Isle tsunami center
is sued over deaths

Survivors and victims’ kin say
the center did not do enough to
warn people in southern Asia

The federal agency that operates the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach is being sued by Indian Ocean tsunami survivors and relatives of victims.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York last week, alleges the center and other plaintiffs did not do enough to protect people from the Dec. 26 tsunami, which killed as many as 300,000 people throughout southern Asia. The lawsuit does not seek damages, but instead asks the court to preserve evidence for the plaintiffs so they can decide whether to pursue damages, an attorney said.

"At least they should have the option to know what is going on," said Edward Fagan, the U.S. attorney for the plaintiffs group, which includes at least 58 European survivors and family members of people killed in the disaster.

Named as defendants are the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Thailand's government, its Meteorological Department and the Accor group, the French owner of the Sofitel hotel chain, which owns a beachfront tourist hotel in Phuket, Thailand.

NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center monitors seismic and ocean conditions in the Pacific Basin and issues warnings to member nations. The Thai Meteorological Department is the country's weather forecasting agency.

The Ewa Beach center has been criticized for not being more aggressive about warning southern Asian nations after they were alerted that a 9.0-magnitude earthquake occurred off Indonesia.

NOAA officials refused comment on the lawsuit, but they previously defended the center by saying it was not set up to warn nations outside the Pacific Rim about potential tsunamis.

Pacific Tsunami Warning Center Director Charles McCreery has also said the center issued an earthquake advisory after its instruments detected a large tremor off Sumatra. But because the agency does not have warning buoys in the Indian Ocean, officials did not know the earthquake generated a tsunami, he has said.

By the time they learned through news reports that the earthquake did generate a tsunami, hours had passed, and the damage had been done already, McCreery has said.

The lawsuit claims the Thai government is destroying and concealing evidence that will prove its officials knew of the approaching tsunami but chose not to issue a warning fearing its effect on the country's tourism industry.

On Wednesday a former Thai official who is investigating the Meteorological Department said he will not release his findings because it could be used in the lawsuit against the government.

The plaintiffs have formed the Tsunami Victims Group, a European nonprofit organization. International tourists at beach resorts throughout southern Asia were among the hundreds of thousands killed.

The plaintiffs want to know if more could have been done to warn the people in the path of the killer waves, according to the lawsuit.

Fagan contends that the U.S. Navy must have received some warning of a potential tsunami because it evacuated part of Diego Garcia, a remote island in the middle of the Indian Ocean that it leases from the British government. But he said he does not know whether the Navy took the action based on the earthquake advisory or a tsunami warning.

Navy officials have said the island sustained minimal damage because of its favorable ocean topography. The island is next to a deep ocean trench that prevents ocean swells from developing into waves.

Fagan gained international prominence in the 1990s when he sued Swiss banks for the return of Holocaust victims' assets.