Finally -- Others Agree

The media have begun to notice what this web log has been saying for the past five days -- that not enough was done by U.S. scientists to send low-tech (telephone) messages to the major news media with global networks in time to save lives before the tsunami struck several Indian Ocean nations.

In a post dated 1/7/05 on its web site, The Guardian (UK) carries a report headlined:
US island base given warning; Bulletins sent to Diego Garcia 'could have saved lives'
The story contains the comments of Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa's Department of Economics:

"Professor Michel Chossudovsky of Ottawa University said the argument put forward by other experts that countries hit by the tsunami could not have been warned of the approaching waves because they had no sensors or special buoys in the Indian Ocean was a 'red herring'. Prof Chossudovsky, who helps run the centre for research on globalisation, added: 'We are not dealing with information based on ocean sensors. The emergency warning (sent to U.S. forces at Diego Garcia) was transmitted in the immediate wake of the earthquake based on seismic data.' With modern communications, 'the information of an impending disaster could have been sent round the world in a matter of minutes, by email, by telephone, by fax, not to mention by satellite television', he said."

Elsewhere, web posts continue to report on the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) response to criticism its agencies did not do enough to effectively warn Indian Ocean nations, as Professor Chossudovsky and this web log suggest. A post at GovEXEC.com quotes NOAA's web site and timeline as saying, "NOAA officials tried to get the message out to other nations not a part of its Pacific warning system to alert them to the possibility of a tsunami." Referring to NOAA's statement, the site says scientists "were attuned to the danger, but blind to it without a way to detect it."

Perhaps not sufficiently attuned on Christmas Day, HST. Although it took nearly three and one-half hours for the quake's true magnitude to be calculated (by Harvard University's Seismology Department), the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and other montoring sites presumably knew shortly after the quake struck that its epicenter was in a subduction zone -- an area where one of the earth's plates is pushing its way beneath another. These zones are notorious for tsunami generation.

Nevertheless, knowledge of a subduction zone epicenter wasn't sufficient to immediately suggest the potential for a tsunami to U.S. scientists. The timeline says it took another hour for that possibility to sink in. Phone calls started going out to colleagues and agencies in the region, but there still is no evidence that scientists attempted to reach out through the news media to communicate their fears.

Doug Carlson
Honolulu, HI
January 5, 2005