Thai Pm Pledges Probe On Lack Of Tsunami Alert

[Darknight]

Thai PM pledges probe on lack of tsunami alert

Source: Reuters

By Nopporn Wong-Anan

BANGKOK, Jan 1 (Reuters) - Thailand will set up a panel to find out why no warnings of the deadly tsunami were issued, which might have saved thousands of lives, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said on Saturday.

"There must be an investigation of the whole incident, how it happened, when it happened and why early warnings could not have been issued," Thaksin said in his weekly radio address.

The final toll could be nearer 8,000 than the 4,500 now known because many of the 6,500 missing were feared dead, said Thaksin, Thaksin admits Thailand's response to the one of the worst natural disasters in living memory has been disorganised in a country which rarely faces anything worse than floods during the annual monsoon.

So far it appears to have had little political impact. Thaksin faces a general election next month which he is expected to win handsomely.

Chief meteorologist Suparerk Tansriratanawong told reporters on Monday Thailand had not been hit by a tsunami in more than 300 years and his 900-strong meterological department, which has four earthquake experts, had no reason to expect one.

But the English-language Nation newspaper this week quoted an unnamed member of the department as saying a tsunami alert was not issued for fear of hurting the important tourist industry at peak season if it turned out to be false.

"If we issued a warning which would have led to evacuation, what would happen then? Business would be instaneously affected," the source was quoted as saying.

No Asian country issued a warning of the tsunami, triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Indonesia, which killed more than 124,000 people as it crashed ashore around the Indian Ocean.

Hotels on the Thai coast were packed when the tsunami hit. At least 4,560 people were killed on southern Thailand's Andaman Sea coast and its islands, more than 2,400 of them foreign tourists drawn to its sand, warms seas and coral reefs.

Many came from Europe, especially Scandinavia, to escape the long, dark, cold northern winter.

Thaksin did not say how the probe would be conducted, but he said he had appointed earthquake and tsunami expert Samith Dhammasaroj to lead the establishment of a national early warning system for all natural disasters.

"Some might say we are putting up fences after the cows have gone," Thaksin said. "But there are still some cows left and there will be more cows coming and we need to have a strong fence."

Samith told Reuters he sent out warnings to southern provincial governors when he was chief meteorologist in 1993 that they might be "dangerously hit" by deadly tsunamis, and issued another warning in 1998, after a tsunami hit Papua New Guinea.

"Nobody heeded my alert. Some provinces have banned me from entering their territories. They said I was ruining their tourism image," he said.

Samith said he hoped to have a plan ready in a month and added a national drill would be conducted once it was in place.

"An early warning could have been issued, but our problem was there was no single agency to take charge," Samith said. (Editing by Michael Battye and Sonya Hepinstall; Reuters Messaging [email protected];+662 648-9739))

[The_Moog]

Where is Thaksin getting the new cows from?

His bucolic analogies are a bit confusing.

[RDN]

....Chief meteorologist Suparerk Tansriratanawong told reporters on Monday Thailand had not been hit by a tsunami in more than 300 years and his 900-strong meterological department, which has four earthquake experts, had no reason to expect one....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Earthquake experts? I wonder what they do all day?

[Darknight]

Thais probe missing wave warning

From BBC news

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has pledged an investigation to find out why early warnings were not issued ahead of Sunday's deadly tsunami.

Thailand's death toll currently stands at 4,812, with just over half of the dead being foreign tourists, but Mr Thaksin warned it could reach 8,000.

Specialist DNA forensic teams from at least 12 states have now arrived in Thailand to help identify the dead.

But they are warning it could be a long and distressing process.

"There must be an investigation of the whole incident, how it happened, when it happened and why early warnings could not have been issued," Mr Thaksin said in his weekly radio address on Saturday.

Mr Thaksin's remarks follow allegations made by an unnamed member of the Thai meteorological department this week that a tsunami alert was not issued for fear of hurting the country's important tourism industry in case it turned out to be a false alarm.

None of the countries affected by the tsunami issued a warning.

Mr Thaksin said he had appointed a quake and tsunami expert, Samith Dhammasaroj, to establish an early warning system for all natural disasters.

"Some might say we are putting up fences after the cows have gone," he said. "But there are still some cows left and there will be more cows coming and we need to have a strong fence," he said.

The BBC's Dominic Hughes, on the Thai island of Phuket, says that in some places the devastation has been complete - remote coastal fishing villages have been entirely wiped out.

Identification process

Meanwhile, the struggle to identify the dead continues. Our correspondent says so far the bodies of around 250 foreigners have been positively identified - just one in 10 of the total known to have died so far.

But it could be weeks if not months before all those killed in Thailand by last Sunday's tsunami are identified, rescue teams in the country have said.

The death toll is now more than 4,800, with another 6,000 missing.

It is now virtually impossible to identify the bodies by sight, so forensic experts are trying to use dental records, or match DNA samples provided by relatives of the missing.

But the bodies of the Thai victims - most of them Buddhists - have started to be cremated.

The traditional mourning rituals have been abandoned, with dozens of bodies being burnt together to reduce the risk of disease.

Across the country, New Year's celebrations were cancelled or toned down. In Phuket, hundreds of tourists left bars at midnight to join locals in spontaneous candle-lighting in the streets, the French news agency AFP reported.

At the same time, a huge clear-up operation is removing the rubble of collapsed buildings in Thailand's top tourism spots.

The country relies on tourism, and businesses are trying to revive the industry as soon as possible, our correspondent says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4139435.stm

[Richard W]

Where is Thaksin getting the new cows from?

His bucolic analogies are a bit confusing.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Maybe he hasn't heard that asteroid 2004 MN4 will miss, especially in 2029. It sounds as though the strike possibility was recently as high as 1 in 43! It's now quite low.

Seriously, though, the fault that caused the tsunami has had very large earthquakes less than 30 years apart, so a repeat in his lifetime is quite possible.

[Rhys]

Should we expected anything..

[RDN]

.... Thaksin Shinawatra has pledged an investigation to find out why early warnings were not issued ahead of Sunday's deadly tsunami.....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Will the report come out before the next election?

[kat]

Yeah, and will it mention that the last president of the Meterological unit was sacked for urging the development of the very same system? Or that the present lackadasials were afraid of a fresh reprimand for Toxin and the rest of Phuket, as they received 2 years ago for issuing an alert? Exactly what will this report probe - Toxin's ######?

[Phil Conners]

Whatever happened to "the buck stops here" ?

Edited January 2, 2005 by madsere

[RDN]

Question:

Whatever happened to "the buck stops here" ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Answer:

Mai bpen rai.

[aaaaaa]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/01/0...reut/index.html

Thailand fires chief meteorologist

Inquiry launched into why no tsunami warning was issued

Tuesday, January 4, 2005 Posted: 5:15 AM EST (1015 GMT)

BANGKOK, Thailand (Reuters) -- Thailand has fired its chief meteorologist and opened an investigation into why his department failed to issue a tsunami warning which might have saved thousands of lives, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced.

"When a quake measured at 8.9-9.0 on the Richter scale struck in Sumatra, it was widely known tsunami can happen. But why weren't there any alerts? I really want to know the truth," Thaksin told reporters Tuesday.

A day after deadly waves devastated the country's Andaman Sea coast, Meteorological Department chief Suparerk Tansriratanawong had told reporters Thailand had not been hit by a tsunami in more than 300 years and had no reason to expect one.

But the English-language Nation newspaper quoted an unnamed member of the department last week as saying a tsunami alert was not issued for fear of hurting the important tourist industry at the peak season if it turned out to be false.

During the investigation, to be led by Information & Communications Technology Minister Surapong Suebwonglee, Suparerk will help set up a national early warning system for all natural disasters, a government spokesman said.

No Asian country issued a warning of the Dec. 26 tsunami, triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Indonesia, which killed nearly 150,000 people as it crashed ashore around the Indian Ocean.

Thai expert says he tried to warn the government a deadly tsunami might be sweeping towards tourist-packed beaches, but couldn't find anyone to take his calls.

Samith Dhammasaroj said Monday he was sure a tsunami was coming as soon as he heard about the massive December 26 earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island that measured magnitude 9.0 -- the world's biggest in 40 years. (Full story)

"I tried to call the director-general of the meteorological office, but his phone was always busy," Samith said as he described his desperate attempts to generate an alert which might have saved thousands of lives.

"I tried to phone the office, but it was a Sunday and no-one was there," said the former chief of the meteorological department now charged with setting up an early warning disaster system for Thailand.

"I knew that one day we would have this type of tsunami. I warned that there would be a big disaster," he told reporters.

"Everyone laughed at me and said I was a bad guy who wanted to ruin the tourist industry," he added.

The tsunami took just 75 minutes to hit the beaches and islands of Thailand's Andaman Sea coast, 600 km (375 miles) from the earthquake's epicenter.

Hotels on Thailand's Andaman Sea coast were packed when the tsunami hit, killing at least 5,187 people, including more than 2,400 foreign tourists, many from Scandinavia, drawn to its sand, warm seas and coral reefs to escape the long northern winter.

[RDN]

.... Suparerk Tansriratanawong had told reporters Thailand had not been hit by a tsunami in more than 300 years and had no reason to expect one....

... Suparerk will help set up a national early warning system for all natural disasters...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hopefully his job will be tea-boy (or Thai equivalent thereof).

[george]

Thailand 'inactive' in tsunami warning group

Past alerts suppressed to protect tourism industry, seismologist suggests

WASHINGTON: -- Thailand is a long-standing member of the world's only functioning tsunami warning system, but it rarely sent representatives to meetings, provided no contact information and was ill-prepared to issue rapid warnings that might have saved thousands of citizens and foreign tourists from the killer waves that destroyed its idyllic Indian Ocean resorts.

The full scope of Thai lack of interest in the system is only beginning to emerge, more than a week after the huge tsunamis slammed ashore. One senior Thai seismologist, Sumalee Prachuab, even suggested that the government deliberately suppressed past warnings because of fears of unsettling the country's crucial tourism industry.

Yesterday, the Thai government fired the head of the country's meteorological branch, Suparerk Thantiratanawong, accusing him of failing to issue a timely warning. "If he warned, the death toll would definitely have been minimized," Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said.

But Bangkok's record on the international tsunami warning system reaches far beyond the failings of one senior bureaucrat.

"It's true, they have been inactive," said Charles McCreery, the geophysicist in charge of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii.

Thailand is one of 26 members of an international co-ordination group that runs the Pacific warning system, although it hasn't sent a representative to meetings for years -- including one in 2004 called to examine the costs of setting up an Indian Ocean warning system.

The Thai representative is a junior military officer, Lieutenant Sukit Yensung. Alone among the 26 members, he has supplied no telephone number to the group.

Dr. McCreery and several other leading international tsunami experts voiced a measure of understanding that Bangkok had paid relatively little attention to the threat from massive waves. With no exposed Pacific coast, the warning system was normally of little benefit to Thailand, they said.

Russia's leading expert, Viacheslav Gusiakov, said in an e-mail interview that last week's massive tsunamis were a typical example of a "low-probability, high-consequence" hazard.

Both Thailand and Indonesia were members of the Pacific warning group, although only Indonesia was active. But the huge earthquake was so close to the Indonesian island of Sumatra that it took only a few minutes for the towering waves to reach the shore. No warning system could have alerted the population in time.

However, Thai authorities knew of the earthquake from multiple sources. Although the waves took only an hour to reach Thai shores, the country's own seismologists did record the earthquake, and at least one bulletin from the Hawaii centre was sent before the waves hit. But it referred only to the lack of threat in the Pacific -- the warning centre doesn't cover the Indian Ocean.

Spokesmen for the Thai government were repeatedly contacted to explain why its representatives had failed to attend the meetings on the threat, but offered no explanation.

Bangkok apparently ordered national police forces to check for and report quake damage after the temblor, but there was no effort to warn the Phuket area.

In the rush to belatedly establish an Indian Ocean warning system, the Thai government has turned to a former head of the meteorological branch, Samith Thammasaroj, who says he was fired seven years ago when his repeated warnings about the tsunami threat were ignored.

"Nobody listened to me. I was blamed as a black sheep, a liar," he said this week. Thai seismologists "knew exactly what was going to happen, but they . . . were afraid to make a decision, because they believed if they made a wrong forecast they will get blame."

Accurately forecasting the size and destructive potential of tsunamis remains exceedingly difficult.

Major tsunamis, known as tele-tsunamis, are extraordinarily rare. Only twice since the year 416 have waves of this size swept across the Indian Ocean, Mr. Gusiakov said.

At least two of the recent warnings issued in the Pacific -- with sophisticated sensors and a well-developed communications system -- have turned out to be false alarms.

--globeandmail.com 2005-01-05

[RDN]

....The Thai representative is a junior military officer, Lieutenant Sukit Yensung. Alone among the 26 members, he has supplied no telephone number to the group.....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

...and he can push the trolley.