Warning system delays add to deaths in Indonesian tsunami

MAKASSAR: An early warning system that could have prevented some deaths in the tsunami that hit an Indonesian island on Friday has been stalled in the testing phase for years.

The high-tech system of seafloor sensors, data-laden sound waves and fiber-optic cable was meant to replace a system set up after an earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 250,000 people in 2004. But inter-agency wrangling and delays in getting 1 billion rupiah ($69,000) to complete the project means the system hasn’t moved beyond a prototype developed with $3 million from the US National Science Foundation.

It is too late for Sulawesi, where walls of water up to six metres high and a magnitude 7.5 earthquake killed at least 832 people in the cities of Palu and Donggala, tragically highlighting the weaknesses of the existing warning system and low public awareness about how to respond to warnings.

“To me this is a tragedy for science, even more so a tragedy for the Indonesian people as the residents of Sulawesi are discovering right now,” said Louise Comfort, a University of Pittsburgh expert in disaster management who has led the US side of the project, also involving engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Indonesian scientists and disaster experts. “It’s a heartbreak to watch when there is a well-designed sensor network that could provide critical information,” she said.