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.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
OVERHAUL: The move would likely mark the end to Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operated in nearly 50 languages The parent agency of Voice of America (VOA) on Friday said it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more staff, completing an 85 percent decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda. US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) senior advisor Kari Lake said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of US President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum. “Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image