[ OUR OPINION ]

---

Hawaii’s tsunami
warning center
performed its job

THE ISSUE A Thailand official has blamed the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center for thousands of deaths in the Indian Ocean area.

POLITICIANS in Thailand are in a turmoil over whom to blame for the failure to alert people about the oncoming tsunami before it struck Asian shores on Dec. 26. The finger-pointing has been extended wrongly to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, where officials did all they could to spread the warning of the possible disaster.

Thailand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra last week fired the country's top forecaster, Suparek Thantiratanawong, director general of the government's meteorological department, for failing to issue a warning. The department knew that the earthquake off Indonesia's coast might produce a dangerous tsunami about an hour before the waves began to crash into Thailand.

Thaksin appointed Smith Thammasaroj, former chief of the meteorological department, to head a new committee to set up a national tsunami warning system. Smith now has turned the blame to the Hawaii center for not alerting India, Bangladesh and the Maldives, an island republic south of India, after the tsunami had displayed its strength in Indonesia and Thailand.

"If they warned those countries, they could have saved thousands of lives," Smith said. "It's their failure to do so that makes me mad at them." The tsunami has claimed at least 15,779 lives in Indian, 82 in the Maldives and two in Bangladesh.

The Ewa Beach center did send an alert to the 26 countries that are members of the emergency warning system, including Thailand and Indonesia, within 15 minutes after the earthquake. Other Indian Ocean nations, including India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives, did not receive the warning because they are not members of the system and the center did not have phone numbers of officials in those countries to warn about the possible effects of the earthquake, according to Hawaii warning system geophysicist Charles McCreery.

McCreery says the center's scientists did not learn about the tsunami until several hours later when they read news accounts on the Internet, "well after those waves would have hit all of those places over there that got hit badly." Unlike the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean lacks a network of tide gauges to determine whether an earthquake has generated a tsunami, which does not always ensue from a quake.

Conrad Lautenbacher, administrator of the Ewa Beach operation, says the United States is initiating a 10-year plan for 53 nations to share timely data from satellites, sea buoys and other sensors. A meeting of those countries' representatives had been scheduled for Feb. 16 in Belgium before the tsunami devastated the Indian Ocean coastlines.