Looking For Disaster

[Sunbelt Asia]

http://www.bangkokpost.com/Perspective/09Jan2005_pers01.php

LOOKING FOR DISASTER

Building an early warning system for tsunamis in the Indian Ocean will take massive financial and technical resources, as well as unprecedented cooperation between the concerned countries, writes ALAN DAWSON

The clock started ticking at 7:58 a.m. Thawatchai Pol-amnuay, on his construction job building a new house, had 90 minutes to live. Orlantha Ambrose, a 33-year-old Sri Lankan-American, had two hours.

Many are asking who is to blame, why there was no warning, because it is too horrible to imagine that man was unable to confront the random violence of nature that took Thawatchai, Ms Ambrose and tens of thousands of others in the most widespread natural disaster in memory. Scientists tell us that it was all a matter of plate tectonics, a geological theory that says the surface of the Earth is broken into large plates, the size and position of which change over time. At the edges of these plates, where they move against each other, there is intense geologic activity, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and the slow formation of mountains.

At 7:58 Bangkok time on December 26, the unimaginably huge and heavy stone Sunda Plate nine kilometres beneath the Andaman Sea jammed under the unimaginably huge and heavy stone Burma Microplate beside it, and lifted it 10 metres. This required incomprehensible power and force _ think a million Hiroshima atomic bombs. The entire planet jiggled and its rotation sped up by three microseconds. The sudden undersea movement shook nearby Sumatra island violently for three minutes and 20 seconds. Beyond _ in Java and Burma and Thailand _ dishes rattled, tall buildings swayed and a few cracked.

In Phuket, some people felt dizzy; a few thought "earthquake," others thought "last night's Christmas party." Nearby, though, people in Aceh started to die immediately from the quake, as buildings fell and the ground opened and tossed around people and things. In only minutes hundreds were dead. But apart from the immediate area of northern Sumatra, the Earth stopped shaking and life became normal again. For a while.

Just off the main Patong Beach in Phuket, 41-year-old Thawatchai and fellow workers were on the job. His wife Sompaeng Chairat was at work with him as always.

In southern Sri Lanka, Orlantha, 33, was showing her visiting mother and father, Dr Anton and Beulah, the work she had quit her job in Los Angeles to perform _ a two-year volunteer stint to teach music to underprivileged Lankan children.

It was 6:58 a.m. in Sri Lanka, but the Indian Ocean was on earthquake time.

In Denver, Colorado, men and women were also at work. It was still Christmas afternoon, and in the office of the World Data Center for Seismology at the National Earthquake Information Center, some of the machines that report the state of the Earth on a second-by-second basis began to go crazy.

In six minutes, geophysicists Don Blakeman and Julie Martinez had analysed the incoming information and put out a bulletin to the United States, Thailand and the other 24 nations who are members of The International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific. Here are its key lines:

ISSUED AT 0204Z 26 DEC 2004

AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED... MAGNITUDE 8.5 REVISED MAGNITUDE BASED ON ANALYSIS OF MANTLE WAVES.

NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS FOR THE PACIFIC BASIN BASED ON HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA.

THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF A TSUNAMI NEAR THE EPICENTER.

THIS MESSAGE IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY. THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING OR WATCH IN EFFECT.

A note attested: "This event has been reviewed by a seismologist."

SUDDEN CATASTROPHE

So far as is known, no damaging tsunami had ever before struck Thailand or Siam.

The US Geological Survey in Colorado is the fount of earthquake news for the world. At 9:20 a.m. the Meteorological Department in Samut Prakan issued a general notice that it had independently monitored, and also received (the US) reports of an earthquake in the sea off Sumatra. The Department estimated the quake's strength at 8.1 magnitude on the Richter scale. (First reports are always subject to revision; the quake is now believed to have had a magnitude of 9.0, or 100 times the strength first estimated.)

What exactly occurred at the Meteorological Department is being reviewed by an investigation under the capable hand of the supervising minister, Surapong Suebwonglee, and it seems likely that several versions will compete for the truth.

In any case, where the Americans specified, correctly as it turned out, that there was no apparent threat of a tsunami in the Pacific, Thai meteorologists on that Sunday morning did not mention the word "tsunami," and therefore forecast precisely nothing. Some commentators have mentioned the department warned of high waves in the Andaman Sea, but daily readers of the weather report know that this is a routine, ho-hum advisory unrelated to disaster warning.

Nine kilometres down, and 22 minutes earlier, the shifting plates had sucked and pushed unimaginable quantities of water hither and fro _ exactly as if you waved a ping-pong paddle in a pool. Displaced by the shifting plates, a huge volume of seawater did what water always does, rush to fill the empty space.

This touched off a massive underwater surge that within a minute was travelling at the speed of an airliner and, for the first time in recorded history, in all directions.

In 15 minutes the surging water hit Aceh. The earthquake had already cut communications, and when the powerful wave struck the already crippled province the outside world did not know.

The surge was traveling beneath the Andaman Sea and breaking into the Indian Ocean, going north, south east, west. After Aceh, everything appeared calm. Tsunamis do not affect the sea surface. They pass beneath ships and fishing boats and tourists on their way to outer islands without notice. The surge was below the surface and bearing down silently on islands and mainland. Next in its rippling path was Phuket.

Experience makes people smarter. It's pretty easy to see today what happened on December 26 and how lives could have been saved.

Americans call this "Monday morning quarterbacking" _ coaching the Sunday afternoon football game the next day, when it's easy to see what should have been done to win. The teen slang of the day also refers to this: Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

Until the day after Christmas, there was never in recorded history a tsunami, ocean surge or anything of the type in Thailand, let alone on the Indian Ocean side. Thailand joined the 1946 Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which is based in Hawaii and operates from messages coming from Colorado. The 26-nation Warning Center is a good place for meteorologists to meet, but in 58 years Thailand has never received a warning from the group.

The last big surge in the Andaman Sea was on August 27, 1883, when the Indonesian volcano-island of Krakatoa exploded with a force so great that people on the streets of Bangkok heard it. The tsunami on that "Day the World Exploded" killed more than 30,000 people _ but there were no deaths in Thailand even though the wave actually reached the English Channel. Krakatoa caused several years of global cooling but its big waves went west and south, sparing Siam. The last big tsunami in the Indian Ocean before that was 4,000 years ago, when a great wave from an Indonesia landslide hit Australia _ although there were no such nations in those days.

Authorities were unprepared for the Dec 26 tsunami. But they also are unprepared for the leadup to many disasters and for the same reason. There is no planned warning for an imminent typhoon in Bangkok, two 747s' colliding over Phitsanulok or a total collapse of the US dollar.

There has been no preparation for these events because they are so unlikely. One generally plans for the worst likely situations. A tsunami had never had occurred in Thailand and previous great ocean surges in the upper Indian Ocean were caused by cyclones, as they call typhoons. So there was no instruction on what to do if a tsunami seemed suddenly possible.

POLITICAL WILL REQUIRED

Since no strong or killer tsunami ever had struck Thailand, in the face of a warning people may have been as likely to say, "Huh?" as "Go!" In a few cases, however, people reacting to the coming disaster did save themselves. A warning almost certainly would have saved more, perhaps hundreds _ maybe thousands.

Still, Thailand does not need a national tsunami warning centre. It does need a general disaster centre to sift evidence and scientific information to warn intelligently and react far more quickly and aggressively when disaster strikes. The onset of three recent medical disasters show how much Thailand does need general disaster planning and warning systems. The initial responses to Aids, Sars and avian flu were as timorous as the tsunami watch. Authorities issued no warnings until well after the disasters were already established, ingrained and killing. In each case, the signs were there but a combination of denial and timidity allowed the disasters to gain the upper hand. The cost of installing and manning a national disaster centre based on dependable international monitors is a fraction of the cost of rehabilitation of the physical losses in the South _ which in turn are just a fraction of the human toll.

But it would be a grave error for Thailand to plan and build and staff a tsunami warning system on its own _ or a terrorist warning system, or a nuclear missile alert network or an asteroid monitoring service, even though there is a 1-in-37 chance that Asteroid 2004 MN4 will crash into Earth with the power of 38 Soviet Tsar Bombas, the biggest nuclear weapon ever made, on Songkran Day 2029 _ this information discovered in the week before the once-in-a-millennium tsunami.

Looking for disaster intelligently _ be it tsunamis or Friday-the-13th asteroids or terrorist attacks, typhoons, tornados, head-on airliner crashes, cruise ship sinkings and dozens of other disasters _ takes political will across borders.

That is why it was disappointing to hear the Malaysian Prime Minister say, three days after the Boxing Day disaster, "I will be writing to each of my counterparts in the affected countries expressing my condolences and to propose for cooperation to be stepped up." This is almost exactly what every Asia-Pacific leader has said about terrorism, but cooperation remains slim. The 26 members of the Pacific warning network are led by strong pressure from the United States and Japan. Who will step up with that kind of leadership in the Indian Ocean region?

The Earth is a living planet and disaster will strike. But we can limit the toll if we can overcome the hurdle of convincing countries to participate.

If Thailand had issued the first tsunami alert in the country's history on Dec 26, would Thawatchai have lived? Perhaps _ not. Realistically, there was no more than 40 minutes to put a message on TV screens or send messages on cell phones. Thawatchai certainly would not have directly received a warning to drop everything and head for higher ground. But indirectly? Maybe.

The tsunami continued to ripple outward. In Sri Lanka, Orlantha Ambrose likely had felt the earthquake _ most of Serendipity Island had _ but the ground had long stopped shaking and she was unaware that death was thundering towards her at the speed of an airliner.

Just 30 minutes after Thawatchai was swept to his deatht, Orlantha likewise was taken by another great wave. She, too, was just one of thousands whose last moments were unrecorded.

[onethailand]

You tell 'em, Alan!

In one of the earlier threads, there was a lot of finger-pointing going on without a whole lot of substantiation. There was also an article posted which pointed out that even experts around the globe were not convinced of the possible danger of a tsunami until it was basically too late to do anything.

I'm not sure that there will ever be any formal conclusion on this - but I have opined that it is really difficult to put the blame squarely on the Meteorological Department - or the prime minister - when they have no experience with tsunamis, nor do they have the proper tools with which to make any reasonable judgement about the danger of a tsunami striking Thailand's shores.

I would like to see other opinions about this, of course - but Alan is a master old-hand in Thailand and not the least bit perturbed about tweaking the government - but in this case he is practically defending them - almost unheard of