Tsunami Warning System To Be Built

According to Friday's Bangkok Post, an advanced seismic and tidal wave warning system will be established for Thailand, and the man in charge with be Smith Thamsaroj, a former Meteorological Dept chief. This is the same guy who a few years ago was declared persona non grata in Phuket for suggesting the very same thing.

But experts have pointed out that warning systems are far from infallible - three out of four tsunami warnings issues since 1948 have been false, and the two warnings resulting in (expensive) evacuations in Hawaii were both false alarms. The problem is not predicting the wave, but predicting the destructive power of the wave, which depends a lot on local conditions at the wave's destination.

And an essential part of any warning system is education. As one expert put it, "If you tell untrained people there's a tsunami coming, half of them go down to the beach to see what a tsunami looks like."

Of course, the best warning systems use satellites, so the cynics will see this as another business opportunity for Shin Corp.