A warning from Hawaii flashes across the computer screens -- an earthquake, magnitude 8, has been detected off Indonesia.
As an alarm screams through the center just north of Bangkok, analysts quickly punch in numbers, consult matrixes and within 15 minutes unleash a torrent of prepared short-message system (sms), phone, fax and media messages.
One of them automatically activates sirens on three towers along Phuket's Patong Beach, 700km to the south, and a special 19-man Royal Thai Navy team springs into action among the crowds of sunbathers and swimmers on the resort island.
"My teams will run out to the beach with whistles and megaphones. If the tourists hear the word `tsunami,' they'll know what to do. They'll run," says team leader Lieutenant Chamnan Chansuwan, outlining a hypothetical scenario of a tsunami akin to the Dec. 26 cataclysm that killed or left missing more than 226,000 people in Indian Ocean nations.
Thailand and other Indian Ocean nations have made important strides in implementing sophisticated warning systems like the one described by Chamnan. But gaps, perhaps lethal ones, remain where the danger is greatest -- on the beaches. Some are elementary: Chamnan's team has yet to be issued with loudspeakers and whistles.
Despite the challenges that lie ahead, however, experts are confident that interim measures like those Thailand has implemented over the past six months would sharply reduce casualties.
"If a new tsunami strikes it would not be the same because now there are not only much better systems in place but greater awareness," says Salvano Briceno, director of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.
UNEVEN PREPAREDNESS
Throughout the region, the level of preparedness is uneven.
In Indonesia's Aceh province, where some 128,000 died, a formal plan to warn people at the village level about an impending tsunami exists on paper only and coordination among different government agencies remains poor, says Syahnan, a local official with the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency.
"The tsunami system is only a plan for now," Syahnan says. "The only way we would find out about a tsunami is if we hear from the police on the sea."
A countrywide warning system that would be firmly connected to coastal communities in the Indo-nesian archipelago could take three years to establish, predicts Stephen Hill, who heads UNESCO's operations in Indonesia.
Briceno concedes it will be several years before all vulnerable villages along Indian Ocean coastlines, many of them in impoverished areas barely linked to the outside world, can be adequately prepared for a tsunami strike.
"You can have a good warning system, but if people don't know how to react they will get hurt. You have to educate the people -- fishermen, villagers, hotel operators -- how to escape," says Smith Thammasaroj, a meteorologist brought out of retirement to oversee Thailand's tsunami strategy.
"I'm not fully happy. But three, four months ago we had nothing to warn the people," he says.
Initial warnings of a possible tsunami are now sent to Indian Ocean countries from Japan's Meteorological Agency and the 56-year-old US Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, which came under criticism and a lawsuit for not reporting more aggressively on the Dec. 26 disaster. Unlike the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean has no region-wide center.
Following the tragedy, Asian nations squabbled about where an Indian Ocean center should be located and then settled for a network of several hubs, each contributing its own expertise and resources for the benefit of all.
This network should be in place sometime next year, Briceno said, although how effective it will prove remains questionable given the problems in some countries and a possible dearth of funds.
"Donors all pledge a lot of money but many don't want to pay," Smith says.
In the meantime, countries have cobbled together stop-gap measures and are working on national warning systems with the help of Briceno's organization, UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and some Western governments.
Most Buddhist and Hindu temples and mosques along Sri Lanka's coast have been fitted with loudspeakers to relay warnings from radio and TV stations.
India expects to have its own US$26.7 million early-warning system in place by September 2007, centered along fault lines in the Arabian Sea and one stretching from Java-Sumatra to Myanmar. In Tamil Nadu, village leaders can now be alerted by telephone and in turn can immediately contact nearby officials trained in evacuation.
TEST CASE
The system worked well during the March 28 earthquake off Sumatra which didn't spawn a tsunami. Most villages in the state, where 8,000 perished in December, were evacuated within one-and-a-half hours of receiving the warning. Other Indian Ocean nations also gave themselves passing marks for evacuations in face of the 8.7-magnitude earthquake.
In Indonesia, local and German scientists will begin installing tsunami sensors off the west coast of Sumatra in October. Among a number of such detectors to be set up in international and territorial waters of the Indian Ocean, these systems consist of a sensor planted as deep as 10km on the ocean floor connected to a floating buoy which in turn is linked to a satellite.
An observation center on the Indonesian coast will receive the satellite-borne warnings for relay to villagers via mobile telephone text messages or to religious leaders who will broadcast them from speakers at mosques normally used to call Muslims to prayer, says Idwan Suhardi, a Ministry of Research and Technology official.
At the forefront of preparedness, Thailand opened its National Disaster Warning Center in this suburban Bangkok town last month, modeling itself on the Hawaii center.
The US center, Smith says, takes three to five minutes to detect an earthquake and send along a description that can only be sketchy since the proper equipment is not yet in place in the Indian Ocean. The Thai center, staffed around the clock like the facility in Hawaii, will need 10 minutes to 15 minutes to analyze the information and press the warning buttons after any earthquake of 7.4 or higher.
AMPLE WARNING?
If the epicenter is along the main fault, coastal residents in Thailand would have one to one-and-a-half hours -- enough time, Smith says -- to evacuate before the tsunami hit. The Dec. 26 wave took one hour and 20 minutes to strike southern Thailand and kill 5,300 Thais and foreign tourists who were almost all unaware of the onrushing mass of water.
The center has communication links to 10 TV and more than 500 radio stations as well as 20 million mobile telephones. It can break into TV and radio broadcasts with a warning bulletin and rush out 5,000 SMS messages within two minutes. Three offshore sensors and a total of 60 warning towers are planned.
But experts like Smith foresee dangers beyond the day when it's all systems go. Maintaining equipment will prove expensive -- a single sensor costs US$1 million and must be replaced every 18 months.
Dangerous complacency may set in if no tsunami strikes decade after decade. And such emphasis on one disaster may prove too much of a good thing, given how greatly many Asian countries suffer from cyclones, floods, landslides and droughts.
"If we focus only on the tsunami hazard itself, I fear that we will be like the proverbial general planning for the last war," says Eileen Shea, an expert on climate at Hawaii's East-West Center.
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