Didn't have their friggin "address" (to warn about the tsunami)???

[rainbow4321]

http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68074



The Hawaii PTWC had detected the 9.0 Richter earthquake and likelihood of tsunamis. Incredibly, they issued warnings to Pacific countries but not to those around the Indian Ocean. “We tried to do what we could. We don't have any contacts in our address book for anybody in that particular part of the world," said Charles McCreery, director of the centre.

On the 24th December 2004 a warning was issued after the biggest earthquake of the year (8.1 Richter scale), 1000 miles southwest of New Zealand. The PTWC website warned of “widely destructive” tsunamis possible. However, the earthquake turned out to be caused by tectonic plates moving sideways against each other, rather than up and down, lessening the effects on the ocean above
“There's no reason for a single individual to get killed in a tsunami," Tad Murty, a Canadian tsunami specialist said. "The waves are totally predictable. We have travel-time charts for the whole of the Indian Ocean. From where this earthquake hit, the travel time for waves to hit the tip of India was four hours. That's enough time for a warning."


Why has an Indian Ocean version of the DART system not been set up? “The instruments are very expensive and we don’t have the money to buy them,” said Budi Waluyo of the Indonesian Meteorology and Geophysics Agency . Yet DART’s annual running cost was under $2million in 2002. Such sums are spent in a few minutes of high technology warfare. How much has the Indonesian government spent fighting in East Timor and Aceh, the Sri Lankan government against the Tamil Tigers, the Indian government in Kashmir or the Somali government fighting Eritrea?

[illflem]

1. Before you get too gung-ho on DART

Look at the results it's had in Hawaii. Every time a warning is issued folks flock to the beach to watch it and nothing happens.
In 1994 it was estimated to cost $23 million for evacuations in HI, again nothing happened. After a few false alarms no one pays attention, sort of like the terrorist attack color code.

[Goathead]

2. They test the Civil Defense sirens every 1st of the month

at noon. Sometimes it scares the crap out of me, especially if I have forgotten the date. On the Big Island they have the sirens anywhere people congregate around the coastal areas, my community also has them and we are at about 2,000 ft in elev. haven't quite figured out why they put them way up here. I often wonder how effective the system would be in the case of an actual tsunami. The Big Island by the way has been struck by several catastrophic tsunamis, but nothing anywhere near the scale that happened in So. east Asia.

http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/1994/94_05_20.html