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.
DISASTER: The Bangladesh Meteorological Department recorded a magnitude 5.7 and tremors reached as far as Kolkata, India, more than 300km away from the epicenter A powerful earthquake struck Bangladesh yesterday outside the crowded capital, Dhaka, killing at least five people and injuring about a hundred, the government said. The magnitude 5.5 quake struck at 10:38am near Narsingdi, Bangladesh, about 33km from Dhaka, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. The earthquake sparked fear and chaos with many in the Muslim-majority nation of 170 million people at home on their day off. AFP reporters in Dhaka said they saw people weeping in the streets while others appeared shocked. Bangladesh Interim Leader Muhammad Yunus expressed his “deep shock and sorrow over the news of casualties in various districts.” At least five people,
It is one of the world’s most famous unsolved codes whose answer could sell for a fortune — but two US friends say they have already found the secret hidden by Kryptos. The S-shaped copper sculpture has baffled cryptography enthusiasts since its 1990 installation on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Virginia, with three of its four messages deciphered so far. Yet K4, the final passage, has kept codebreakers scratching their heads. Sculptor Jim Sanborn, 80, has been so overwhelmed by guesses that he started charging US$50 for each response. Sanborn in August announced he would auction the 97-character solution to K4
SHOW OF FORCE: The US has held nine multilateral drills near Guam in the past four months, which Australia said was important to deter coercion in the region Five Chinese research vessels, including ships used for space and missile tracking and underwater mapping, were active in the northwest Pacific last month, as the US stepped up military exercises, data compiled by a Guam-based group shows. Rapid militarization in the northern Pacific gets insufficient attention, the Pacific Center for Island Security said, adding that it makes island populations a potential target in any great-power conflict. “If you look at the number of US and bilateral and multilateral exercises, there is a lot of activity,” Leland Bettis, the director of the group that seeks to flag regional security risks, said in an
‘DIGNITY’: The Ukrainian president said that ‘we did not not betray Ukraine then, we will not do so now,’ amid US pressure to give significant concessions to Russia Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pushed back against a US plan to end the war in Ukraine, while Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the proposal that includes many of his hardline demands. With US President Donald Trump giving Ukraine less than a week to sign, Zelenskiy pledged to work to ensure any deal would not “betray” Ukraine’s interests, while acknowledging he risked losing Washington as an ally. Putin said the blueprint could “lay the foundation” for a final peace settlement, but threatened more land seizures if Ukraine walked away from negotiations. Ukraine faces one of the most challenging moments in its history,
RSS