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Thursday, January 06, 2005
D.I.Y.
The most interesting take I've seen on the tsunami has, I think, been Bob Cringely's. He points out that international seismographic data is already available in realtime on the Internet. (In the case of last month's tsunami, Matt Drudge had reported the size and epicentre of the originating earthquake to millions of readers almost before the wave hit.) Instead of building a costly international warning system that serves only to provide employment for a bunch of scientists from the developed world, it may make sense to encourage the building of a lot of localized, robust, overlapping systems. Every beach in the world, Cringley argues persuasively, could have its own tsunami alert with a fairly trivial investment of capital and expertise. (India, at the very least, should not be short on the necessary technical know-how.)
It's also worth pointing out that the first tsunami warning in many of the affected harbours was a simultaneous "glitch" in GPS readouts on boats. I've read that a few fishermen and sailors basically asked each other "Hey, is your elevation suddenly twenty feet higher than it was a minute ago?", not realizing that the system was recording a genuine, disastrous change in the sea level. It seems that people already have the data they need to protect themselves--an event like this is just so rare that no one was ready for it. As Cringely says, if it's left up to the governments of the world, preparedness is likely to "take too darned long and spend too much money."
Posted by Colby Cosh on January 6, 2005 in International Affairs | Permalink
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