Cost & Accuracy
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An Indonesian official has questioned whether their government can afford to operate and maintain the planned Indian Ocean Tsunami Early Warning System (TEWS) The director of the Geophysics Data and Information Center at the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG), Prih Hajardi, said the operation and maintenance costs could be as high as US$300,000 per month for each deep-sea tsunami assessment and reporting (DART) system. 'The operational and maintenance costs will be quite high because we need to check and clean the system on a weekly and monthly basis. Regular maintenance is important because the regional and national transmission of tsunami monitoring requires satellites,' he was quoted as saying. Prih said that in the Indian Ocean alone, at least 10 DART buoys were necessary for accurate and fast warnings. The ability to forecast or predict tsunamis with any degree of accuracy is limited. Long term tsunami prediction is based primarily on statistical methods of earthquake prediction at identified seismic gaps. Medium-term prediction is also based on statistical recurrence and is of limited value. However, destructive tsunamis do not always happen in forecasted seismic-gap regions. Often such was the case with the 1975 tsunami in the Philippines, the 1979 tsunami in Colombia, and the 1983 tsunami in the Sea of Japan. All these events occurred in unexpected areas. No tsunami warnings were issued for these events that could have been of any value to the threatened population. Thus many lives, were lost. Presently, it is not possible to predict when these big earthquakes will strike again and whether they will produce large or small tsunamis. In some instances, it may not even be possible to issue an operational warning. |