The Sumatra Trench Tsunami: Politics, Technologies and Opportunities
Automated Warning Processes
Where time is of the essence, particularly in a 7/24 context, it is vital to establish robust automated systems. Any warning system must be able to cascade through a variety of language and script rendition on the basis of the end user registration specification. The registration process must make clear what languages and scripts are on offer and receiving devices must be tested to ensure that they can receive that which they have been registered to receive. The registering party must also be clear what geographical latitude is been given to the warning centre. The receipt of all global messages for all parts of the globe should be default with broadcasters and telecommunications companies manually blocking onward transmission. In the case of the Java Trench quake, warnings were sent by the Pacific Warning system and one of the sad ironies of the situation is that most places other than the Indian Ocean knew about the quake before the Tsunami struck its coasts.
Any cascading system must be cross platform so that the automated warning can flow across technology junctions, from telecommunications to on-screen television captions, from on-screen telephone text in English to synthetic speech output in Tamil. Current default technologies would include standard PC's, PDA's, cellular telephones and land lines, broadcasting receivers.