Indonesia on alert for tsunami drill

BBC News, by Karishma Vaswani, Jakarta

Indonesians are still reeling from the devastating 7.6-magnitude earthquake which struck off the coast of Sumatra last month, killing at least 1,100 people and injuring many more.

However, as efforts shift from rescuing survivors to rebuilding the provincial capital, Padang, and outlying villages, some people have already begun to discuss whether the country is sufficiently prepared for another natural disaster.

Now a tsunami drill being held on Wednesday in 18 countries around the Indian Ocean rim aims to test the responses of local authorities and the public.

Experts are agreed that another powerful earthquake could hit the area anytime in the near future.

But they are unsure if the Indonesian emergency response teams are equipped to react quickly and effectively to a crisis on a similar scale.

The country's National Disaster Management Agency has acknowledged that it was too slow to respond to the Sumatra earthquake, which brought down hospitals, schools and shopping malls, cut power lines and triggered landslides.

"On the first day, it was just pure panic," Priyo Kardono, a spokesman for the agency, told the BBC.

"We couldn't contact our colleagues in Padang because they were affected by the disaster. It's human nature to save your family first in these circumstances. But everyone needs to evaluate their readiness and response to emergencies like these," he added.

Public response

The panic in Padang saw the city's airport closed for 12 crucial hours - an important window during which the authorities could have sent much-needed emergency rescue and relief teams to the area.

In 2004, the only warning most people had was the sight of a giant wave

The head of the Indonesian Seismological Agency, Fauzi, says that was because many of the airport workers rushed home to check on their families.

"Padang airport was abandoned shortly after the earthquake, because the workers were scared," he adds. "We urgently need systems in place to test the public's response to disasters like this, to see how they will react."

Garnering information about the responses of both the authorities and the public is one of the aims of Wednesday's tsunami drill.

Exercise Indian Ocean Wave 09 will simulate the 9.2-magnitude earthquake which struck off the north-western coast of Sumatra in 2004, triggering a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people in 11 countries, more than half of them in the Indonesian province of Aceh.

Held on World Disaster Reduction Day, the exercise will be the first ocean-wide test of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (IOTWS), set up by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) the following year.

When the tsunami struck five years ago, the only warning most people in the region had was the sight of a giant wave heading towards them.

Unlike the Pacific, the Indian Ocean did not have a system to alert residents of coastal areas that a tsunami was imminent.

Shortly after last month's earthquake in Sumatra, an alert was quickly broadcast warning people in low-lying coastal areas of the possibility of another tsunami and ordering them to evacuate to higher ground. It was eventually lifted, however, as a tsunami did not materialise.

Vital co-operation

Unesco is helping to organise Wednesday's tsunami exercise. According to the UN agency, it will be the first time that the IOTWS will be tested worldwide.

Spokeswoman Sue Williams says one of the major challenges has been to get all the countries who signed up to the system to share data.

"The countries have to share their data otherwise this system won't work," she explains.

"If a tsunami is generated off the coast of Indonesia and is on its way to Africa - then African authorities need to have data about the wave at the source, where it began its journey. That means sharing seismic data and maps - and that was a very important part of the discussions and negotiations we had before we signed this agreement."

Another major challenge is getting the information about a potential tsunami out to people in the coastal areas, Ms Williams says.

"The instruments that are used to measure seismic activity and tsunami activity are in the water - the thing to watch is what happens on the beach," she adds.

"We've seen that national authorities can get the message out about a potential tsunami very quickly, but getting the message out to the communities on the coast is a completely different challenge."

"If the fault line of the earthquake is very close to the coast - the way it was in Aceh - then people have only got a few minutes to act," she warns.

Equipment shortage

The Indonesian government wants to deliver tsunami alerts to its citizens and those most at risk from the destructive wave within five minutes of an underwater earthquake in the region.

But experts say that will not be achieved until the country has installed at least 22 buoys, 120 tide gauges and 160 seismographs in its waters.

So far, according to the Indonesian Seismological Agency, it only has 14 buoys, 60 tide gauges and 150 seismographs.

The system is expected to be fully completed by 2010, but is already operational. Much of the funding for it has come from international donors, including Germany, Japan and China.

Wednesday's test will therefore determine whether the Indonesian authorities have spent that money wisely, and whether people are prepared for another catastrophe.

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