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Asia Officials Failed to Issue Warnings
| Shooting the wounded already? The dead aren't even cold yet... |
Asian officials conceded Monday that they failed to issue broad public warnings immediately after a massive undersea earthquake in Indonesia, which could have saved countless lives from the subsequent giant waves that smashed into nine countries as far away as Africa. India said it would consider establishing a warning system, and Australia and Japan said they would help build it. One Australian official said it would take at least a year to set one up. Also, Thailand's Meteorological Department said the country lacked an international warning system and proper coordination to get messages of impending disasters sent across the country. "If we had the international warning system, we could give real-time warning to people," said Seismological Bureau official Sumalee Prachuab.
| As a very rudimentary warning system, somebody could have hollered "Hey! There was a really big earthquake! Y'all watch out for tidal waves!" I know for a fact that when you have one, you often have the other. |
Governments around the region insisted they did not know the true nature of the threat because there was no international system in place to track tidal waves in the Indian Ocean — where they are rare — and they cannot afford to buy sophisticated equipment to build one. And what warnings there were came too little, too late.
Posted by: Fred 2004-12-27 |
