Tsunami buoys fail to trigger warning
Print Edition
ALL 22 of the early-warning buoys Indonesia deployed after the 2004 tsunami disaster were inoperable when a massive undersea earthquake struck off the coast on Wednesday, a National Disaster Mitigation Agency official said.
The 7.8 magnitude quake did not trigger a tsunami, and there were no deaths and no major damage, but it did expose gaps in the systems put in place to prevent a disaster similar to the Indian Ocean quake that killed more than 200,000 people 11 years ago.
In addition to the malfunctioning of buoys designed to warn of massive waves, authorities said there were not enough evacuation routes or shelters in Padang, a Sumatra island port city of around 1 million people that felt the quake.
“There was definitely panic last night, that cannot be denied,” said Zulfiatno, the head of the disaster management agency in Padang, adding that shelters had the capacity to only hold around 200,000 people. “But the situation has improved from previous years. People have started to understand how to evacuate safely.”
The 9.15-magnitude quake of December 2004 opened a fault line deep beneath the ocean, triggering a wave as high as 17.4 meters that crashed ashore in more than a dozen countries to wipe some communities off the map in seconds.
Indonesia straddles the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire,” a highly seismically active zone, where different plates on the earth’s crust meet and create a large number of earthquakes and volcanoes.
Soon after that disaster, Indonesia introduced a sophisticated early warning system using buoys, sea-level gauges and seismometers that can send alerts to countries’ tsunami warning centers within 10 minutes of a quake.
Officials said the procedure is to issue a tsunami warning if a quake of more than 6.5 magnitude and with its epicenter less than 20km deep happens at sea, and that went smoothly on Wednesday. But the buoys, which measure the force and speed of water movement, were a missing link in the chain.
The buoys cost around US$2.3 million a year to maintain.
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