The tsunami victims’ lawsuit filed on March 4 (reported today for the first time in The Honolulu Advertiser) seems destined to use U.S. officials’ own words against them. They can be found in hundreds, if not thousands, of web postings.
Here, for example, an Associated Press story quotes NOAA Administrator Conrad C. Lautenbacher: “Folks out there (at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center) tried to contact people that they thought would be interested….” But they didn’t try to contact the news media.
Here, one of those scientists is quoted: “At the time, given what I knew, there wasn’t a system in place to save these people and I feel very, very bad.” He refers to the lack of a high-tech system in the Indian Ocean, but there also was no low-tech system in place in Hawaii to alert the media that a devasting tsunami probably had been generated.
And here, a professor from Sri Lanka reports on his visit to the Island of Hawaii’s Emergency Operations Center: “They are engaged in a polite exchange with (Pacific Tsunami Warning Center) about the timing of the release of disaster information: if CNN carries the story before their phone tree is activated, they get a busy tone which bothers them. I tell them it’s possible to give them priority numbers so their calls will go through. But they are not too keen about shedding ordinary people from the phone system.” Professor Rohan Samarajiva’s report hints at inefficiencies even inside the Hawaii emergency agency network.
Professor Samarajiva concludes his column with excellent post-tsunami advice for Sri Lanka that is equally applicable everywhere in the tsunami warning network:
“The core business of government is safeguarding the lives of its citizens; Let us train the people in the Railway Department to stop the trains going on the coastal lines when a tsunami warning is out; Let us train the Navy to communicate facts like massive waves battering the East Coast to the media; Let us train the staff of the Meteorological Department (with four alumni of the Bangkok course) and the National Disaster Management Centre (three trained, including Director, now retired) to wear pagers on holidays.
“And let’s make sure that the people who go to the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center actually attend the lectures and not go shopping or whatever else they do in Bangkok. And more than anything else, let’s make sure we have the right kind of organization to keep watch on behalf of our citizens; keep watch not only against tsunamis, but also against cyclones and flash floods and land slides and all the other hazards that turn into massive disasters in this little country. So the next time we’ll be ready and we’ll save ourselves and our children, despite the politicians who say that Sri Lanka had no reason to be prepared having only a few droughts as disasters. We need disaster education for politicians too. That might be the hardest task of all.”
Doug Carlson
Honolulu, HI
March 13, 2005
No comments:
Post a Comment