More concretely, we are working on a media note summarizing lessons from our post 2004 tsunami research, which was on risk reduction, not on relief and recovery. Here below is a excerpt from the note. The full text is Pacific tsunami revised.

Japan is a country that knows how to deal with earthquakes and with tsunamis. Its buildings are constructed to code; its people are trained on how to respond from when they are in school. It is also a wealthy developed country and one that has a high population density. Therefore, the original hypothesis was that loss of life will be much less than in the case of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami while property losses will be much larger. First reports indicate that the early warning systems worked and the years of training citizens to respond appropriately yielded results. Yet the losses of life in Sendai, the city most affected by the local tsunami, indicate that more can be done in early warning and in disaster-resilient land-use planning and building construction.

In relation to the teletsunami that threatened the littoral countries of the Pacific Ocean, the risk-reduction measures appear to have worked, at least in the developed economies. The microstates of the Pacific islands have significant similarities with the Sri Lankan coastal communities that were studied as part of the HazInfo project. Whether or not the early warnings went through effectively to the last mile in those countries and whether those communities were prepared to respond appropriately remains to be seen.

The New York Times quotes experts on the same lines:

Initial reports from Ofunato on Friday suggested that hundreds of homes had been swept away; the death toll was not yet known. But Matthew Francis of URS Corporation and a member of the civil engineering society’s tsunami subcommittee, said that education may have been the critical factor.

“For a trained population, a matter of 5 or 10 minutes is all you may need to get to high ground,” Mr. Francis said.

That would be in contrast to the much less experienced Southeast Asians, many of whom died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami because they lingered near the coast. Reports in the Japanese news media indicate that people originally listed as missing in remote areas have been turning up in schools and community centers, suggesting that tsunami education and evacuation drills were indeed effective.

Patients use the service by logging on to participating health plans’ Web sites. Doctors hold 10-minute appointments, which can be extended for a fee, and can file prescriptions and view patients’ medical histories through the system. American Well is working with HealthVault, Microsoft’s electronic medical records service, and ActiveHealth Management, a subsidiary of Aetna, which scans patients’ medical history for gaps in their previous care and alerts doctors during their American Well appointment.

The Hawaiian health plan’s 700,000 members pay $10 to use the service. The insurer also offers the service to uninsured patients for $45. Health plans pay American Well a license fee per member and a transaction fee of about $2 each time a patient sees a doctor.

The new softswitch – which upgrades Telecom Cook’s core wireless network to more efficient, IP-based technology in order to reduce costs and enable value-added services such as integrated SMS, voicemail, GPRS and pre-paid calling, has been in deployment since September 2007, and the final network cutover was accomplished last week. The UltraWave solution includes an overall expansion of the network’s capacity to 15,000 from 8,000 GSM subscribers.

Read the full story here.

(Background info: This group of islands in the South Pacific Ocean, about one-half of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand was named after Captain Cook, who sighted them in 1770. After being administrated by Britain and New Zealand, in 1965, residents chose self-government in free association with New Zealand. Total Area: 237 sq km, population: 21,750: The World Fact Book, CIA)

PRELIMINARY EARTHQUAKE PARAMETERS
 MAGNITUDE – 7.7
 TIME      - 0214 AKST NOV 15 2006
            0314  PST NOV 15 2006
            1114  UTC NOV 15 2006
 LOCATION  - 46.7 NORTH 153.5 EAST
          – KURIL ISLANDS
 DEPTH     – 21 MILES

THE PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER IN EWA BEACH HAWAII HAS
ISSUED A TSUNAMI WARNING FOR AREAS OF THE PACIFIC OUTSIDE OF
CALIFORNIA/ OREGON/ WASHINGTON/ BRITISH COLUMBIA AND ALASKA.

As Japan braces: Tech-related tsunami resources 

Bridging the long ‘last mile’ in Sri Lanka / 2006/4 / Media Development / Publications / Home – World Association for Christian Communication

While the countries of South and Southeast Asia were largely unprepared to act on the tsunami, it was not really a complete surprise. As the killer waves originating from the ocean near Indonesia’s Sumatra Island radiated across the Indian Ocean at the speed of a jetliner, the alert about the impending tsunami moved through the Internet at the speed of light. Scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) in Hawaii, who had detected the extraordinary seismic activity, issued a local tsunami warning one hour and five minutes after the undersea quake.

That was a bit too late for Indonesia – which, being closest to the quake’s epicentre, was already hit – but it could have made a difference in countries further away, such as India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. As is now well established, an authentic warning was delivered to each country, but there were few listeners at the receiving end – and even fewer to act on it.

More than 30 countries around the Pacific Ocean have tested a system to warn them of approaching tsunamis.
The exercise began with a mock alert at the Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii.
An earthquake with a magnitude 9.2 was imagined to have struck near the coast of Chile, sending a tsunami racing across the eastern Pacific.
A second mock earthquake alert, north of the Philippines, will provide a further test on Wednesday.
Governments will report back on how efficiently they received the tsunami warnings, relayed through various circuits including weather services, emails and faxes.
The drill, co-ordinated by the Hawaii warning centre, will also measure how well the message is relayed through local emergency systems.

‘Already a success’
At the start of the test, a beeping noise sounded throughout the warning centre on Hawaii’s Ewa Beach, and within minutes the first alerts were sent out.
“Even before the exercise started, we considered it to be a success in the sense of having so much interest from all the countries,” said Charles McCreery, director of the warning centre.
“Showing their willingness to co-operate, that’s something we have never seen before.”
Correspondents say governments’ interest in tsunami alerts had waned before the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, which took more than 200,000 lives.
Two actual earthquakes struck on Tuesday during the test – a magnitude 7.4 quake north of New Zealand, and a magnitude 6.8 off Indonesia. No casualties were reported.

Wednesday test
Another mock test on Wednesday will envisage a magnitude 8.8 earthquake north of the Philippines.
Officials there, and in Thailand, Malaysia and American Samoa, will go one step further by staging real evacuations.
A Pacific warning system has been in place since 1965, but this is largest test of the system since its inception.
The exercise may serve as a model for future tests in the Indian Ocean.

Ten preliminary lessons of the 28th March 2005 Sumatra great earthquake (Photo Source)

LIRNEasia, together with Vanguard Foundation, intends to systematically analyze the Sri Lankan media response to the great earthquake of the 28th of March. However, it appears useful to draw some preliminary lessons from this tragedy which has cost over 1,000 lives, including the people of Nias and other islands and those in Sri Lanka and elsewhere who died as a result of the warnings. The conclusions are preliminary; comments are welcome.

# Earthquake hazard detection is easy; tsunami hazard detection is not. One cannot simply infer the existence of a destructive tsunami from an earthquake. Whether a tsunami has been generated and the direction it is likely to go requires the application of expert judgment.
# Issuing tsunami warnings is not difficult; avoiding false warnings is. It is said that the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and its predecessors have never failed to predict a tsunami; the problem is that they have issued a lot of false warnings in the process. The key in the now destabilized Sunda Trench area is to install equipment to reduce the issuance of false warnings such as that issued on the 28th of March. I do not in any way suggest that the authorities and the media should not have issued the warnings on this particular occasion, or that there was anything intentionally wrong in its issuance. So soon after a catastrophe of 26th December 2004, the option of not issuing a warning did not exist.
# The proposed Asian tsunami warning center is a boondoggle; Hawai’i worked perfectly on the 28th of March; duplicating a tsunami warning center will not save lives. The earthquake occurred at 1610 hrs UMT (2210 hrs SLT). The tsunami bulletin was issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at 1626 hrs UMT (2226 hrs SLT). The gap was 16 minutes, the same as on 26th December 2004. Can an Asian tsunami warning center do better? The communication of the earthquake hazard detection depends on direct measurement of waves that go through the earth and on its surface and on telemetry. If there were tide gauges and deep sea tsunami detection devices, those signals would be communicated using radio signals. The time taken to communicate with Ewa Beach Hawai’i and the location of the Asian Center would be the same. The time taken to communicate from Hawai’i is no different to that from an Asian location. It is better to rotate the best Asian scientists through PTWC than to go to the trouble of setting up a new center in Asia, assuming that the posturing of the Indian and other country representatives will allow such a center to be built in the first place. Note to the diplomats: lives are involved here, not national prestige.
# Historical data are important for benchmarking the response. For Sri Lanka, the critical time was 1740 UMT (2340 hrs SLT), 90 minutes after the earthquake. It was possible to arrive at this conclusion from the experience of the 26th December 2004, when the tsunami hit the coast near Kalmunai at around 0230 hrs UMT (0830 hrs SLT), approximately 90 minutes after the earthquake. The three-hour time period that some in the media were talking about may have been useful in generating the all-clear decision (if a tsunami had not been generated within 3 hours, one could assume a tsunami would not come), but it was not relevant for warning purposes.
# The Internet and messaging are faster than conventional mass media. Many people in Sri Lanka were aware of the earthquake well before the BBC, CNN or other news channels began to broadcast news about it. I received an SMS at 1658 hrs UMT (2258 hrs SLT), confirmed it on the Internet and informed several people before the news was conveyed on international cable channels.
# Media must have pre-agreed procedures for the issuance of alerts and warnings. The reason the Sri Lankan TV channels took until around 2330 hrs SLT (to be confirmed through a questionnaire and interviews) to broadcast warning messages was the absence of standard pre-agreed procedures. In one case, the colleague who contacted the media channel was told that they were awaiting clearance from the Department of Meteorology. Some channels interrupted their programs to make live announcements and went back to the programs. The problem with this approach was that a viewer who was flipping channels or just tuned in could have missed the message. Others linked live to ANN, BBC and CNN. As time went by, the crawlers in Sinhala appeared.
# Evacuation procedures and drills are important. All who participated in issuing warnings and organizing the evacuation deserve our praise for effort. But this does not mean that we should take the actions of the 28th of March as any kind of model for the future. The fact that widespread looting did not occur was luck, more than anything else. In actual fact, most families left behind one or more members in their homes when they evacuated.
# Congestion is a problem that needs to be addressed and also embraced. Close to midnight, the telecom networks began to get congested as the word spread. It is not practical to design networks that will not be congested by sharp spikes in use such as those engendered by disaster warnings. The telecom operators, with or without participation of the regulatory authority, should get together after each congestion event to evaluate network performance and implement remedial measures. But it is important to understand what congestion tells us: it tells us that people are calling their loved ones and that the warnings are being disseminated.
# The experience of the 28th of March does not support the 100/200 meter forbidden zone rule. The evacuation instructions indicated that everyone close to the coast should go beyond 2 km. If the 100/200 meter rule is related to the tsunami, the evacuation order should have asked people to evacuate to a point beyond 100/200 meters as appropriate. The response that will serve the interest of public safety will include:
** Preparing vulnerability maps of the coast for tsunamis and cyclones.
** Establishing effective early warning systems, especially in the areas of greatest vulnerability.
** Ensuring that people have places to evacuate to within 10-15 minutes (this may require the building of structures for vertical evacuation such as the tsunami hills proposed by Professor Hettige of the University of Colombo).
** Moving structures with significant externality effects such as roads, electricity transformers and telecom towers out of the areas of greatest vulnerability. Once the information is publicly available, the affected citizens and other parties such as insurance companies will use that information to make the appropriate decisions.
# An authoritative, adequately resourced single-focus agency responsible for all aspects of disaster warning is essential. See above.

The event was launched by the release of the draft report on a National All Hazard Disaster Warning System written by local and international experts. This draft report emerged from an Expert Consultation that was held in January 26, 2005 where broad input was obtained from Sri Lankans with disaster management expertise, experts in hazard warning and the public who responded to newspaper advertisements. The primary purpose of the video news conference was to discuss the concept paper with the Sri Lankan media in order to give the widest possible publicity to the draft report that was written up on the basis of international best practice and local input.

The proceedings have been videotaped and will be available as streaming video at a future date. Media coverage of this event will be posted on this site as they become available.

In the meatime, here is the presentation made by Rohan Samarajiva at the video news conference along with press releases in Sinhala & Tamil:

Presentation Slides, Video news conference on National All-Hazard Warning System for Sri Lanka, Rohan Samarajiva [Powerpoint]News Release [Press Release] in Sinhala available here (PDF file 592 KB)

News Release [Press Release] in Tamil available here (PDF 1.6 MB)

My presentation was Expanding Access to ICTs (Powerpoint)

Along with Bill Melody’s forceful comments it clearly established the importance of market and regulatory reforms, a position that may otherwise have been deemphasized as a result of the Chair’s interest in subsidies.

The visit was also used to pursue the disaster warning-communication issues that have come to the fore in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. On the 18th of January I visited the Big Island’s Civil Defense Emergency Operations Center and the Pacific Tsunami Museum accompanied by Bill Melody and at the invitation of Dr George Curtis, a tsunami expert at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. On the following day, Peter Anderson, the expert we had recruited for the disaster warning work in Sri Lanka, and I visited the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at Ewa Beach, Oahu. The information gathered in these visits was written up as “Surviving tsunamis: Lessons we can learn from Hawai’i.” I am not attaching this article at this time because I hope to get it published in Sinhala and English in Sri Lanka shortly. This article has been circulated to contacts in tsunami-hit countries in the region as the first step in broadening the disaster warning-communication work.

On the 19th I made a plenary presentation (posted on website previously), “What happened in Sri Lanka and why it won’t be as bad next time.” I was one of four speakers at the closing plenary of the PTC 05 conference. The plenary was well attended. I established useful relations with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a result of the plenary and the related contacts.

The PTC event itself did not live up to (possibly unrealistic) expectations. It had lost a lot of the government, academic and first-tier telco participation that it had back in 1990 when I last attended. There was a dearth of significant fund-raising or academic collaboration opportunities as a result. However, signaling the presence of LIRNEasia as a player in the Asia Pacific and the contacts related to the disaster warning-communication work made the trip worthwhile.