Tag Archives: tsunami
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Cell Broadcasting for Early Disaster Warning in Maldives: Report released today
Maldives, a country of 1,192 islands and 290,000 citizens, is highly dependent on its natural resources. Along with tourism, which provides more than 30 percent of the country’s income, fisheries and agriculture are essential to livelihoods on the country’s 199 inhabited islands. The December 2004 tsunami affected many of its islands and wrought considerable devastation [...]
The science of earthquake (and therefore tsunami) prediction
Lots of people talk about predicting earthquakes. Here’s the science. Why should we be in interested in earthquake prediction? Because we live in a bad neighborhood: there has been a tsunamigenic earthquake every year, except 2008, since 2004 in the Sunda Trench. Until the prediction issue is resolved all we can do is focus on [...]
Advances in modeling of long waves to help predict tsunami hazards
Impressive science is being produced as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The focus now must be on creating systems within national governments that will allow the best use of science. Modeling data on projected tsunami arrival times (if any) were available to all on September 12, 2007. There is no evidence that [...]
Four years after Tsunami 2004 : Your smiles are ours

Four years to history, ‘Your tears are mine’ (see below) was my reaction to Asian tsunami. Reproduced in multiple sites, it was recited once in a remembrance event. Though written more in a Sri Lankan context, let me pick it again today, to remember all 225,000 lives lost, in the worst tsunami in recent history [...]
Sri Lanka: Tsunami warning towers, a day late and a penny short
One and a half years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the government of Sri Lanka stated that it had obtained funds for three warning towers and was on track to build 25 more by the second anniversary: The Ministry has already received funds from UNESCAP to build three tsunami warning towers in the Eastern, [...]
Harmonization of cell broadcasting channels
Mark Wood, who among other things coordinates the group that is working harmonizing the address space for cell broadcasts on mobiles at ITU-T, had an intensive discussion with representatives of Sri Lanka mobile operators at a meeting organized at very short notice by LIRNEasia on 2nd of October 2008. He was on his way back [...]
LIRNEasia holds final HazInfo Workshop in Jakarta
Yesterday, 5 March 2008, LIRNEasia, with its Indonesian partner, the Indonesian Institute for Disaster Preparedness (IIDP), held the final HazInfo workshop at the Hotel Borobudur in Jakarta, Indonesia. The “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning: Community-based Last-Mile Warning Systems” workshop included several highlights such as a testimonial from an Aceh survivor of the 2004 Indian Ocean [...]
2/3rd of 2004 Tsunami wave height caused by Horizontal Forces
“Scientists have long believed tsunamis form from vertical deformation of seafloor during undersea earthquakes. However, seismograph and GPS data show such deformation from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake was too small to generate the powerful tsunami that ensued. Song’s team found horizontal forces were responsible for two-thirds of the tsunami’s height, as observed by three satellites [...]
False tsunami warning costs lives in Bangladesh cyclone
Governments need to pay more attention to the costs of false warnings. It’s not that this has not been said before. But now we have real evidence from the region. Gulfnews: Cyclone victims ignored repeated warnings A false tsunami alert two months ago led thousands of Bangladeshis to ignore warnings as Cyclone Sidr approached, costing [...]
India prepares for Mass Casualties
National Disaster Management Guidelines Released “We all know that India like any other nation in the world has its own share of vulnerability, risk and its capacity to respond to the disasters. The equations of these three factors can be well visualized in some of the worst disasters of the past – the Super Cyclone [...]
Review of tsunami warning/alert
The Minister is to be commended for initiating the review of the alert process that went from alert to evacuation in minutes. Sri Lanka News | Online edition of Daily News – Lakehouse Newspapers Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe, called for an immediate review of the tsunami alert process that was put into operation on [...]
Tsunami kills in Solomans
A tsunami has swept ashore in the Solomon Islands after a strong undersea earthquake in the South Pacific. Initial reports from outlying, remote areas say at least eight people have been killed, but local officials fear the death toll could rise further. The National Disaster Council chairman told reporters that some villages had been “completely [...]
Sahana wins software award given last year to Wikipedia!
Sahana, an entirely volunteer effort to create technology for managing large-scale relief efforts, is the recipient of the 2006 Free Software Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Sahana was created by the Lanka Software Foundation, in the wake of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, to compensate for the devastating consequences of [...]
Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka: Challenges of Implementing CAP
There is a growing call for the use of open source content standards for all-hazards, all-media alert and notification systems. Content standards such as Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) and others promise to improve the interoperatiblity of hazard information systems at both the internetworking and last-mile stages of distribution. Despite the [...]



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