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| Wednesday, 16 February 2005 |
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Both coasts of Americas seen vulnerable to tsunamis WASHINGTON, Both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the Americas are vulnerable to tsunamis like the one that devastated Indian Ocean shorelines in December and experts said on Tuesday they are scrambling to try to get warning system in place before politicians lose interest. "It's not if but when," said Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information Center run by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization.She and other experts want to use momentum from the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami to press for a global warning system. Experts have been trying since a tsunami hit Chile's coast in 1960, but the disasters occur so infrequently that it is difficult to keep the attention of governments, she said. The magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra lifted the sea floor 15 feet (4.5 metres) and displaced trillions of gallons of water, causing the monster wave that swamped coastlines as far away as Somalia. The quake registered right away, but it took several hours for instruments to show just how large it was, Kong told a news conference arranged by the Smithsonian Institution's magazine. "What they didn't have information on was whether a real tsunami had been generated," she said. There were no underwater monitoring stations to measure the displacement of water. There are such stations in the Pacific, where 85 percent of tsunamis occur, but not in other vulnerable areas. George Maul, a professor of Oceanography at the Florida Institute of Technology, has been trying to organize a tsunami warning system for the Atlantic and Caribbean for years. There are several active Caribbean volcanoes that could set off an inundating wave, he said. There are also active zones in the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa and off the coasts of Spain and Portugal that could generate tsunamis. The best protection, he said, is a program to inform people about the warning signs of a tsunami so they can flee. In January U.S. officials said they would spend $37.5 million over two years to set up new deep-sea warning systems aimed at giving near-total coverage for the U.S. coastline. "We estimate that within 100 km (50 miles) of the coastline globally, there will be 600 million more people by 2025," Maul said. The best system may be based on old air-alert sirens, said Timothy Walsh of the Washington Department of Natural Resources. He foresees a system of loudspeakers on poles hooked directly into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's weather warning system. Many communities will have to be evacuated within half an hour or less of a big quake in the Northwest's Cascadia subduction zone, but roads could be damaged. "The evacuation will have to be made by foot and right away," said Walsh. It might also be possible to build earthquake- and tsunami-proof buildings, tall enough to survive inundation and strong enough to survive the battering they would take. (REUTERS) |
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