Lack of funds has crippled the creation of a tsunami warning system, leaving earthquake-prone Indonesia without a single working detection buoy, an official said yesterday, a day after a tsunami killed more than 340 people.
No sirens alerted residents in Pangandaran beach, the worst-hit area of Monday's tsunami, after a 7.7 magnitude quake struck 180km offshore in the Indian Ocean.
Edi Prihantoro, an official at the Ministry of Research and Technology that oversees a national warning project, said the southern Java area had no system to warn people of coming waves.
PHOTO: AP
Indonesia deployed two tsunami buoys last year off Sumatra, part of a five-year project to install similar detectors all around the world's largest archipelago.
But when asked how many of them were operational, Prihantoro said: "None."
"We need at least 22 buoys to cover all of Indonesia. We have received two from Germany and they were deployed months ago. However, both of them are damaged now," he said.
Both have since been removed from the sea and one buoy is sitting in a warehouse in west Sumatra awaiting repairs.
The death in a dozen Indian Ocean countries of more than 230,000 people -- more than two-thirds in Indonesia's Aceh Province -- from a huge tsunami in December 2004 prompted international calls for a global warning system.
Indonesia was the worst hit by the 2004 tsunami, and Monday's disaster shows how unprepared the nation remains in dealing with the threat of tsunamis.
However, Science and Technology Minister Kusmayanto Kadiman admitted yesterday that the government had received warnings from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and Japan's Meteorological Agency that Monday's quake had the potential to trigger a tsunami -- but it did not attempt to pass them on to threatened communities.
"If it [the tsunami] did not occur, what would have happened?" he said to reporters in Jakarta, without elaborating.
The alerts were sent around 45 minutes before the tsunami struck.
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