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Only two nations received tsunami warning { December 29 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/12/29/noaas_role_in_warning_nations_is_questioned/http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/12/29/noaas_role_in_warning_nations_is_questioned/
PROBE BY CONGRESS
NOAA's role in warning nations is questioned
By Alan Wirzbicki, Globe Correspondent | December 29, 2004
Congress will investigate why the US government did not notify some nations lining the Indian Ocean of early indications that a deadly tsunami might be headed their way, a spokeswoman for Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, said yesterday.
An early warning station in Hawaii operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration picked up signs that indicated a tsunami was possible on the afternoon of Christmas Day.
But only two countries in the affected region, Indonesia and Australia, both of which take part in the Pacific Ocean tsunami warning system, received the NOAA bulletin. Countries located across the Indian Ocean from the earthquake, including India and Sri Lanka, do not take part in the warning system.
Yet the tsunami took as long as two hours to reach some countries, and NOAA's critics say timely-- even unofficial -- warnings might have allowed people in coastal areas to flee.
Snowe is "exploring and looking into why NOAA was not able to provide this valuable, life-saving information to the 11 affected nations," Snowe's spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier said.
"Why didn't the people who monitor these things warn the Indian countries that a tsunami was about to hit them," said Nirj Deva, a member of the European Parliament said on the BBC. "Nobody was warned. All these people died unnecessarily."
Officials at NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii have said that they lacked contacts in the Indian Ocean region, where tsunamis are rare.
The center is geared toward detecting tsunamis and issuing alerts in the Pacific region, where large, destructive waves are much more common.
"We need to figure out how to better coordinate their efforts with those nations beyond the Pacific Rim, into the Indian Ocean," Ferrier said.
NOAA released a statement yesterday confirming that at 2:59 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time on Saturday "the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center received an alarm that a significant earthquake had occurred off the west coast of northern Sumatra."
The agency added that a "bulletin stating that there was a possibility of a tsunami near the epicenter of the earthquake was issued 16 minutes later to nations that participate in the Pacific Ocean Tsunami Warning System. . . . India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives are not part of the Pacific system."
Snowe chairs the Senate's Subcommittee on Oceans, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, which has oversight over the NOAA. April Boyd, a spokeswoman for ranking Democratic member John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, said she expected hearings on NOAA's reaction.
Detecting tsunamis is a two-part process, said MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch. After seismographs detect an earthquake, underwater gauges monitor the ocean floor for changes in water pressure that indicate a tsunami.
Not all earthquakes result in tsunamis, which happen when a quake shifts parts of the ocean floor and displaces vast amounts of water.
"You can have big earthquakes and no measurable tsunamis," said Wunsch, who defended NOAA's reaction to the quake. "And you can have rather small earthquakes that produce large regional tsunamis."
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