Tsunami warning system worked, but not in time

An early warning system introduced after the disastrous Christmas 2004 tsunami worked as planned, U.S. officials say, but failed to prevent the deaths of more than 100 people in Samoa and American Samoa on Tuesday because of the proximity of the originating earthquake.

It was the first practical test of the system, set up in response to the 2004 wave that killed more than 220,000 people in the Indian Ocean region, primarily in Indonesia.

Officials scrambled after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake shook just before dawn Tuesday, and after a flurry of phone calls within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Island offices, the first warning was issued within 16 minutes, said NOAA spokeswoman Delores Clark. She said that was well within the agency’s range of 10 to 20 minutes for an acceptable warning.

But because the quake was so close to American Samoa, it was just four minutes after the warning that a series of two-story-high waves crashed over low-lying villages and heavily damaged the capital city of Pago Pago.

Samoa’s Deputy Prime Minister Misa Telefoni told Australia’s AAP news agency that the event happened so quickly there was little time to get out of harm’s way.

“The difficulty is that it now appears that the [earthquake] fault was very, very close to us and we only had minutes rather than hours to respond,” Mr. Telefoni said.

“People were saying that there was the shake and the ocean went out within five minutes, so that’s pretty fast and that makes it extremely difficult,” he added. “With the location and the intensity, I don’t know [if] anything better could have been done.”

Joey Cummings, a radio disc jockey at 93KHJ in Pago Pago, told the BBC that as soon as the earthquake hit, the station told schools to initiate tsunami warnings and transport children up the mountain.

Mrs. Clark said the earthquake hit at 6:48 a.m. local time, and the Hawaii office issued its first warning at 7:04 a.m., 16 minutes later. She said the tsunami hit roughly 20 minutes after the earthquake, or four minutes after the official warning.

Mrs. Clark said the center’s computers - like those at its twin, the Alaska Tsunami Warning Center - constantly monitor seismic data for earthquakes, then look at water levels to determine whether to send out tsunami warnings or watches.

NOAA said it has made a “significant investment” in tsunami detection and warning systems since the 2004 disaster in Indonesia.

The agency increased the number of tsunami buoys around the world from six to 39 at a cost of about $1 million each, Mrs. Clark said. She said the expenditure “absolutely has helped” with tsunami detection.

She also said the Hawaii office and the International Tsunami Information Center recently held a workshop on American Samoa, which helped local officials know how to respond to the first signs of an earthquake.

“That was very helpful,” Mrs. Clark said.

As the official death toll rose Wednesday, dozens of people remained missing among the destroyed buildings and mud-soaked streets.

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