Posted on 12/30/2004 12:57:28 PM PST by Red Badger
PUNE: Could the colossal death and destruction caused by Sunday's tsunami in the Andamans have been reduced by heeding the repeated warnings issued to the Andaman and Nicobar administration by a Pune-based seismologist as early as August 2004?
Following five earthquakes that shook the Andaman and Nicobar islands on July 29, ranging in magnitude from 5.0 to 5.9 on the Richter scale, Pune-based seismologist Arun Bapat had written to the Lt. Governor of the islands stressing the necessity of "seismic surveillance and earthquake awareness in the Andamans".
In his email of August 2, 2004, to Lt. Governor Ram Kapse, Bapat emphasised that the five quakes needed to be "examined seriously". "This may perhaps be foreshocks of a big seismic jolt," he had written in his letter.
Bapat, who retired in 1998 as head of the Earthquake Engineering Research Division of the Central Water and Power Research Station (CWPRS), pointed out that for the last one-and-a-half years, he had been writing to the Lt. Governor's office "about the urgent necessity of creating seismic awareness in the region".
"I was in the USA last year and I still continued to write to you. But it seems that you are very busy with some other works and I could not hear from you. I request that this letter of mine receive the desired attention," he pleaded in his August 2 letter, sent by email to the Lt. Governor's personal assistant. The email stated categorically that it was "extremely necessary to undertake ‘seismic vulnerability assessment' of the region immediately." Stating that he was already advising a number of states on earthquake related problems, Bapat urged the Lt. Governor to "circulate material connected with earthquake disaster mitigation". Bapat told TNN that it is truly a tragedy that he never heard from the governor and that his early warnings and appeals were ignored by the Andaman and Nicobar administration.
FNC reported last night in the 6:00 hour that there is an agency in Austria that measures both atomic and seismic acativity.
Because of the Christmas holiday, no one was in the agency to relay the information.
Can you imagine the outrage if this was a United States agency?
This looks like someone fishing for a job more than an serious warning. The only bit missing was sending the bank account number. I would have ignored it as a scam as well.
Bump.
Basically irrelevant; that agency had no information or relevant instrumentation that would have gotten information the USGS wouldn't have already had.
Why wasn't the USGS able to reach anyone to warn them?
No pre-existing network. These things don't work unless you have a defined network where the people have already met to set up procedures.
Otherwise you're either lost in the immense bureacracy of countries like Sri Lanka or India trying to find someone with the authority to order an evacuation (mind you, the people you're calling have never met or heard of you....if you were them, would you believe them) or you're somehow trying to call the local police departments in the areas in question.
1. The funding for the study this guy is proposing to do is evaluated, found valuable enough to spend money on, and approved.
2. The bureaucracy disperses the funding to this guy.
3. He hires staff, purchases equipment, and performs his study.
4. The data he tabulates is condensed into an actual government document, peer reviewed, and issued to the government in question. In this report, he proposes the first ever, in this part of the world, design, purchase, and implementation of devices which would monitor the area for seismic activity, tsunami activity, and the creation of an early warning system for these primitive people on these two remote islands.
5. The government reviews the report in detail, and then decides that the proposal is completely valid, and should be pursued, with minimal (if any) changes or revisions.
6. A funding source is found for the (likely) millions of dollars to be spent on all this equipment, and the installation, and testing and commissioning of this system.
7. The government takes bids for the complete implementation of this system, including purchasing, construction/installation, programming, testing, de-bugging, and hiring staff and training them to use the system effectively.
8. The bids are received by the government, approved, and the contract is awarded to some company capable of effectively managing a project of this size/scope.
9. Purchasing of all of this equipment is completed, installation of all of this equipment and software is completed, testing/commissioning of all the entire system, including resolving any and all "glitches" is completed, hiring and training of the staff to operate/utilize this system is completed, and the primitive islanders who are supposed to benefit from this system is performed.
10. Now, after all that, when the "the big one" hits on December 26 (less than 5 months after the date of this memo), everything will pretty much go according to plan, and so prevent a tragic loss of life.
And the unstated supposition is, that because this wasn't accomplished in a few months, the government was completely remiss in safeguarding these people.
That just seems like a HUGE stretch to me. Some may have another opinion.
The below excerpt tells of a seismic station installed at the US military facility at Diego Garcia earlier this year. Stations are also in the Seychelles and Sri Lanka. It is not easy to learn what is done with the data.
http://www.igpp.ucsd.edu/ne/2004/02/09.html
Febuary 09, 2004
New IDA station installed in Diego Garcia
... installed the fortieth station in the IDA network on the island of Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory. The choice of Diego Garcia as a site for a seismic station was an obvious one to make: this atoll in the Chagos Archipelago is the only suitable land for over 1500 miles in any direction in the central Indian Ocean! IDA scientists strive to distribute their sensors in as globally uniform a fashion as possible given the distribution of continents and islands. Although great progress is being made at Scripps and elsewhere to install seismic instruments on the seafloor, the vast majority of seismometers are still installed on land. By placing instruments over a broad region of the globe, scientists can more accurately locate earthquakes and better develop detailed models of the Earth's interior by measuring the changes seismic waves undergo as they travel around the globe.
... The location for the sensors, in a seismic vault constructed on the US Air Force's GEODSS installation, provides a superb platform from which to view earthquake activity in this part of the world. Diego Garcia is located very close to very active seismic regions along the Southwest and Southeast Indian ridges. There are very few islands that can accommodate seismic instruments in the Indian Ocean. Project IDA has sites on four of them: in the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Cocos (Keeling), and now Diego Garcia. ...
My reaction exactly: This old turkey is using a rejected fishing expedition for a fat consulting job as an "I told you so!".
I despise scumbags who use tragedy as an opportunity for personal aggrandizement!
This is almost as bad as watching Clinton and the Brady bunch of gun-grabbers -- dancing on the graves of the Columbine victims!
Which reminds me... Has anyone heard whether our people at Diego were affected in any way?
Volcano erupts in Andaman Islands
AFP | 30dec04 | From correspondents in Port Blair
Posted on 12/31/2004 3:12:58 PM by kidd
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