The Sumatra Trench Tsunami: Politics, Technologies and Opportunities
Lessons from the Tsunami
There has been a good deal of criticism of countries neighbouring the Indian Ocean (see Juma, Calestous: Millennium Project on Science: www.unmilenniumproject.org (In BBC Radio 4 Today, 6.i.05). for refusing to implement an early warning system similar to that in the Pacific. One obvious lesson is that we should study the effectiveness and penetration of the Pacific warning system.
Had there been such a warning system, however, it is important to ask to what extent its messages would have been picked up and transmitted via official routes. The people of Tamil Nadu and Thailand would almost certainly have believed announcements from state broadcasters but that would not have held for Burma, Indonesia, Somalia and Sri Lanka. There is some anecdotal evidence that some potential victims fled as the result of mobile phone messages from trusted sources and we are still investigating this. Even in countries with trusted state broadcasters the pick up rate via television would have been very low amongst the coastal poor and, in morning working hours, not much better for radio. Interestingly, however, a global warning distribution system would have saved the lives of many thousands of Europeans carrying mobile phones (there were more Swedes killed in Thailand than there were people killed in the Twin Towers on 9/11). An early warning system, therefore, without adequate and trusted distribution to the grass roots is wasteful.
Another phenomenon which immediately stands out from the early days of the relief effort is the almost total telephone/wireless silence of survivor communities. It seems that whole islands in the Andaman’s and whole communities in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Somalia did not have satellite telephones to make contact with the civil and military authorities.
The first country to reach a stage of mature organisation was Thailand which could rely upon messages from mobile and land line phones and internet connections to the authorities. Infrastructure continued to operate less than two kilometres from the coast and/or at an elevation of 40 metres.
The clear conclusion from this brief analysis is that no disaster warning or emergency relief system can work without distributed hardware and access to two-way communications networks.