PM - Wednesday, 5 January , 2005 18:14:23
Reporter: Toni Hassan
TANYA NOLAN: Australia's geoscientific research agency has been
leading the call for an Indian Ocean warning system.
And its pleas have been given more urgency today, after admitting to
major limitations with its earthquake detection system, failures that
prevented it from providing a better assessment of the tsunami's
force.
Toni Hassan reports.
TONI HASSAN: The hours and minutes before a disaster strikes is
critical to lessen the impact.
The past week some experts have lamented that the Boxing Day
earthquake and tsunami that swept through 11 countries in Southern
Asia and East Africa was a colossal tragedy that could have been
largely mitigated.
It's difficult to know.
Certainly, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre recorded the
earthquake, but was unable to relay its tsunami alert to countries
outside its Pacific warning system.
Here at home there's Geoscience Australia. It too registered the
earthquake off Sumatra at more than eight on the Richter scale. But
it made preliminary assessments that suggested it was a land tremor,
not a tremor out at sea likely to cause a tsunami.
As a result advice to emergency authorities was wrong, and while our
peak aid agency AusAID was alerted about a quake, Australian missions
were not told of the looming walls of water.
NEIL WILLIAMS: Sadly that was the case, that by the time the
calculations were refined enough to know that the event had been
tsunamigenic, Sumatra had already been impacted.
TONI HASSAN: That's the Chief Executive of Geoscience Australia, Neil
Williams.
Today, he's told ABC TV News that it took some time, perhaps too
long, for Australian seismologists to interpret the information as it
was coming in.
NEIL WILLIAMS: Basically the Australian system overloads at a
magnitude of 8.2. So our initial assessment was that it was magnitude
8.2. But that was at our limits. So again, we need to rely on
internationally collected information outside of Australia to refine
both the earthquake location and its magnitude.
TONI HASSAN: Geoscience Australia boasts satellite technology that
can measure the size and shape of the earth, but admits serious
deficiencies in its ability to measure earthquakes.
NEIL WILLIAMS: Certainly there is a level of frustration that the
system that we had at our disposal was not trained… designed to
detect events of that sort in that area. So that at best we were
always going to be able to identify only an approximate event.
But there is a realisation in the seismological world that there was
no system in place that could have done… that could have provided the
necessary warnings and there is a lot of discussion now going in the
technical community internationally, about how we might be able to
improve on that situation and develop a system in the Indian Ocean
that is comparable to what we have in the Pacific Ocean.
TONI HASSAN: Neil Williams has some ideas on what's immediately
needed.
NEIL WILLIAMS: We need at the very least a system of seismographs,
tidal gauges and seabed pressure monitoring devices that can record
and accurately locate an event quickly. We then need to have a
central location where all of that information can be synthesised,
analysed and modelled and then have a means for then broadcasting an
alert once the modelling indicates the sort of event that it is and
where it may impact.
TONI HASSAN: This wish list is likely to reverberate at tomorrow's
Jakarta meeting, where leaders coming to grips with the sheer scale
of this tragedy will want to not just boost the relief and
reconstruction effort but ensure it never happens again.
TANYA NOLAN: Toni Hassan reporting.
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