami, though some residents recognized
the danger when they saw the wall of water approaching. (AP reporter
Irwan Firdaus in Pangandaran, Indonesia, contributed to this report.)

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Indonesian tsunami reveals glaring gaps in local warning system: UN

PARIS, July 19 (AFP) -- The high toll from the killer waves that
lashed Java on Monday exposed major gaps in Indonesia's tsunami
warning system, the United Nations agency that oversees the Indian
Ocean's regional alert network said on Wednesday.

Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the UN Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), said the regional warning system
established by Indian Ocean states had "functioned well" on Monday.

"In Jakarta, the tsunami advisory was received (from regional
monitors) only 19 minutes after the earthquake," Matsuura said.

"However, several hundred people still lost their lives and tens of
thousands more have lost their homes and livelihoods. The system still
has big gaps, notably in getting the warnings to coastal communities
in time."

The tsunami hit less than three weeks after the Indian Ocean's
regional network was declared active.

Set up in response to the December 26, 2004, tsunami that killed some
220,000 people in a dozen countries, the network comprises 26 out of a
possible 29 national centres, which receive information bulletins in
real time from monitors in Japan and Hawaii.

In a veiled warning to Indonesia and other vulnerable countries,
Matsuura said: "It is important to maintain the momentum of the past
18 months and to reinforce national capacities to react effectively
when disaster strikes."

More than 520 people were killed in Java when a three-metre (10-foot)
wave, generated by a 7.7-magnitude quake, hit the coast and penetrated
around 500 metres (yards) inland.

The wave may have amplified to a height of six or seven metres (20 to
25 feet) in height once it touched the shore, according to Franck
Lavigne, who heads Tsunarisque, a joint French-Indonesian research and
prevention programme focusing on tsunamis.

On Tuesday, Indonesian officials acknowledged that a country-wide
warning system was not due to be in place until 2009.

The system had so far only deployed two out of 25 buoys to detect the
movement of unusual waves and there remained a lack of direct
communication with remote coastal communities at risk, they said.

The idea is to relay warnings automatically through mobile phone text
message or email to local officials, who could then inform residents.

But many of the small fishing villages along Java's south coast that
were hit in Monday's tsunami have patchy mobile-phone reception and
many people are too poor to own phones.

Regional warning systems are also being established in the Northeast
Atlantic, Caribbean and Mediterranean.

-----------------------------------

Indonesia To Build 6 Tsunami Warning Systems In Bali

JAKARTA, July 19 (AP)--The Indonesian government will build six siren
towers in Indonesia's resort island of Bali to alert residents and
tourists on the beaches of tsunami, an official said Wednesday.

The 50-foot towers will be able to issue alarms within 10 minutes
after an earthquake capable of triggering deadly tsunami, said Sidik
Budiman, head of the Bali's Meteorological and Geophysic Agency.

He said the towers' powerful sound would be able to reach people in a
radius of two miles.

"People on the beaches and nearby places will then have 10 to 15
minutes to anticipate the tsunami," said Budiman. "The towers will
also inform residents of no tsunami within 15 minutes."

He said the towers will be operational by the end of the year, as part
of Indonesia's tsunami warning system. They system will be expanded to
cover the sprawling Indonesia, which is prone to the seismically
upheaval.

On Monday, a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 7.7-earthquake slammed
into Java's southern coast, killing more than 530 people.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said an Indonesian official "did
the wrong thing" by not alerting residents the deadly tsunami struck.

On Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami killed or left missing more
than 220,000 people in 11 Indian Ocean nations, with Indonesia's
Sumatra island was the hardest hit, where some 128,000 people were
killed.

---------------------------------------

Financial Times (UK)
July 19, 2006

Effectiveness of warning system questioned as tsunami kills hundreds.

By SHAWN DONNAN, TAUFAN HIDAYAT and AMY YEE

Questions were being asked last night about the effectiveness of a
warning system set up in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
after Indonesian officials said an e-mailed warning about Monday's
offshore earthquake was received 14 minutes after towering waves hit
southern Java.

The death toll from the latest tsunami - the result of a 7.7-magnitude
earthquake in the Indian Ocean - rose above 300 yesterday as rescuers
continued to scour the rubble in coastal communities. But as the toll
rose, observers were beginning to question the efficacy of the
much-touted Indian Ocean tsunami warning network.

"For a local tsunami, there is no way to warn people in advance," said
Budi Waluyo, the deputy head of earthquake information at Indonesia's
Bureau of Meteorology and Geophysics. "The tsunami was moving very
fast."

It emerged yesterday that the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii
issued an e-mail bulletin on Monday warning of "the possibility of a
local tsunami that could affect coasts no more than 100 kilometres
from the earthquake epicentre".

However, the e-mail landed at Indonesia's Meteorological and
Geophysical Agency 20 minutes after the earthquake, which happened at
3.19pm local time. According to Mr Waluyo, the first of a series of
waves - moving at 900 km an hour - hit the southern coast of Java at
3.25pm, 14 minutes before the e-mail landed.

Tony Elliott, head of the inter-governmental co-ordination group
overseeing the deployment of the Indian Ocean tsunami warning system,
led by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation, said the 20 minutes it took to issue the warning was "a
very good result".

Officials in India concurred with the warning, causing authorities to
monitor the sea around the Andaman and Nicobar islands for five to six
hours - the time it would have taken a tsunami to cross the Indian
Ocean - before declaring the all-clear.

Mr Elliott said the goal was to cut the time it took to issue a
tsunami warning to five minutes or less. But in places such as
Indonesia, which sits on several seismic fault-lines, even that may do
little to save lives.

Indonesia had a deadly relationship with tsunamis long before the
December 2004 disaster, which left more than 160,000 dead in the
Sumatran province of Aceh. In 1883 more than 36,000 died after the
eruption of Krakatoa. Tsunamis also hit the eastern island of Flores
in 1992 and eastern Java in 1994, causing hundreds of fatalities each
time.

Even if the warning had arrived before the waves, Indonesian officials
said yesterday, the country still did not have a system to pass on
warnings to the public.

A team of experts led by Unesco warned last September that the
country's meteorological bureau relied on busy landlines and a single
mobile phone with an unpublished number to relay warnings, with no
emergency radio system.

The agency's earthquake information centre now has three telephone
lines. When the earthquake hit, they were immediately jammed by
callers seeking information. When they might have been relaying
warnings "our staff were busy answering the phone", Mr Waluyo said

With help from donors, Indonesia is rolling out the infrastructure for
a warning system. Two special buoys were installed this year off the
west coast of Sumatra.

But officials say it will be 2009 before an effective system is in
place. Until then the best they can do is advise people in coastal
areas to stay attuned to earthly rumbles.

"The only thing we can do in the meantime is suggest to people who
live in coastal areas that if there's a strong earthquake . . . they
should move to a safer area," said Fauzi, head of the meteorological
agency's earthquake and tsunami division.

Additional reporting by Amy Yee in New Delhi and Taufan Hidayat in Jakarta

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Australian
Thursday, July 20, 2006

Feature

Faults with the warning

Leigh Dayton

The earth is being ripped apart like a giant zipper, causing eruptions
and tsunamis, with central Sumatra next in line, writes Leigh Dayton

SCIENTISTS can't stop them and they can't predict them. They can,
however, send an alarm when a powerful tsunami is heading to shore.
But for residents of southern Java there was no such warning on Monday
when a near 3m high wall of water, triggered by a magnitude 7.7
earthquake 10km below the seabed, crashed on to a 300km stretch along
scenic Pangandaran beach in Indonesia.

As a result, tens of thousands of people lost homes, businesses and
livelihoods. Thousands were injured and hundreds died. The reason they
weren't warned was because there wasn't a warning system in place.

"We're going to see these sorts of things keep happening until there
is an effective early warning system and a program of education to
teach people to run whenever they feel a tremor or see changes in the
sea," says Bill McGuire, Benfield Hazard Research Centre director at
University College London.

Setting up a warning system, however, isn't simple. It takes
seismometers to detect tsunami-generating quakes, sea-level gauges to
monitor passing waves, scientists and computer systems able to receive
and interpret raw data sent to a central locality by the instruments
and a way of rapidly warning thepublic.

According to Geoscience Australia seismologist Spiro Spiliopoulos,
efforts to build such a system are under way in Indonesia.

"The Indonesia system is being built with German aid," says
Melbourne-based Spiliopoulos, leader of Australia's tsunami warning
system program.

He notes that it's early days, however. Little wonder, then, that
there are unconfirmed reports that the arm of the fledgling system
already in place on the island of Sumatra failed and that residents of
Java can't expect to get alerts on their island until next year. The
rest of the 18,000 islands in the Indonesian archipelago will follow
thereafter.

Indonesia's ambassador to Australia Mohammad Hamzah Thayeb says his
country agreed to set up the tsunami early warning system. "I don't
think it is working properly, if you saw the results of the latest
tsunami," he says. "I think we need to work on that."

Spiliopoulos says regional experts are getting on with the enormously
complex task of building a new warning network, not just for Indonesia
but one encompassing all nations ringing the Indian Ocean, including
Australia. Purely by chance, he says, the intergovernmental group
co-ordinating the effort will meet later this month in Bali and any
country bordering the Indian Ocean is invited.

Scientists have known for decades that the Indian Ocean region is
subject to tsunamis, as well as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
"Earthquakes are occurring all the time up there," Geoscience
Australia geophysicist David Jepsen says.

The region shakes and quakes because it straddles the boundary, the
fault lines and deep trenches, where one enormous hunk of earth, the
Australian plate, is banging into and under another, the Eurasian
plate.

"Occasionally the Australian plate locks up and it's not moving under
the Eurasian plate," Jepsen says. When the lock breaks, he says, the
earth rocks and enormous energy is released. If it's under water, a
tsunami may be triggered.

"That's why we had a really big one," he says of the 2004 earthquake
and the devastating tsunami that left 230,000 people dead.

Imagine a giant zipper ripping open under stress build-up when the
plates slip with violent force. The unzipping is also occurring with
more frequency and is proceeding down Sumatra and towards Java and
Australia.

"There are real risks on both the western and eastern sides of
Australia," observes Chris Ryan, head of the National Meteorological
and Oceanographic Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne.
"The trenches south of Indonesia are active and dangerous. There are
risks along most of the [Australian] coast."

But as Ryan points out, Australian scientists are only beginning to
quantify the precise severity of the risk. It's part of the
development of the Australian National Tsunami Warning System, a
four-year collaboration between the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience
Australia and Emergency Management Australia.

It's a $68.9 million project, funded by the Australian Government. The
goal is a reliable network of earthquake-detecting seismographs and
tsunami-monitoring tidal gauges, along with real-time analysis and
prompt warnings of possible Australia-bound tsunamis.

According to Ryan, the Bureau of Meteorology is the centre for the
emerging network because it already has 24/7 capability for
earthquakes, storms and other potentially dangerous weather events.
"We have a well-established warning system in place already [at the
bureau] so we can disseminate warnings to the media, emergency
services and other authorities," Ryan says. "In general terms, the
good news for Australia is that all of the big tsunami-generating
faults are a long way off our coast, which means we should get
reasonable warning time. The bad news is that we have faults like that
off the north, northwest and east coast. The trenches south of
Indonesia are active and dangerous."

The pattern of eruptions and tsunamis suggests the zipper is unlikely
to reach Australia soon. While Java was hit last May, seismologists
believe it was not a consequence of the unzipping that began in 2004
and continued in 2005.

That's because the next point on the zip line is central Sumatra, not
Java, which lies along a different fault line in what is a complicated
tangle of thousands of faults.

This week's event, while deadly, was not as powerful as the one in
2004. That earthquake hit 9.3 on the Richter scale and unzipped 1200km
of the earth's crust. Monday's resulted in an estimated 70km rupture.

The suffering of the victims of Monday's quake and tsunami shows that
comparatively small events can be deadly and destructive. Yet despite
persistent warning by experts such as John McCloskey, of the
University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, that the region faces
serious tsunami threats, the Indian Ocean remains second cousin to the
Pacific Ocean.

The hi-tech Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii links into
instruments operated by nations around the earthquake and
tsunami-prone Ring of Fire. Within minutes of receiving a signal, the
centre alerts participating countries, which then are responsible for
warning local people to head for higher ground.

It was the Hawaiian centre and Japan's Meteorological Agency that
picked up Monday's quake and alerted the world. Both organisations
issued warnings within 17 minutes of the quake, more than a half-hour
before the tsunami hit Java's coastline.

In the open ocean a tsunami travels, on average, 800km/h. It slows
when it reaches the shallower water of a coastline. "That's why the
wave builds up," Jepsen says.

But neither the Japanese nor the Hawaiian centre was able to determine
the size of the Java tsunami. Nor have tide gauges been in position
around the island, although two gauge-bearing buoys were deployed off
the Sumatran coast last year as part of a five-year project to install
them across the archipelago.

It took the 2004 event in the Indian Ocean for regional leaders to act
and the Bali meeting is part of a move to build interlinked networks
of sensors and scientists.

Despite fits, starts and unreliable funding, experts are optimistic.
For instance, Australian scientists note that once this nation's
tsunami warning system is fully operational -- with a full fleet of
seismographs and tidal gauges backing up those from outfits such as
the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre -- it will feed into the proposed
Indian Ocean system.

Meanwhile, there's a logistical hurdle facing all members of the
intergovernmental group seeking to develop the Indian Ocean network: a
shortage of top-quality seismographs.

According to Spiliopoulos, the best instruments are manufactured in
Switzerland. And since the Boxing Day tsunami there has been a rush on
the small firm, which makes only about 200 instruments a year.

"There's a backlog," Spiliopoulos says. "But the seismometers [ordered
by Australia] started to arrive these last few weeks." They'll be
deployed at key locations across the country and the region: Christmas
Island, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, along the West Australian coast,
Norfolk Island and Niue Island in the Pacific.

"Then we can share the data around a bit easier and make our data
available to [others] as well," Spiliopoulos says.

As well, Australian scientists are working on computer programs that
can crunch data from remote detectors and estimate how high a tsunami
is likely to be at various points along its path. "Emergency services
people are crying out for this," Ryan says. "It's one thing to say a
tsunami is coming. The next question is how big will it be. Now, we
have no reliable way of telling them that."

Nor is there a reliable way of alerting people such as those caught in
Monday's event. For now, the best warning system consists of people
such as Australian expatriate Andrew Warnbrunn. The Batu Karas
resident was cleaning a fish for dinner when he felt the earth move.
"I stood up, looked out through the palm tress and saw a fishing boat
shoot straight up in the air," he says. "That's when it clicked. I
yelled out, `Tsunami', ran inside and grabbed my wife and son and, we
ran."

Leigh Dayton is The Australian's science writer.

INDONESIA'S TRAIL OF DEATH AND DEVASTATION

* December 1992: Indonesia. A 25m tsunami washes 300m inland in Flores
region, killing 2500. The earthquake that triggers it registers 7.5 on
the Richter scale.

* July 1998: Papua New Guinea. About 3000 people die when a 7.1
magnitude earthquake 24km offshore is followed within 10 minutes by a
12m tsunami. The coastal villages of Arop and Warapu are destroyed.

* December 26, 2004: Thailand, Sri Lanka and Malaysia are worst hit. A
magnitude 9.3 earthquake off the coast of Aceh triggers tsunamis,
killing 230,000 people across the Indian Ocean. It is one of the
deadliest disasters in modern history caused by the second biggest
earthquake in recorded history. Fatalities also occur thousands of
kilometres from the earthquake's epicentre, in India, the Maldives,
Bangladesh and even Somalia in eastern Africa.

* March 28, 2005: Indonesia. A magnitude 8.7 earthquake hits islands
off western Sumatra, killing nearly 1000 people.

* May 27, 2006: Indonesia. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake devastates a
wide area around the ancient royal city of Yogyakarta, killing more
than 5000 people.

* Monday: Indonesia. A magnitude 7.7 earthquake off the Java coast
triggers a tsunami that kills at least 327 people and leaves 160
missing.

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Indonesia dusts up stalled tsunami warning alarm

By Achmad Sukarsono

JAKARTA, July 19 (Reuters) - Indonesia stepped up repairs of a tsunami
detection buoy on Wednesday in an effort to revive a stalled warning
system after the quake-prone country failed to detect its second
tsunami in almost as many years.

The device on a ship at the Jakarta port is one of two buoys deployed
off Sumatra island last year as part of a project to install a tsunami
early warning system to protect people living on the shores of
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago.

But both of them were found bobbing around the ocean in a damaged
state barely six months after they were deployed, and have been
sitting since then in storage waiting for spare parts.

Authorities dusted up the buoy in Jakarta amid mounting criticism
after no sirens alerted residents of the southern Java coast of
Monday's tsunami that killed more than 500 people and displaced
thousands. "The radio antenna of its modem is broken so data for
detection were ruined. The chain to the anchor is also severed," said
electrical engineer Handoko Manoto.

On Wednesday, an earthquake measuring 6.2 shook the Indonesian
capital, Jakarta, and its surroundings, the national earthquake centre
said. But there were no reports of casualties and the U.S.-based
Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said there was no risk of a tsunami.

Indonesia first began setting up a tsunami warning system after the
December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the worst on record, that left
230,000 dead or missing, including 170,000 in Indonesia.

The project aims to deliver tsunami alerts within five minutes of an
undersea quake, but experts say that is just a dream until the
archipelago of 17,000 islands has in place at least 22 buoys, 120 tide
gauges with digital recordings, and 160 seismographs.

"We are very much in tears because a disaster happened when we are
trying to realise this project," said Idwan Suhardi, a deputy at the
Ministry of Research and Technology that oversees the ambitious plan.

Another ministry official said the project was short of funds while
Transport Minister Hatta Rajasa told reporters the country also lacked
other necessary equipment.

"Imagine this. From 160 seismographs needed we only have installed
36," said the minister who supervises the state meteorology and
geophysics agency.

The late 2004 tsunami prompted international calls for a global warning 
system.

But international support and funding has waned since then. Officials
said Indonesia could not proceed without international aid and so far
there had been scant pledges to fund the project which needs $120
million to cover equipment costs alone.

Experts said even if the buoys had been in place and had detected
Monday's tsunami, Java residents were still not guaranteed a warning
as there were no sirens in place.

(additional reporting by Benny Siahaya)

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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