The Wall Street Journal (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y. Dec 29, 2004. pg. B.1.
Why Quake Warnings Failed; Hours After Indonesia Was Hit, Victims in Africa Had No Inkling
Kate Linebaugh and Bruce Stanley in Hong Kong, Jay Solomon in New Delhi, Rin Hindrati in Jakarta, Sebastian Moffett and Ginny Parker in Tokyo, and Christopher Conkey in Washington.
EXPERTS FROM Australia to Colorado sensed the earthquake immediately as it shook the Indian ocean floor. But because of bureaucratic inertia, diplomatic protocol and primitive communications, news of the impending catastrophe never reached the beaches and coastal communities lying in its path.
Bayu Pranata was sipping tea shortly after starting his 7 a.m. shift at the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency in West Sumatra, Indonesia, about 500 miles south of the quake's epicenter, when he was disturbed by a "tak, tak, tak" sound. It was so loud he thought mechanics had started working in the garage next door. Then he realized it was the pen on the seismograph. He hurriedly called the National Earthquake Center in Jakarta but ended up spending more than an hour trying to contact Indonesian disaster officials in vain.
At about the same time in Nagano, Japan, a short computer beep alerted Masashi Kobayashi, at the country's main earthquake observatory, that a big quake had taken place somewhere in the region. Within minutes, he contacted meteorological officials. Japan's emergency-management system quickly swung into gear: it compared the pattern of the earthquake to data on 100,000 other temblors and determined Japan faced no tsunami risk. Japanese officials didn't do much else with the information.
In Australia, the seismology officer on duty at the geoscience agency in Canberra rushed back to the office after being alerted an earthquake was registered in the agency's computers. He determined the quake was likely to create a tsunami and within half an hour had sent a warning to Australia's national emergency system and to the Foreign Ministry, which notified some of its embassies overseas. No messages were given to foreign governments for fear of overstepping diplomatic protocol, officials say.
As these warnings filtered slowly around bureaucratic channels across Asia Sunday morning, fishermen set out in flimsy boats, children splashed in the waves and tourists escaping winter climates lay out on beaches or went snorkeling amid the coral. Unbeknownst to them, a tsunami of Biblical proportions, created by one of the largest undersea earthquakes in decades, was speeding across the Indian Ocean. In a span of less than 10 hours, nearly 70,000 people, and probably more, would be killed -- drowned, smashed into buildings or swept out to sea. Later, global satellite communications would beam pictures of the devastation around the world in nanoseconds, but the tsunami moved virtually without warning from one country to the next. In Somalia, in East Africa, victims were taken as completely by surprise as those who were struck in Indonesia many hours earlier.
The failure to communicate the threat in large part was the result of a lack of sophisticated monitoring devices in the Indian Ocean that might have detected the quake sooner. It also was caused by economic conditions: the waves struck at thousands of miles of rural coastline in some of the world's least-developed nations, where devices such as cable television and cellphones still are rare. It also was a failure of imagination -- the inability of dozens of experts and officials in a score of countries to fathom that an undersea earthquake could conceivably cause such havoc, so far away.
Indeed, officials all around the ocean basin were slow to react to the first reports of tremors.
First to feel the waves was Banda Aceh, a city in Aceh province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, minutes after the quake occured at 7:58 a.m. local time, underwater off Sumatra.
More than a thousand miles away in Jakarta, Budi Waluyo, an official with Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, received a call from Radio Elshinta around 8:30 local time. The reporter said he had received information about strong shakes in Medan that could be an earthquake. Mr. Waluyo said he needed further information before making a public announcement and tried calling his agency's station closest to the earthquake's center in Banda Aceh. About an hour after the Jakarta office was alerted to the quake, it sent an e-mail to counterparts around the region and in Europe. "But of course, we only sent e-mail to the address we have. We did not call them," Mr. Waluyo said later.
Mr. Waluyo also informed Indonesia's National Coordinating Board for disaster, headed by Indonesian Vice President Yusuf Kalla. "But since it was Sunday, I am not sure who might receive the information. Our duties are simply to monitor earthquake, analyze the information and provide complete calculations of the impact of the earthquake," he said. Officials at the National Coordinating Board couldn't be contacted, nor could Mr. Kalla.
Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency has 33 stations throughout the archipelago to monitor seismic activity. Some of the information generated has to be compiled and conveyed manually. Analyzing the data to figure out the size and location of an earthquake can take as much as two hours, and even longer to determine whether it could generate a tsunami, according to the head of the agency's tsunami division.
The quake's tremors also were picked up within minutes by seismology stations across Malaysia, where 65 people are reported dead. The nation's meteorological agency sifted data on the quake and passed it to the prime minister's office. The data didn't include a warning of possible tsunamis because Malaysia lacks the necessary equipment to make such predictions, said Low Kong Chiew, director of the agency's seismology division.
Mr. Low faxed news of the quake -- with no mention of a tsunami -- to his branch offices. At 11:12 a.m. local time, Amirzudi Hashim, a duty officer at the small town of Bayan Lepas on the southwest end of Penang Island, received the news. The big waves rolled in about two hours later, to the shock of Mr. Amirzudi and thousands of tourists and beachgoers. "I never expected a tsunami here," Mr. Amirzudi says.
About an hour after the quake struck, and shortly before the tsunami hit Thailand's tourist-packed beaches, Kathawuth Malairojsiri, a weather forecast chief at Thailand's Meteorological Department, received news of the quake. He immediately called a Bangkok traffic radio station, asking them to broadcast a tsunami warning -- which they did, he said, adding that his office received more than 1,000 calls after that.
Some of the hardest-hit areas, however, such as Sri Lanka and India, had no warning at all. "We simply didn't get any warnings from anybody," said Dutta Trayam, who heads the seismology department at the Indian Meteorological Department.
With most of their equipment focused on tsunami threats in the Pacific Ocean, U.S. officials struggled to detect the tsunami and warn Indian Ocean countries about it in the immediate aftermath of the quake. The U.S. Geological Survey's world-wide network of 120 seismographs immediately detected the earthquake.
Based on this data, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, the U.S. agency responsible for tsunami warnings, issued its first "information bulletin" at 8:14 Eastern time to Pacific-rim countries, including Indonesia and Thailand. It said "no destructive tsunami threat exists based on historical earthquake and tsunami data."
It wasn't until 75 minutes after the quake, around 9 p.m. Eastern time that the Geological Survey upgraded the quake's magnitude to 8.5 from 8.0. "That was our first indication there might be a far-flung threat," said Charles McCreery, director of the PTWC in Ewa Beach, Hawaii.
When news reports of coastal casualties in Thailand, and then Sri Lanka trickled in, Mr. McCreery's only international call had been to his counterparts in Australia. Now he got a call from the U.S. ambassador in Sri Lanka, wanting to know if any more waves would hit the island. PWTC analysts struggled to determine how much further the tsunami would extend and whether to issue a more serious threat.
The U.S. naval base in Diego Garcia was reporting normal wave activity, and a buoy equipped with sensors in the Cocos Islands, the only gauge available to the U.S. in the Indian Ocean, indicated that sea level was less than a foot above normal. "We didn't know how to interpret all that," Mr. McCreery said.
Australian disaster officials said there was no diplomatic protocol that allowed them to contact their international counterparts. Within a half hour of the quake, Geoscience Australia sent out an alert stating there had been a massive earthquake underwater that had the potential to generate a tsunami, said the agency's Mr. McFadden.
The alert went to Australia's emergency services network, and officials at the country's embassies were notified. "There isn't an alert system set up throughout those countries. Most embassies are informed," Mr. McFadden said. "We are a bit weak because it isn't our domain up there. We can't go trampling on other people's territory."
In Indonesia, Mr. Pranata was "confused, worried and panicked," he said, because he wanted to spread the information as he knew tsunamis could result from such earthquakes. His efforts were thwarted as phones went unanswered at local government offices and the state broadcast media. So he turned to private radio stations and got them to alert communities to evacuate coastal areas due to the chance of gigantic waves flooding coastal areas. Mr. Pranata continued to contact the government to no avail.
In the Maldives islands off India, officials had no warning when the wave hit starting around 9:30 a.m. local time. "I woke up with the wave," said Ismail Firag, deputy director of planning for Maldives Ministry of Tourism.
Mr. Firag had been working on a nearby island in the coral atoll and spent the night at the Kadoma Tourist Resort. As he packed in the morning, he heard yelling, which he thought might be kids playing. "All of a sudden there was water in the room," he said. "I couldn't open the door, so I went out through the window. I was not scared, but I was surprised." Three times the water rose over the beach and up into the resort as guests retreated to what little high ground there is in the Maldives -- the islands' average elevation is three feet above sea level.
"We don't have a formal system where we monitor these kinds of things," Mr. Firag said. "If we had been aware of this tremor we could have at least told somebody. We could have saved lives, most certainly."
Some chain hotels with resorts in multiple locations attempted to pass word along. The Banyan Tree Phuket in Thailand notified the company's vice president for operations as soon as waves and mud flooded its grounds, but the Bangkok executive was unable to get through to the Maldives resort in time.
"It really drove all of us in a panic because we couldn't get in touch with our colleagues," said Banyan Tree spokeswoman Kalai Natarajan. Outlying reefs near the Banyan Tree Maldives Vabbinfaru and a sister hotel broke the rising waves and the tsunami's impact on these resorts was minimal.
International hotel chains with resorts in Phuket, Thailand received no advance alert before the tsunami crashed ashore. "Not a sign at all," said Hwee Peng Yio, a spokeswoman for Starwood Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., which operates the Sheraton Grand Laguna Phuket.
Craig Smith, general manager of the beachfront JW Marriott in Phuket was at Sunday morning services at about 10, when he got a call from hotel staff that the waves were abnormally high. Mr. Smith said he immediately thought it could be a tsunami and he jumped on his motorcycle to get to the hotel. He arrived just as the water from the first big wave was receding from the hotel grounds. Damage was fairly minimal, with the pool flooded with muddy water. He said he believes his staff saved about 30 lives by acting quickly to clear the beach when they saw the waves approaching.
By the time experts around the world grasped the enormity of the tsunami, it was too late. "In the end, the biggest frustration is that we were trying to invent a tsunami warning system after the tsunami was generated," said Mr. McCreery of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
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