From: Edward Cranswick <e_cranswick at yahoo.com> Mailing-List: list nowar_australia at yahoogroups.com; contact nowar_australia-owner at yahoogroups.com Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 14:27:22 +0000
NOWAR-SA-
Reading the New York Times article, "At Warning Center, Alert for the Quake, None for a Tsunami" (appended below), and thinking of my experience with investigating earthquakes for the US government for almost 22 years and doing research on seismological techniques to monitor underground nuclear explosions, I believe that the US military/CIA had critically useful information about the tsunami while it was in progress.
Based on seismic (earthquake) data alone, any tsunami expert would know that a magnitude 8+ submarine thrust (subduction) event like the 2004 Magnitude 9.0 Northern Sumatra Earthquake would have a good possibility of generating a tsunami (see appended article). The US has a very large military base on the island of Diego Garcia <<http://www.nctsdg.navy.mil/dgworld.html>http://www.nctsdg.navy.mil/dgworld.html> <<http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/io.html>http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/io.html> <<http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/deployment.map/diego.garcia.html>http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/trade.center/deployment.map/diego.garcia.html> <<http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/5_DiegoGarcia.html>http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/5_DiegoGarcia.html> in the middle of the Indian Ocean where they develop and test the "Son of Star Wars" anti-ballistic missile system, among other activities. Somebody in the military must have been aware of tsunami hazard to the island due to the proximity of the southwestern Pacific archipelago. The US Navy and CIA undoubtedly have many sea-bottom sensors in the Indian Ocean for detecting submarines, undersea nuclear explosions, and earthquakes & tsunamis. I am sure that US military/CIA knew the tsunami was in progress but they did not relay this information to the countries at risk because the info was "CLASSIFIED".
"One of the few places in the Indian Ocean that got the message of the quake was Diego Garcia, a speck of an island with a United States Navy base, because the Pacific warning center's contact list includes the Navy. Finding the appropriate people in Sri Lanka or India was harder." <<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/science/28warn.html>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/science/28warn.html> (see appended article)
... so what happened to Diego Garcia? What damage did it sustain from the tsunami? Were emergency measures taken before the waves hit?
The justification for not warning the countries that have been so devastated by the tsunami is that the US authorities don't know who to call in these countries -- how do they expect to fight the "War on Terrorism" or shoot down a nuke ICBM -- are they really that incompetent? Is this the same kind of lapse that occurred on 9/11 in the two hours between the time when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center and the time when fourth plane "crashed" in Pennsylvania?
Cruising the web today, I picked up the beginning of a monumental international blame-game and ass-covering exercise with respect to the failure to issue tsunami warnings -- it was even suggested by the remarks of Australian Foreign Minister Downer who spends much of his time prevaricating about the situation in Iraq and the reasons for the Australian participation in that fiasco.
There is a good possibility that the US military/CIA let tens of thousands drown rather than "compromise" the sources of their "intelligence".
-Edward Cranswick
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NO WARNING
At Warning Center, Alert for the Quake, None for a Tsunami
By MICHELE KAYAL and MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: December 28, 2004
HONOLULU, Dec. 27 - When experts at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu were first alerted that an earthquake had struck Sunday off Indonesia, they had no way of knowing that it had generated a devastating tsunami and no way to warn the people most likely to suffer.
Tsunamis are rare in the Indian Ocean, which has no system for detecting them and alerting those in danger, and scientists do not have the tools to tell when an earthquake has created one.
Not until the deadly wave hit Sri Lanka and the scientists in Honolulu saw news reports of the damage there did they recognize what was happening.
"Then we knew there was something moving across the Indian Ocean," said Dr. Charles McCreery, the center's director.
"We wanted to try to do something, but without a plan in place then, it was not an effective way to issue a warning, or to have it acted upon," Dr. McCreery said. "There would have still been some time - not a lot of time, but some time - if there was something that could be done in Madagascar, or on the coast of Africa."
"One of the things that was running through my mind is just that our international group has in many past meetings had discussions about what can be done for other ocean basins," he said. "And I guess I was just wishing in retrospect that more progress had been made in that area."
The sequence of events as knowledge of the earthquake, the tsunami and the destruction unfolded suggest the speed and precision of science and modern communication, as well as their limits. If there had been a warning system for tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, thousands of people might have had a chance to flee.
The first notice of the earthquake that anyone at the Pacific tsunami center received was a computer-generated page set off by seismic sensors at 2:59 p.m. on Saturday Honolulu time. The immediate message received by people like Laura S. L. Kong, a Department of Commerce expert who is the head of a United Nations tsunami education center in Hawaii, included the time of the quake, latitude, longitude and an initial estimate of magnitude, about 8.0.
Nobody was in the office of the Pacific tsunami center. But staff members who received the pages reached the office, took a closer look at available data and sent out a warning to a preset list of contacts around the Pacific.
The center was advising of sea level changes in Fiji, Chile and California measured in inches, the echo of a distant event that had sloshed through the straits that connect the oceans. The warning center continued to refine its estimate of the quake, eventually raising it to a magnitude of 9.0, which is 10 times more powerful than the initial estimate of 8.0, because the scale is logarithmic.
The Pacific center, operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, faced two problems in recognizing what was occurring in the Indian Ocean and alerting potential victims. There is no direct connection between an earthquake magnitude and a resulting tsunami. Not all quakes under the ocean lift the ocean floor to displace the water needed to create a tsunami.
For the Pacific, there are computer models to analyze the consequences of an earthquake, based on years of observations of previous quakes and tsunamis. For the Indian Ocean, there are no such models, according to Vasily V. Titov, a research oceanographer with the Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, based in Seattle. "They assemble quite a bit of data to get the right information and the right warning message," he said of such models.
Another difficulty is that countries that have experienced tsunamis in recent memory are set up with warning systems. Hawaii, for example, has warning sirens, and the "weather radio" network of oceanographic administration can also carry tsunami warnings.
Nor is a tsunami obvious as it races across an ocean at hundreds of miles per hour. In the open ocean, the wave may be only inches high. Boats on the ocean would feel almost nothing. Only when it hits the shallow water of a continental shelf does the wave rise to its destructive height.
Dr. McCreery, the Honolulu center's director, said the initial estimate of the earthquake's magnitude, 8.0, would have been likely to generate a local tsunami.
"Based on it being an 8.0, we assumed the damage would be confined to Sumatra and would be a local tsunami event, one that strikes shore within minutes of the event," he said. "We weren't overly concerned at that point that it was something larger."
But using another, sometimes more accurate method of measuring, Dr. McCreery said, the staff quickly determined that the magnitude had been closer to 8.5, more intense, but still only borderline for generating more distant damage. The center issued a follow-up bulletin.
But it was not until they saw news reports of casualties in Sri Lanka that all that changed.
Dr. McCreery spoke to the American ambassador to Sri Lanka, who wanted to know whether there were more giant waves expected. Then he had a conference call with a State Department official and embassy staff in Madagascar and Mauritius to address potential threats headed their way, and how the local authorities might be notified. But with no system in place, they would basically be scrambling.
The Indian Ocean and some other ocean basins do not have tsunami warning systems. The Pacific basin has had a well-constructed warning system with instrumentation throughout the region and plans for communicating critical information since 1965, Dr. McCreery said.
He said there have been frequent international discussions about improving systems for other oceans. "I know for certain after this event the entire global tsunami community will be looking for ways to implement better preparedness," he said.
One of the few places in the Indian Ocean that got the message of the quake was Diego Garcia, a speck of an island with a United States Navy base, because the Pacific warning center's contact list includes the Navy. Finding the appropriate people in Sri Lanka or India was harder.
The experts knew they were set up for the wrong ocean, but over a holiday weekend, Dr. Kong said, "it's tough to find contact information."
"I think they made their best efforts to contact as many people they thought they could get to," she said. After pushing the button to send out the initial warning to contacts in the Pacific, where about 90 percent of the tsunamis are observed, "they're trying to think of personally who might they call, who might then know who to call."
Last year a book on another Indonesian cataclysm, "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded," by Simon Winchester, asserted that that volcano, which set off an even more deadly tsunami when it exploded in 1883, was the world's first international disaster, because new undersea telegraph cables spread the news around the world within a few minutes. With high-speed data links and the Internet, it takes fewer minutes now, but if the information spreads wide, it does not always go deep.
Michele Kayal reported from Honolulu for this article, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington.