Warning Systems Vital To Slash Disaster Tolls - UN
Date: 29-Dec-04
Country: SWITZERLAND
Author: Robert Evans
And investment in broad education programmes is also vital so that ordinary people -- especially in coastal areas where catastrophe often hits hardest -- know what to do when alerted that calamity is on the way, they warn.
"The international community has to move ahead and build global systems to avoid a repeat of what has happened in Asia this week," Reid Basher of the UN's Platform for the Promotion of Early Warning (PPEW) in Bonn told Reuters.
He said that would now be a key topic at a long-planned World Conference on Disaster Reduction on January 18-22 in Kobe, Japan site of a massive earthquake in January 1995 which killed more than 6,400 people.
Latest official figures put deaths at 38,957, and climbing, in the tidal waves that hit up to a dozen countries and island states around the Indian Ocean and east Africa after an undersea earthquake off Indonesia on Sunday.
The tsunami killed poor local fishermen and their families in coastal communities as well as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of foreign tourists underlining to global aspect of the tragedy.
"The catastrophe will certainly concentrate minds in Kobe on what needs to be done now," said John Harding, an oceanographer and tsunami specialist with the UN's disaster reduction agency ISDR in Geneva.
"Effective information programmes and communications networks, like that in place in the Pacific region, can save many thousands of lives in these situations."
QUANTUM LEAP IN COMMITMENT
The conference "is expected to prompt a quantum leap in learning and commitment for improving prevention, risk assessment and early warning systems," a statement from the ISDR secretariat in Geneva said.
UN officials say that where funds are short, richer countries must be more ready to help out the poorer to develop such systems even against what may appear to be regional low-risk catastrophes like the Indian Ocean tsunami.
"Money comes in rapidly when disasters happen. It needs to be there beforehand," said one relief coordinator in Geneva who asked to remain anonymous.
International radio stations say they have been bombarded with messages complaining that countries around the region had no system in place to warn that the tsunami was on the way.
But Basher and Harding said such recriminations were unfair. "It is easy to be wise after the event, but we must remember that the Indian Ocean has not had a major tsunami for over a century," said Basher, in a telephone interview.
"It is not entirely surprising that the governments there had no warning system in place. They had many other priorities."
In the Pacific, where undersea quakes and the tidal surges they cause are common, a wide-ranging programme has been developed over four decades with rapid alerts on tsunamis and long-term public information about them.
Schoolchildren are taught to clear beaches when one is on the way and head inland quickly. Local media educate older people and foreign tourists arriving in hotels are given instructions on how to react, Harding said.
