Tsunami warning system out of service
JAKARTA: Indonesia was compelled to rely on tsunami warnings from other nations’ buoys in the Indian Ocean this week after a huge earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra because its detection system was disabled, a senior disaster agency official said on Thursday.
Wednesday night’s earthquake had a magnitude of 7.8 and set off warnings in multiple countries, but it did not cause a tsunami. Indonesia’s warning system, completed in 2008, has not been operable since last year, said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the National Disaster Management Agency.
Indonesia began deploying a chain of German-built buoys less than a year after the Indian Ocean tsunami on Dec 26, 2004, which killed 230,000 people in more than a dozen countries, including around 177,000 in the Indonesian province of Aceh alone.
In the years since the system became operable, there have been occasional reports about pirates and fishermen stealing parts from the buoys or hauling them away to sell for scrap.
“There were 22 buoys, and as of last year, the last of them were not working due to them breaking down, or from theft or vandalism,” Mr Sutopo said.
“And we don’t have funding for maintenance or to replace them,” he said.
After the earthquake struck shortly before 8pm on Wednesday, the country’s meteorology agency, which runs its tsunami warning center, transmitted a warning about a possible tsunami to the disaster management agency and other government bodies based on readings from its seismograph network, Mr Sutopo said.
He said Indonesia relied on rapid data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and from warning systems run by Australia and Thailand.
“It’s difficult to ask the disaster management agency to make sure a tsunami is not happening,” Mr Sutopo said. “I think we need to build the buoy network again.”
He said the new buoys would cost US$300,000 (about 10.6 million baht) to $600,000 each, depending on whether the government bought units or built its own.
The Indonesian centre took nearly two hours to call off its tsunami warning on Wednesday, long after Thailand and Australia.