Source: Chicago Tribune -- Dec 27, 10:15 PM
KLIK IMEJAN
Dec. 28--CHICAGO -- With a killer tsunami bearing down on Sri Lanka and India at airliner speeds, an effort to save thousands of lives came down to a handful of overworked employees in Hawaii trying to telephone government officials they did not know and did not know how to reach.
For 40 years, governments around the Pacific Ocean have known the giant waves caused by massive undersea earthquakes could reach across thousands of miles of ocean and devastate coastal areas, and they had prepared accordingly.
Not so around the Indian Ocean, where tens of thousands of people were killed by a wave hundreds of miles long that erupted from the ocean early Sunday morning.
Technology had given scientists a warning of the potential danger, but they had no way to get it to the people in the wave's path.
Only after the first waves hit Sri Lanka did workers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and others in Hawaii start making phone calls to American diplomats in Madagascar and Mauritius in an attempt to head off further disaster. The U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka, Jeffrey J. Lunstead, called Hawaii for more information. Military officials in the Pacific were called and asked to relay warnings to U.S. forces in the Indian Ocean.
"We didn't have a contact in place where you could just pick up the phone," Dolores Clark, spokeswoman for the International Tsunami Information Center in Hawaii said Monday. "We were starting from scratch."
The first hint of trouble came within 30 seconds, when fast-moving shockwaves would have reached the nearest seismograph. The scope of the threat then grew with each new seismograph they reached, each one building a larger picture of what had happened.
By geologists' calculations Monday, the shock sent as much as 45 feet of the Indian tectonic plate lurching at once under the Burmese plate, far beneath the Indian Ocean. At the bottom of a trench nearly five miles deep, the Burmese plate would havesuddenly popped up as much as 30 feet.
A force strong enough to move continents set in motion a 600-mile long wall of water still moving around the world a day later, sloshing into different oceans in a diminished state.
If the earthquake and subsequent destructive wave had originated in the Pacific Ocean, NOAA would have taken just minutes to employ its extensive system of tide gauges -- and a warning protocol dating to 1965 -- to issue an alert to 26 participating countries bordering the Pacific.
In the Indian Ocean, there is a far less extensive history of tsunamis and no such warning system. Only three of the countries that happened to be members of the Pacific alert system were warned_Australia, Thailand and Indonesia.
"There were some attempts," Clark said.
But it appeared none of them were effective. "It all happened so fast. There simply wasn't enough time," she said.
Within 13 minutes, the first speeding shockwaves from Sunday's massive undersea earthquake hadbounced needles on enough of the nearest seismographs to pinpoint the shock's birthplace_near Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. Soon after, the size of the quake that shook the wave into life was revealed -- 9.0 on the Richter scale.
The implications of the tsunami's fury were calculated on the wrong side of the world, in Honolulu and in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Golden, Colo.
Just across the international dateline at the International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu and in the nearby Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, both part of the U.S-based NOAA, the risk of impending disaster became clearer with each passing minute.
In a cinderblock shack overlooking Mamala Bay a half-hour west of Honolulu, the two employees on duty at the warning center Saturday night knew within minutes that an earthquake of at least 8.0 magnitude had struck the ocean floor just west of Sumatra.
Even though no part of the Pacific basin was threatened, the tsunami information center sent an advisory to Pacific Rim countries about the neighboring threat within 15 minutes.
Within a half-hour of the undersea quake, scientists from the United States Geologic Survey in Colorado had calculated that the earthquake was at least an 8.1 on the Richter scale, said regional coordinator Mark Petersen. It was upgraded to a probable 8.6 quake fifteen minutes after that, he said.
In Hawaii, warning center geophysicist Charles McCreery was paged away from a family Christmas dinner, arriving at the center as a second advisory upgrading the likely strength of the quake to 8.5 was sent out.
"If there had been a warning system for the Indian Ocean, a lot of lives could have been saved," he said.
But nothing in the Pacific Rim was threatened, he reasoned at the time, and besides, an ocean as big as the Pacific can absorb earthquakes as big as 8.5 magnitudes without generating damaging tsunamis. The thinking was that the Indian Ocean would behave likewise.
"We weren't real concerned at that point," McCreery said.
But some 45 minutes later, the wall of water climbed out of the ocean, crashing against Sri Lanka and, soon afterward, India's East Coast.
"It wasn't until initial news reports in Sri Lanka that we went: 'Uh-oh, this is worse than we thought,' " McCreery said.
Seismologists later determined the undersea earthquake's magnitude was worse even than upgraded estimates. At 9.0, it was the worst in recorded history in the Indian Ocean, and had started that ocean's worst recorded tsunami. Echoes of the shock will likely ring for weeks through the earth's crust, which is vibrating as if it were a church bell.
In the Pacific Ocean, the United States uses a system of six deep-water buoys deployed from the Alaskan coast to Mexico to confirm a tsunami has formed from earthquakes detected by ground-based seismometers.
KLIK IMEJANDec. 28--CHICAGO -- With a killer tsunami bearing down on Sri Lanka and India at airliner speeds, an effort to save thousands of lives came down to a handful of overworked employees in Hawaii trying to telephone government officials they did not know and did not know how to reach.
For 40 years, governments around the Pacific Ocean have known the giant waves caused by massive undersea earthquakes could reach across thousands of miles of ocean and devastate coastal areas, and they had prepared accordingly.
Not so around the Indian Ocean, where tens of thousands of people were killed by a wave hundreds of miles long that erupted from the ocean early Sunday morning.
Technology had given scientists a warning of the potential danger, but they had no way to get it to the people in the wave's path.
Only after the first waves hit Sri Lanka did workers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and others in Hawaii start making phone calls to American diplomats in Madagascar and Mauritius in an attempt to head off further disaster. The U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka, Jeffrey J. Lunstead, called Hawaii for more information. Military officials in the Pacific were called and asked to relay warnings to U.S. forces in the Indian Ocean.
"We didn't have a contact in place where you could just pick up the phone," Dolores Clark, spokeswoman for the International Tsunami Information Center in Hawaii said Monday. "We were starting from scratch."
The first hint of trouble came within 30 seconds, when fast-moving shockwaves would have reached the nearest seismograph. The scope of the threat then grew with each new seismograph they reached, each one building a larger picture of what had happened.
By geologists' calculations Monday, the shock sent as much as 45 feet of the Indian tectonic plate lurching at once under the Burmese plate, far beneath the Indian Ocean. At the bottom of a trench nearly five miles deep, the Burmese plate would havesuddenly popped up as much as 30 feet.
A force strong enough to move continents set in motion a 600-mile long wall of water still moving around the world a day later, sloshing into different oceans in a diminished state.
If the earthquake and subsequent destructive wave had originated in the Pacific Ocean, NOAA would have taken just minutes to employ its extensive system of tide gauges -- and a warning protocol dating to 1965 -- to issue an alert to 26 participating countries bordering the Pacific.
In the Indian Ocean, there is a far less extensive history of tsunamis and no such warning system. Only three of the countries that happened to be members of the Pacific alert system were warned_Australia, Thailand and Indonesia.
"There were some attempts," Clark said.
But it appeared none of them were effective. "It all happened so fast. There simply wasn't enough time," she said.
Within 13 minutes, the first speeding shockwaves from Sunday's massive undersea earthquake hadbounced needles on enough of the nearest seismographs to pinpoint the shock's birthplace_near Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. Soon after, the size of the quake that shook the wave into life was revealed -- 9.0 on the Richter scale.
The implications of the tsunami's fury were calculated on the wrong side of the world, in Honolulu and in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Golden, Colo.
Just across the international dateline at the International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu and in the nearby Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, both part of the U.S-based NOAA, the risk of impending disaster became clearer with each passing minute.
In a cinderblock shack overlooking Mamala Bay a half-hour west of Honolulu, the two employees on duty at the warning center Saturday night knew within minutes that an earthquake of at least 8.0 magnitude had struck the ocean floor just west of Sumatra.
Even though no part of the Pacific basin was threatened, the tsunami information center sent an advisory to Pacific Rim countries about the neighboring threat within 15 minutes.
Within a half-hour of the undersea quake, scientists from the United States Geologic Survey in Colorado had calculated that the earthquake was at least an 8.1 on the Richter scale, said regional coordinator Mark Petersen. It was upgraded to a probable 8.6 quake fifteen minutes after that, he said.
In Hawaii, warning center geophysicist Charles McCreery was paged away from a family Christmas dinner, arriving at the center as a second advisory upgrading the likely strength of the quake to 8.5 was sent out.
"If there had been a warning system for the Indian Ocean, a lot of lives could have been saved," he said.
But nothing in the Pacific Rim was threatened, he reasoned at the time, and besides, an ocean as big as the Pacific can absorb earthquakes as big as 8.5 magnitudes without generating damaging tsunamis. The thinking was that the Indian Ocean would behave likewise.
"We weren't real concerned at that point," McCreery said.
But some 45 minutes later, the wall of water climbed out of the ocean, crashing against Sri Lanka and, soon afterward, India's East Coast.
"It wasn't until initial news reports in Sri Lanka that we went: 'Uh-oh, this is worse than we thought,' " McCreery said.
Seismologists later determined the undersea earthquake's magnitude was worse even than upgraded estimates. At 9.0, it was the worst in recorded history in the Indian Ocean, and had started that ocean's worst recorded tsunami. Echoes of the shock will likely ring for weeks through the earth's crust, which is vibrating as if it were a church bell.
In the Pacific Ocean, the United States uses a system of six deep-water buoys deployed from the Alaskan coast to Mexico to confirm a tsunami has formed from earthquakes detected by ground-based seismometers.
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