India's tangled bureaucracy bungled the first alerts on the tsunami strike losing precious time which could have saved lives, newspapers reported yesterday.
India's air force was warned that a remote base on Car Nicobar island had been flooded well before the giant waves hit the mainland coast hundreds of kilometers away on Sunday morning, the Indian Express said.
PHOTO: AP
"At 7:30 am (0200 GMT) we were informed .... about a massive earthquake near Andamans and Nicobar," air force chief S. Krishnaswamy told the daily. "But communications links went down" with the islands.
"The last message from Car Nicobar base was that the island is sinking and there is water all over."
At 8:15am, the air chief says he asked an assistant to alert the defense ministry.
On the civilian side, totally disconnected from the military, the Indian Meteorological Department had sent a warning fax out at 8:54 am -- but it went to the former science minister Murli Manohar Joshi, and not the incumbent Kapil Sibal. The government changed last May.
Unaware of the mistake, the department then sent another fax to the Home Ministry's disaster control room, at 9:41 am.
At 10:30 (0500 GMT), the control room informed the cabinet secretariat.
Thousands were already dead along India's devastated southeastern coastline.
The Crisis Management Group, India's main emergency response body, finally met at one pm.
The country's top science and technology official told The Times of India that his department learnt of the tsunami strike from the television. V.S. Ramamurthy, secretary at the department, said they had "no clue."
The undersea earthquake hit off Indonesia's Sumatra at 6:29am, sending killer tsunamis racing across the Indian Ocean. Although Indian scientists monitored the quake, because it was outside the country, they just relaxed, the Times said. That had been "the first mistake," Ramamurthy said.
India will now install systems to detect tsunamis at the cost of more than US$27 million, Sibal said Wednesday.
An international expert told the Express that India had turned a deaf ear to repeated warnings it needed a tidal wave alert system similar to that used by many countries because of the costs.
Nearly 11,000 people died in India and thousands are still unaccounted for, particularly on the Andaman and Nicobar islands where communications facilities are poor or non-existent.
Shamans in Peru on Monday gathered for an annual New Year’s ritual where they made predictions for the year to come, including illness for US President Donald Trump and the downfall of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. “The United States should prepare itself because Donald Trump will fall seriously ill,” Juan de Dios Garcia proclaimed as he gathered with other shamans on a beach in southern Lima, dressed in traditional Andean ponchos and headdresses, and sprinkling flowers on the sand. The shamans carried large posters of world leaders, over which they crossed swords and burned incense, some of which they stomped on. In this
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
‘TRUMP’S LONG GAME’: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that while fraud was a serious issue, the US president was politicizing it to defund programs for Minnesotans US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday said it was auditing immigration cases involving US citizens of Somalian origin to detect fraud that could lead to denaturalization, or revocation of citizenship, while also announcing a freeze of childcare funds to Minnesota and demanding an audit of some daycare centers. “Under US law, if an individual procures citizenship on a fraudulent basis, that is grounds for denaturalization,” US Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Denaturalization cases are rare and can take years. About 11 cases were pursued per year between 1990 and 2017, the Immigrant Legal Resource
ANGER: US-based activists reported protests at 174 locations across the country, with at least 582 arrested and 15 killed, while Khamenei said the protesters were ‘paid’ Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday said that “rioters must be put in their place” after a week of protests that have shaken the Islamic Republic, likely giving security forces a green light to aggressively put down the demonstrations. The first comments by 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei come as violence surrounding the demonstrations sparked by Iran’s ailing economy has killed at least 15 people, according to human rights activists. The protests show no sign of stopping and follow US President Donald Trump warning Iran on Friday that if Tehran “violently kills peaceful protesters,” the US “will come to their rescue.” While it remains
RSS