Melbourne Indymedia: US didn't know "who to call" for tsunami warning

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2004/12/85534.php


"One of the few places in the Indian Ocean that got the message of the quake was Diego Garcia, a speck of an island with a United States Navy base, because the Pacific warning center's contact list includes the Navy. Finding the appropriate people in Sri Lanka or India was harder", New York Times, 28 Dec 2004.... so what happened to Diego Garcia? What damage did it sustain from the tsunami? Were emergency measures taken before the waves hit?

Using seismological data alone, any tsunami expert would know that a magnitude 8+ submarine megathrust event like the 2004 Sumatra Earthquake would have a good possibility of generating a tsunami. The US has a very large military base on the island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and they have been aware of tsunami hazard to the island due to the proximity of the southwestern Pacific archipelago. The US Navy and CIA have many sea-bottom sensors in the Indian Ocean for detecting submarines, undersea nuclear explosions, earthquakes and tsunamis.

The justification for not warning the countries that have been so devastated by the tsunami is that the US authorities did not know who to call in these countries -- how do they expect to fight the "War on Terrorism" or shoot down a nuke ICBM -- are they really that incompetent?


A monumental international blame-game and cover-up exercise is developing with respect to the failure to issue tsunami warnings -- it was even suggested by the remarks of Australian Foreign Minister Downer who spends much of his time prevaricating about the situation in Iraq and the reasons for the Australian participation in that fiasco

There was an article yesterday that has a timeline of the various earthquake scientists and their responses.

The one scientist was notified on his beeper, I think it's some kind of specialized equipment. So anyway, he takes off on his bicyle to the "earthquake center" in Hawaii. They get together, decide it's an 8.0 and issue that alert 15 minutes later. Some time later, they reissue it as an 8.5.

Okay, I live on the Oregon coast and have been trusting my life to these guys. Regardless of the lack of sensors in the Indian Ocean, if the earthquake had been off the Pacific coast, they wouldn't have gotten much better information to ME in time for me to do anything.

If I feel the earth move here, I'm running. I honestly cannot believe what we allow to pass for "state of the art technology".

they also detected the original earthquake and apparently made no effort to send out any warnings. (They developed atomic weaponry; I'm sure they have sophisticated seismological equipment, and are the most advanced country in the immediate area.) Their official position is that earthquakes don't usually generate serious tsunamis in the Indian Ocean area.

Despite whatever CYA's are underway right now, it seems pretty clear that there was no plan on how to notify people about such an impending disaster in the region, and more importantly, how to get people at risk out of harm's way. That situation seems to relate more to past history than to anything else. As much as some people want to place blame on the US for this, the countries in that region are the ones responsible for their own citizens' protection.