Inertia, protocol stalled warnings: Experts knew disaster loomed, but failed to tell potential victims -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Experts from Australia to Colorado sensed the earthquake immediately as it shook the Indian Ocean floor. But because of bureaucratic inertia, diplomatic protocol and primitive communications, news of the impending catastrophe never reached the beaches and coastal communities lying in its path. Bayu Pranata was sipping tea shortly after starting his 7 a.m. shift at the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency in West Sumatra, Indonesia, about 800 kilometres south of the quake's epicentre, when he was disturbed by a "tak, tak, tak" sound. It was so loud he thought mechanics had started working in the garage next door. Then he realized it was the pen on the seismograph. He hurriedly called the National Earthquake Centre in Jakarta, but ended up spending more than an hour trying to contact Indonesian disaster officials, in vain. At about the same time in Nagano, Japan, a short computer beep alerted Masashi Kobayashi, at the country's main earthquake observatory, that a big quake had taken place in the region. Within minutes, he contacted meteorological officials. Japan's emergency-management system quickly swung into gear, comparing the pattern of the quake to data on 100,000 other temblors and determined Japan faced no tsunami risk. Japanese officials didn't do much else with the information. In Australia, the seismology officer on duty at the geoscience agency in Canberra rushed back to the office after being alerted an earthquake was registered in the agency's computers. He determined the quake was likely to create a tsunami and within half an hour had sent a warning to Australia's national emergency system and to the foreign ministry, which notified some of its embassies overseas. No messages were given to foreign governments for fear of overstepping diplomatic protocol, officials say. As these warnings filtered slowly around bureaucratic channels across Asia Sunday morning, fishermen set out in flimsy boats, children splashed in the waves and tourists lay out on beaches or went snorkeling amid the coral. Unbeknownst to them, a tsunami of biblical proportions, created by one of the largest undersea earthquakes in decades, was speeding across the Indian Ocean. In a span of less than 10 hours, more than 80,000 people would be killed -- drowned, smashed into buildings or swept out to sea. Later, satellites would beam pictures of the devastation around the world in nanoseconds, but the tsunami moved virtually without warning from one country to the next. In Somalia, East Africa, victims were taken as completely by surprise as those who were struck in Indonesia many hours earlier. The failure to communicate the threat was, in large part, the result of a lack of sophisticated monitoring devices in the Indian Ocean that might have detected the quake sooner. It also was caused by economic conditions: The waves struck rural coastlines in some of the world's least-developed nations, where devices such as cable television and cellphones still are rare. It also was a failure of imagination -- the inability of dozens of experts and officials in a score of countries to fathom that an undersea earthquake could conceivably cause such havoc so far away. Indeed, officials all around the ocean basin were slow to react to the first reports of tremors. First to feel the waves was Banda Aceh, a city in Aceh province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, minutes after the quake occurred at 7:58 a.m. local time, underwater off Sumatra. More than 1,000 kilometres away in Jakarta, Budi Waluyo, an official with Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, received a call from Radio Elshinta around 8:30 a.m. local time. The reporter said he had received information about strong shakes in Medan that could be an earthquake. Mr. Waluyo said he needed further information before making a public announcement and tried calling his agency's station closest to the earthquake's centre in Banda Aceh. About an hour after the Jakarta office was alerted to the quake, it sent an e-mail to counterparts around the region and in Europe. "But of course, we only sent e-mail to the address we have. We did not call them," Mr. Waluyo said later. Mr. Waluyo also informed Indonesia's National Co-ordinating Board for disaster, headed by Indonesian Vice-President Yusuf Kalla. "But since it was Sunday, I am not sure who might receive the information. Our duties are simply to monitor earthquake, analyse the information and provide complete calculations of the impact of the earthquake," he said. Officials at the National Co-ordinating Board couldn't be contacted, nor could Mr. Kalla. Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency has 33 stations throughout the archipelago to monitor seismic activity. Some of the information generated has to be compiled and conveyed manually. Analysing the data to figure out the size and location of a quake can take as much as two hours, and even longer to determine whether it could generate a tsunami, according to the head of the agency's tsunami division. The quake's tremors also were picked up within minutes by seismology stations across Malaysia, where 65 people are reported dead. The nation's meteorological agency sifted data on the quake and passed it to the prime minister's office. The data didn't include a warning of possible tsunamis because Malaysia lacks the necessary equipment to make such predictions, said Low Kong Chiew, director of the agency's seismology division. Mr. Low faxed news of the quake -- with no mention of a tsunami -- to his branch offices. At 11:12 a.m. local time, Amirzudi Hashim, a duty officer at the small town of Bayan Lepas on the southwest end of Penang Island, received the news. The big waves rolled in about two hours later, to the shock of Mr. Amirzudi and thousands of tourists and beachgoers. "I never expected a tsunami here," Mr. Amirzudi says. About an hour after the quake struck, and shortly before the tsunami hit Thailand's tourist-packed beaches, Kathawuth Malairojsiri, a weather forecast chief at Thailand's meteorological department, received news of the quake. He immediately called a Bangkok traffic radio station, asking them to broadcast a tsunami warning, which they did, he said, adding that his office received more than 1,000 calls after that. Some of the hardest-hit areas, however, such as Sri Lanka and India, had no warning at all. "We simply didn't get any warnings from anybody," said Dutta Trayam, who heads the seismology department at the Indian Meteorological Department. With most of their equipment focused on tsunami threats in the Pacific Ocean, U.S. officials struggled to detect the tsunami and warn Indian Ocean countries about it in the aftermath of the quake. The U.S. Geological Survey's worldwide network of 120 seismographs immediately detected the earthquake. Based on this data, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, the U.S. agency responsible for tsunami warnings, issued its first "information bulletin" at 8:14 p.m. Eastern time to Pacific Rim countries, including Indonesia and Thailand. It said "no destructive tsunami threat exists based on historical earthquake and tsunami data." It wasn't until 75 minutes after the quake, around 9 p.m. Eastern time that the Geological Survey upgraded the quake's magnitude to 8.5 from 8.0. "That was our first indication there might be a far-flung threat," said Charles McCreery, director of the PTWC in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. When news reports of coastal casualties in Thailand, and then Sri Lanka, trickled in, Mr. McCreery's only international call had been to his counterparts in Australia. Now he got a call from the U.S. ambassador in Sri Lanka, wanting to know if any more waves would hit the island. PWTC analysts struggled to determine how much further the tsunami would extend and whether to issue a more serious threat warning. The U.S. naval base in Diego Garcia was reporting normal wave activity, and a buoy equipped with sensors in the Cocos Islands, the only gauge available to the U.S. in the Indian Ocean, indicated that sea level was less than 300 centimetres above normal. "We didn't know how to interpret all that," Mr. McCreery said. Australian disaster officials said there was no protocol that allowed them to contact their international counterparts. Within a half-hour of the quake, Geoscience Australia sent out an alert stating there had been a massive earthquake underwater that had the potential to generate a tsunami. The alert went to Australia's emergency services network, and officials at the country's embassies were notified. "There isn't an alert system set up throughout those countries. Most embassies are informed," Phil McFadden of Geoscience Australia, said. "We are a bit weak because it isn't our domain up there. We can't go trampling on other people's territory." In Indonesia, Mr. Pranata was "confused, worried and panicked," he said, because he wanted to spread the information because he knew tsunamis could occur. His efforts were thwarted as phones went unanswered at government offices and the state broadcast media. So he turned to private radio stations and got them to alert communities to evacuate coastal areas due to the chance of gigantic waves flooding coastal areas. Mr. Pranata continued to try to contact the government to no avail. In the Maldives islands off India, officials had no warning when the wave hit starting around 9:30 a.m. local time. "I woke up with the wave," said Ismail Firag, deputy director of planning for the Maldives Ministry of Tourism.