BANGKOK – Almost 1,000 kilometres off the Thai coast devastated by a tsunami 20 years ago, engineers lower a detection buoy into the waves — a key link in a warning system intended to ensure no disaster is as deadly again.
On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake under the Indian Ocean triggered a huge tsunami with waves up to 30 metres high.
Only a rudimentary warning system was in place at the time, with no way to alert the millions of people living around the Indian Ocean in advance. More than 225,000 people were killed in a dozen countries.
In the years following the disaster, multiple governments developed a global tsunami information system, building on the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) network of six detection buoys in the Pacific.
Known as Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART), the system now has 74 buoys around the world.
Each floats on the surface while tethered to the seabed, monitoring signals from a seismic sensor on the ocean floor and changes in the water level.
Songsil Nodharith, head of Khuek Khak village, helped residents to evacuate “without even grabbing their belongings” during a night-time false alarm last year and urged authorities to ensure that the towers were well maintained.
In Sri Lanka — where 31,000 were killed in 2004, making it the second-worst-hit country — more than three-quarters of the 77 tsunami warning towers the government subsequently installed are not operating because the communications equipment has become obsolete, the island’s Disaster Management Centre chief Udaya Herath told AFP.
Mobile phone companies have instead identified some 70,000 “key contacts” in coastal areas, including resort managers, to receive warnings and evacuation orders in the event of impending danger.
Warnings have occasionally set off panic in Thailand, with locals and tourists rushing for higher ground, but residents have faith in the system.
The fishing village of Ban Nam Khem saw Thailand’s worst destruction in 2004, with trawlers swept onto houses and 800 residents killed.
Manasak Yuankaew, now head of the village, lost four members of his family that day.
“We have a saying here,” he told AFP. “Fleeing 100 times is better than not fleeing that one crucial time.”
by Watsamon Tri-yasakda
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