Not good enough

news just in: earth­quake hits japanno imme­di­ate reports of injuries or dam­age from the quake, which occurred around 6:30 p.m. (0930 GMT). No tsunami warn­ing was issued.

Okay. Take a deep breath. We are all upset by this ter­ri­ble tragedy. How­ever assign­ing blame is not going to help much. We do the best of what we can and leave the rest in the hands of .

How­ever I feel com­pelled to throw in my 2 bits in defence of NOAA, which oper­ates the PTWC of out of Hawaii (not Colorado).

First of all as the name implies, the PTWC cov­ers the Pacific basin, not the Indian ocean. This is the “not my area of respon­si­bil­ity” defence which should be fami­lar to Singaporeans.

Sec­ondly, the PTWC did what they could by the book. The warn­ings were posted to the Pacific nations under 20 min­utes after the event. The PTWC does not have estab­lished chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tions to this part of the world.

Thirdly, even if the infor­ma­tion was suc­cess­fully relayed to the rel­e­vant nations (ignor­ing the red­tape you would have to cut through to estab­lish the infor­ma­tion flow). What are the chances the infor­ma­tion would be ver­i­fied by the recip­i­ents and dis­sem­i­nated to the masses before the tsunami hit? We are talk­ing a time­frame of one to two hours max­i­mum here.

Finally, I remem­ber there was an ear­lier ini­tia­tive to put in tsunami early warn­ing sen­sors for the Indian ocean but the plans got killed due to lack of coop­er­a­tion amongst the nations involved and the high costs (approx US$325,000 each) of the sen­sors involved.

Rage at the slow­ness of aid to the affected areas, if you must. Or rage at the insu­lar nature of the US news media. How­ever I feel the folks at NOAA/PTWC should not have their feet held over hot coals for this “failure”.

Dis­clo­sure: I am a fan of the NOAA, espe­cially the National Hur­ri­cane Center.

Thanks for the infor­ma­tion. I’ve been edu­cat­ing myself, and should’ve done so before rant­ing. But you know with 55,000 dead so far…

Regard­ing the DBS pay­ment, it requires us to fill in the con­sumer ref­er­ence num­ber (which is usu­ally pro­vided when pay­ing bills).

Since this is a non-bill pay­ment, DBS actu­ally want its cus­tomer donors to fill in their con­tact num­ber as the ref­er­ence num­ber. For more info, click here.

I just donated too. Hope it helps.

I agree with you about our, um, “advance” med­ical team, Mr. Miyagi. The baby brother and I dis­cussed this — he’s serv­ing the nation some­way rel­e­vant — chances are they will be help­ing to fish bod­ies out of the water more than any­thing else. Or deal with a pos­si­ble cholera epi­demic. Sucks.

chain­saw­ield­inun

Re: the pathetic cov­er­age of the dis­as­ter in US..

I feel that it’s just an inkling of the peren­nial race issue. When i logged onto british foot­ball forums, the eng­lish peo­ple were post­ing things like

“It’s snow­ing… And all these peo­ple com­plain­ing about tsunamis? Don’t know how lucky they’ve got it..”

Very poor attempt at humour. And these are the same peo­ple who got their knick­ers all twisted in a knot when for eg, sta­dium diasters like the Hey­sel in 1985 are brought up. I won­der if this were to hap­pen else­where nearer to them… but i must say i wont wanna wish some­thing like this on any­one, anywhere

Though i would like to point out not all ang-mohs are like that. Just the sad gits.

kei­thf from blogdrive

Ya lor.. 1 hour before Tsunami strike leh.. NOT ENOUGH TIME TO WARN MEH ?!

To Da Play­Boy Bunny:

In Acheh’s case, they don’t even have the lux­ury of an hour’s notice. Maybe for the coun­tries such as The Mal­dives or Soma­lia, but when you’re near the epic cen­ter of the quake — most don’t have 1–2 hours.

There are a num­ber of things you’re over­look­ing, which I can under­stand, because yes, the death toll is com­pletely over­whelm­ing and I under­stand your rage at feel­ing help­less, and the sense that this shouldn’t have hap­pened, and how bloody unfair that peo­ple who already had so lit­tle to begin with had to lose every­thing else too, BUT:

1) Why Sin­ga­pore (and other coun­tries) are not respond­ing as quickly as you’d like:

One of the most impor­tant things when orga­niz­ing nat­ural dis­as­ter aid/relief efforts is ensur­ing that the right kind of aid is going to the right peo­ple and area. Orga­niz­ing an effort that comes from dozens of coun­tries and that’s sup­posed to reach a dozen coun­tries is a logis­ti­cal nightmare.

Why is orga­ni­za­tion impor­tant? They’re approx­i­mat­ing the dam­age (in US$) of this dis­as­ter at about US$13 bil­lion. That’s a lot of money. It’s unlikely, or at least very dif­fi­cult, for other coun­tries to be able to donate enough cash to cover all that dam­age. We have to ensure that every dol­lar counts. That every dol­lar goes where it does the most good. It’s not going to help Thai­land to receive food/water relief if what they need most is med­ical relief, and vice versa for other areas.

2) Why the Earth­quake Cen­ter could not warn people:

- They didn’t know the extent of the dis­as­ter. Like the arti­cle you linked to (in the NYT) said, tsunamis are not eas­ily detected because a) they aren’t always a def­i­nite result of an under­sea earth­quake, and b) they don’t reach their destruc­tive stage until right before they hit the shore.

- They didn’t have con­tacts in the affected coun­tries that would’ve believed them. They couldn’t just call a ran­dom per­son in Sri Lanka and tell them “evac­u­ate the coasts, tsunamis headed your way” because they may not have had any­one on hand who could speak the local lan­guages, and really, chances are extremely good that the per­son on the other end of the line would’ve laughed at them and hung up. They didn’t even have enough time to con­tact Thai, Indian and Sri Lankan embassies in the U.S.

- Can you imag­ine how the guys at the earth­quake cen­ter feel right about now? To know that they had infor­ma­tion that could have saved tens of thou­sands of lives, and they couldn’t do any­thing? Nobody thinks to them­selves “Well, I could make a phone call and save tens of thou­sands of lives, or I could go get a sand­wich for lunch.” They didn’t know the extent, the scope of the dis­as­ter, and they didn’t have the resources on hand to do any­thing about it even if they had known. There is noth­ing you can say about or to them that hasn’t already passed through their minds.

3) Why media cov­er­age of the dis­as­ter in the US is insular:

Peo­ple need to have some­thing to relate to, in order to under­stand the full scope of a tragedy. This is why first-hand blog accounts of the tsunamis are so impact­ful. Because you get to know some­one, get to know their grief in a very per­sonal way. That’s part of what the media is try­ing to achieve. They’re try­ing to get peo­ple to think “This could’ve hap­pened to my neigh­bor, to me, to my son.” That’s how you get peo­ple to under­stand on a vis­ceral level.

This is not to say that the US media is com­pletely altru­is­tic. I’m sure part of the rea­son they want peo­ple to under­stand this on a gut level is because they want to sell more papers/advertising space. And I’m usu­ally full of crit­i­cism about the US media. But there are some­times good rea­sons they do the things they do.

Just a few ratio­nal thoughts, to try to bring your leg down from that knee-jerk posi­tion.

Thank you. My jaw hurts from knee hit­ting it.

Update:
Appar­ently Thai­land author­i­ties knew but sup­pressed the tsunami warn­ing.
http://wizbangblog.com/archives/004637.php
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30989-2004Dec28.html?sub=AR

Any­body seen the orig­i­nal report sup­pos­edly by _The Nation_?

Sigh. And the ugly part of human nature is sur­fac­ing. Reports of loot­ing and resource hoard­ing are already com­ing in.

Argh, to think that some would hoard resources when oth­ers are starv­ing and unreach­able. But then again those who are hoard­ing are also doing it to keep alive. I am really pray­ing for these people..