Asia's Promised Tsunami Alert System by December
Date: 01-Aug-05
Country: THAILAND
The U.N Development Programme said it would build five equipment-packed monitoring towers off the coasts of Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and the Philippines with the help of the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC).
The $500,000 project should minimise the risk of false alarms like one issued by Thailand last week following an earthquake underneath the Indian Ocean, Suvit Yodmani, head of the non-governmental ADPC, told a news conference.
"If you have too many of these false alarms, then people are going to be quite nonchalant if it happens to be the real thing," he said.
Other countries in the region, including Australia, had already installed the Hawaiian-made monitoring systems which send back information to a centralised database known as the Global Sea Level Observing System.
The new towers in southeast Asia will be connected to that system.
Thailand, where more than 5,000 people were killed by the tsunami which smashed into its Andaman Sea coast at the height of the tourist season, is working on its own monitoring system, including monitoring deep sea buoys.
But the UNDP shrugged off concerns the systems would duplicate each other, saying both local and regional disaster warning systems were needed to prevent a future catastrophe like the tsunami, which struck Indonesia's Aceh province worst.
"I think it is imperative that matters be dealt with at the national level and there also be coordination at the regional level, because there is no duplication," said UNDP's Thailand Representative, Joana Merlin-Scholtes.