BANGKOK: Amid warnings from scientists of the risk of more major earthquakes and tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, some tangible signs of progress are emerging in the development of a warning system for the region.
Thailand has set the pace in the region, opening a national disaster warning center Monday. It is the first to take such a step among the 11 countries hit by the Dec. 26 tsunami disaster, which took more than 230,000 lives and inflicted billions of dollars of damage.
The modest one-story building in Bangkok, packed with hi-tech computer and communications gear that suppliers say is also used in the White House and Pentagon, is linked to regional monitoring centers in Hawaii and Japan.
Experts monitoring the data can now issue warnings within minutes to government ministers, emergency services, radio and television stations and to a network of sirens now under construction along Thailand's coast, which is popular with tourists.
Had the center been in operation in December, 90 percent of the more than 5,300 people killed by the tsunami in Thailand would probably have been saved, said Smith Dharmasaroja, a former head of Thailand's meteorological service who had warned years earlier of the need for such a facility and was put in charge of setting it up.
Built at a cost of about $1.5 million, 80 percent of it donated by the private sector, the Thai center marks a "very significant development," said Miguel Fortes of Unesco's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, in the creation of a warning system for the Indian Ocean. "It shows the region what countries that are still developing can do if they have the will."
In the immediate aftermath of the Dec. 26 disaster, Thailand proposed itself as the location for a warning center serving the Indian Ocean. Faced with resistance to that proposal by other countries in the region and some donor governments, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra decided to push ahead with developing a national warning system, Smith said.
Disaster relief experts hope Thailand's example may catalyze action from other countries in the region. In the five months since the tsunami struck, the oceanographic commission has put in place an interim warning system linking Indian Ocean countries to the seismic monitoring capabilities of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii and the Japanese Meteorological Agency.
As a result, countries of the region would receive warnings of a major earthquake within 10 minutes or 15 minutes of the event, said Laura Kong, director of the oceanographic commission's International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, however, has little access yet to data on sea movements in the Indian Ocean and remains unable to identify or warn if an earthquake has generated a tsunami, Kong said. Creating the network of coastal and ocean gauges and buoys capable of relaying real time data to monitoring centers is the challenge facing Indian Ocean countries, officials say.
The need for such a network "is very urgent," said John McCloskey, head of the School of Environmental Science of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, emphasizing the region's vulnerability to further major earthquakes.
The area of most immediate concern is the Indonesian island of Sumatra, according to scientists in the United States, Europe and Australia. That island bore the brunt of the Dec. 26 earthquake, the biggest in the last 40 years and now assessed at a magnitude of 9.3.It also took the force of a magnitude 8.5 earthquake on March 28, which had its epicenter to the south.
"We believe that after the great earthquakes on Dec. 26 and March 28," said Bill Leith, associate program coordinator for earthquake hazards at the U.S. Geological Survey in Virginia,"there is an increased chance of another earthquake to the south of those two."
Thailand's disaster warning center, in addition to linking up with Hawaii and Japan, will eventually receive data from its own network of coastal gauges and offshore buoys, Smith said. Thailand is ready to relay information to neighboring countries, he added.
The shape of the regional warning system Thailand will link up to, however, is still unclear. The idea of a single center for the Indian Ocean, as in the Pacific, was quickly overtaken by individual countries promoting national strategies.
Australia announced plans to invest 64 million Australian dollars, or $48 million, over four years in developing a national warning system and India is spending $27 million on a system due to be fully operational in 2007.
Indonesia similarly is developing a warning system with some $56 million worth of support from Germany, which will supply buoys, sea gauges, seismometers, telecommunications and training. There also will be assistance from China in seismic monitoring capabilities.
The existence of several subregional centers, however, creates a risk that countries will receive a variety of warnings and possibly different threat perceptions.
The oceanographic commission's member countries meeting in Paris soon are expected to pass a resolution mandating it to set up an agency for coordinating different country programs to ensure common operating standards and procedures.
Still, a key task for the commission will be achieving uniformity in the data different countries provide. At a meeting in Mauritius in April, Indian Ocean countries agreed in principle to share data, but it remains to be seen what they are willing to share.
Indonesia, for example, has declined to share seismic data, and others have regarded such data as security-sensitive, a commission official said.
The commission and donors are concerned that countries understand the long-term financial commitment required to maintain and replace sometimes costly monitoring systems and has the technical and managerial capacity to run the system.
"What is crucial for us is the idea of sustainability," said Winston Bowman, U.S. Agency for International Development's Bangkok-based regional environmental director, leading a $16.5 million program supporting the warnings.
"We don't just want to provide hardware for countries that may not have the money to meet the costs of running it," he said.
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