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"The buoys have a lot of parts and electricity, so they attract fish. Fish attract fishermen. And fishermen are abusing buoys, "says Louise Comfort, professor of international relations at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2016, when another large earthquake hit Sumatra, each of the 22 stations was destroyed, vandalized or attacked to obtain coins. A team of American and Indonesian researchers, led by Comfort, have proposed and tested a less expensive network of tsunami sensors, but they do not yet have the funds to install it.
Even without this network of sophisticated buoys, the Indonesian authorities have still managed to use a set of GPS sensors and more rudimentary buoys to predict last Friday's tsunami in advance. But that too was for nothing. The earthquake that caused the tsunami also destroyed the local power grid and communications network, muzzling the tsunami sirens throughout Palu. As the dread wave approached, the waterfront alarms did not activate.
In fact, this blackout also broke the rudimentary network of tide gauges used to predict the tsunami. Tragically, the Indonesian government has made clear this lack of data: "They canceled the tsunami warning just as the tsunami landed," McKinnon said.
Still, it is unclear whether, even if the buoys had worked, they would have saved most of the lives in Palu. The US government, for example, operates the world's most advanced tsunami early warning system. But it's less miraculous than most people think, says Chris Goldfinger, professor of geophysics at the Oregon State, who is studying what tsunamis would do on the Pacific Northwest coast.
"There is this idea that the [early-warning] The system will provide you with a useful warning, if you're on the beach, right next to the fault line, and that's not really true, "he told me." In most cases, if you are on a coast that has a large subduction zone, the earthquake is a warning. "
Photos of the deadly earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia
Consider, for example, the great subduction fault that is right next to an American coast: the subduction zone of Cascadia, the object of this year 2015 terrifying. New Yorker story. If this subduction zone slips, it will probably lose a devastating earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, somewhere near the coast. "It will just disappear without preamble or warning," said Goldfinger. "And then it starts the clock."
The stopwatch, that is to say the tsunami. If the Cascadia earthquake lasts two minutes, it could result in a 15-foot tsunami. If it lasts longer than that – and the soil could shake it for up to six minutes. It could trigger a wave "in the order of 90 feet," Goldfinger said.
But how would we know this wave is coming? Most US early warning sensors are located relatively offshore. If Cascadia unleashes a tsunami, its point of origin would probably remain enter the coastline and this range of tsunami sensors. Thus, any wave should go to sea before being detected by a sensor of the US government. Even once detected, the news of the wave must always be transmitted to a satellite, sent back to Earth and examined by a person in the center of the tsunami in the United States before an official alert is finally triggered.
