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Asia tsunami warning system feasible
The major obstacles to creating an early-warning system that could have saved many victims of Asia's massive tsunami are not money and technology, but poverty and political and cultural division besetting the region it hit, experts and officials said Monday. Please note: MONEY IS NOT AN ISSUE. Instead it is poverty (read: corruption) and "political and cultural division" (read: ideological intolerance) that is to blame. Let's connect the dots. Authoritarian or totalitarian governments have no interest in cooperative action, even if it is to save their own populations from disaster when it means relinquishing a single SCINTILLA of power. Sound familiar? How about China's concealment of the largest medically caused AIDS crisis in all history? Let's not forget the Oil-for-Palaces scandal that placed immense human suffering well below any personal need for luxury and limitless wealth. The wall of water that killed more than 23,300 people in coastal villages in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Malaysia and Sri Lanka was tracked by U.S. seismologists who said they had no way to warn local governments of the danger. Correction: These governments most certainly had a way, they just didn't want to spend the money on it. Quite like how they don't want to spend the money on sanitation infrastructure or disaster preparedness. The tsunami was spawned by the most powerful earthquake in 40 years, which struck off the Indonesian coast an hour before the tsunami made landfall on Sunday. U.S. officials tried frantically to warn the deadly wall of water was coming, but there was no official alert system in the region. Once more, that pesky issue of having to spend money on things other than Sevruga caviar and Champagne. Just ask Imelda Marcos about it. Six "tsunameters" along the Pacific coastline, one near Chile and 14 off the Japanese coast now feed data to the U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Centers in Hawaii and Alaska. Scientists wanted to place two more of the tsunami meters in the Indian Ocean, including one near Indonesia, as part of a global warning system, but the plan has not been funded, said Eddie Bernard, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. [H]as not been funded" by whom? Wait for it ... The tsunameters each cost $250,000 and take about a month to build, Bernard said. "It has been vetted through a (United Nations commission) and they support it but there's always a delay between proposal writing and deployment of the funds." Gosh, our little darlings at the UN managed to delay implementation of this minuscule appropriation. Why for? Their World Hunger Summit menu probably cost less. Jan Egeland, who heads the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told a news conference that disaster preparation activities in the Indian Ocean area have focused on monsoons, which are common and can be devastating. Tsunamis typically occur in the area once a century, he said. But that didn't prevent him from describing American donations as "skimpy," the slut. He said a warning system should be looked into. "Right after my eight course hot lunch." "I think it would be a massive undertaking to actually have a full-fledged tsunami warning system that would really be effective in many of these places," he said. Horseshit! Cheap bouy detectors could be in place within a few months. Hilton Root, a Milken Institute (sound familiar?) senior fellow and a former U.S. representative to the Asian Development Bank, said poverty and instability in the hardest-hit nations could be the biggest barrier to implementing the most crucial aspect of an early-warning system: moving people away from danger. "These are countries that really don't get along, are at different stages of development and don't trust each other for political reasons," Root said. "They are just beginning to bring down trade barriers so it's an area where the political tension is easily aroused and cooperation never been easy." What a great excuse for mass murder through But the tsunami's extraordinary toll may be "a wake-up call to these people that they need to think about regional risks and start doing something about it," Root said. By contrast, the rich nations of the Pacific rim already have extensive, high-tech warning systems in place. Maybe they know something about investing. Japan, for instance, has a network of sensors that record seismic data and feed information to a national agency able to issue evacuations warnings within minutes of any quake. And an earthquake off the California coast would have triggered instant warnings to federal and state agencies via dedicated hotlines, and to the public via emergency broadcasts, said Paul Whitmore, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Alaska. California also recently launched an electronic system that alerts citizens and emergency workers via e-mail and pager, said Sheryl Tankersley of the state Office of Emergency Services. "We do have a robust system here in California," Tankersley said. "We like to say it's the best in the nation, if not the world. But it's all based on neighbor helping neighbor. Cooperation is essential." One more time: Nations which have been impoverished by their corrupt governments are left defenseless against natural disaster due to inappropriate diversion of funds. These diverted funds directly result in the industrialized nations having to devote between ten and one hundred times the aid necessary to overcome natural disasters, whose effects could easily have been mitigated. Remember, people keep criticizing my lack of patience with these countries because their mismanagement is not only draining international relief coffers but also spawning terrorism. Yet, somehow, my critics do not seem willing to address the immediate and pressing need for pressuring these same countries into some sort of functional compliance with respect to combatting the fundamental causes of terrorism, namely, corruption and the perpetuation of totalitarian systems that relegate civilian needs well below elitist perks. Connect the dots, please. Posted by: Zenster 2004-12-28 |
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