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(MAKASSAR, Indonesia) – An early warning system that could have prevented deaths from the tsunami that hit an Indonesian island on Friday has been stalled for years in the testing phase.
The high-tech system of seabed sensors, data-laden sound waves and fiber-optic cables was to replace a system set up after an earthquake and the tsunami that killed nearly 250,000 people in the region. 2004. But getting only 1 billion rupees (69,000 USD) to carry out the project means that the system has not gone beyond the prototype stage developed with 3 million USD from the US National Science Foundation.
It is too late for Sulawesi, where water walls up to 6 meters high and an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 have killed at least 832 people in the cities of Palu and Donggala, highlighting the weaknesses of the sensitization system. how to respond to warnings.
"For me, it's a tragedy for science, all the more a tragedy for the Indonesian people that Sulawesi residents are discovering right now," said Louise Comfort, an expert in disaster management at the University of Sulawesi. University of Pittsburgh. This project also involves engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Indonesian scientists and disaster specialists.
"It's a pity to watch when there is a well-designed sensor network that could provide crucial information," she said.
After the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, including more than half in the Indonesian province of Aceh, a concerted international effort was launched to improve tsunami warning capabilities, particularly in and countries subject to tsunamis.
Part of this campaign, financed by German and foreign funds, consisted in deploying a network of 22 buoys connected to sea-bed sensors to transmit early warnings.
A large-scale earthquake off Sumatra Island in 2016, which caused panic in the coastal city of Padang, revealed that none of the buoys costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each worked. They had been disabled by vandalism or theft or had simply stopped working due to a lack of funds for maintenance.
The backbone of the Indonesian tsunami warning system is a network of 134 tide stations, plus seismographs on land, sirens in about 55 sites and a system for broadcasting SMS warnings.
When the earthquake hit 7.5 just after 6 pm On Friday, the meteorological and geophysical agency issued a tsunami warning, warning of the possibility of waves of 0.5 to 3 meters (2 to 10 feet). He put an end to the warning at 6:36 pm Online critics received strong criticism, but the agency official said the warning was lifted after the tsunami. It is unclear at what time the waves of the tsunami rushed into the narrow bay around which Palu is built.
"Tide gauges work, but they are limited in terms of advance warning. None of the 22 buoys are functioning, "said Comfort. "During the Sulawesi incident, the BMKG (Meteorological and Geophysical Agency) canceled the tsunami warning too early because it did not have any Palu data. These are the data that the tsunami detection system could provide.
Adam Switzer, a tsunami expert at the Observatory of the Earth in Singapore, said it was "a bit unfair" to say that the agency was wrong.
"This shows that the tsunami models we have now are too simplistic," he said. "They do not take into account several events, several earthquakes in a short time. They do not take into account submarine landslides. "
Whatever the system used, he said, the priority after an earthquake in a coastal area should be to go to higher ground and stay there for a few hours.
According to Harkunti P. Rahayu, an expert at the Bandung Institute of Technology, the power outages following the earthquake meant that the sirens used to warn residents of the evacuation did not work.
"Most people were shocked by the earthquake and did not think that a tsunami would occur," she said.
Experts say the prototype system deployed off Padang – a city extremely vulnerable to tsunamis due to a major delay due to a massive earthquake – can provide reliable information on a tsunami threat in 1 to 3 minutes. This compares with 5 to 45 minutes of today's missing buoys and the limited information provided by tide gauges.
Seismometers and underwater pressure sensors in the system send data-laden sound waves to warm surface waters. From there, they refract in the depths, traveling 20 to 30 kilometers to the next node of the network, and so on.
The last underwater point of the Padang network requires only a few kilometers of fiber optic cable to connect it to a station on an offshore island where the data cascades would be transmitted by satellite to the geophysical agency issuing tsunami warnings. . .
The Associated Press reported on the system for the first time in January 2017, while the project was waiting for Indonesian funding to lay the cables. Since then, the agencies involved have experienced budget cuts and the project has rebounded between them.
An earthquake in December 2017 off Java near Jakarta has sparked renewed interest and the Geophysical Agency has made funding a priority. In July, the Ministry of Finance approved in July funding for the purchase and installation of the cable.
But at an inter-agency meeting in September, the three main agencies involved failed to agree on their responsibilities and the project was "simply put on hold," said Comfort. .
Indonesian officials who supported the new early warning system did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Since the 2004 tsunami, disaster managers in Indonesia have always believed that the earthquake was a tsunami warning and an immediate evacuation signal. Not everyone is convinced that a tsunami detection system is essential.
"What Indonesian colleagues commented on was that people were confused about what to do with the alert information," said Gavin Sullivan,
The fact that people are still hurrying along the Palu coastline when waves obviously approaching shows lessons from previous disasters has not been assimilated.
"This highlights the fact of not following proper training and developing trust so that people know exactly what to do when an alert is triggered," he said. "In our project in Bandung, we see a similar reluctance to prepare for something that seems unlikely."
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Margie Mason, Associated Press Writer in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.
