AFTER THE TSUNAMI – HARNESSING AUSTRALIAN EXPERTISE FOR RECOVERY
Canberra, 31 March 2005

Session 3: Reporting back and general discussion
Chair: Professor Leon Mann
Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia

Group 1: Warning and preparedness
Rapporteur: Dr Mark Leonard

Powerpoint presentation (18KB)

We were talking about warning and preparedness, and what quickly came out of that is you end up with three topics you have to worry about. One is what you might call the scientific/technical aspects of how you locate an earthquake, how you deal with the tide/sea level data, how you might predict run-up. Another one is how you disseminate that information down to the people who need to know this. And then the preparedness aspect is making sure that people are prepared, they know what to do when such a warning comes through, and various authorities know where they are passing that on.

As to Australia’s current capacity, we are pretty well placed in several areas. We have a fairly mature rapid earthquake alert system at the moment. Some of the more sophisticated analyses that Phil Cummins showed this morning we don’t really have the domestic capacity for, but we certainly have the people who are capable of building that fairly quickly. The deep ocean tsunami modelling: there are several institutions in Australia with pretty good skills in that.

The areas where we are a bit poorer include the tide gauge network. There are essentially no real-time Australian tide gauges in Australia; they are all designed to be dialled up manually. There is no central repository for all the different states, and national run different networks. There is no central repository for all data. We of course have no deep-ocean buoys at all. There are none in the Indian Ocean that I am aware of, and certainly Australia doesn’t have any off our shores.

And then some of the other key elements that would be involved in a tsunami warning system would be run-up models, or inundation models. If you have a big earthquake off Sumatra that causes a tsunami, what are the key areas that you have to worry about, and exactly how far inland will be affected? That is very difficult modelling to do, and requires a lot of data we don’t currently have. That said, Australia is a developed nation and we do have the capacities to fairly quickly fill in these gaps.

As to warning systems, we have good systems in place for what I have called non sudden-impact disasters – cyclones, hail. For cyclones you generally have days of warning, for hail you normally have several hours. These systems in Australia are fairly mature. Public awareness of, for example, cyclones, bushfires, what you should do, is fairly good. It is not so good for earthquakes and tsunamis. But we do have the expertise in how to build these systems and how we might want to apply them to tsunami early warning systems. And we do have a great deal of expertise at every level of government in Australia on building of community awareness and education programs. So we might not currently have that knowledge out in the general public; we certainly have the skills to build that.

So the gaps, which I have been touching on: we would need to improve the seismic network to actually run tsunami early warning systems. We have a pretty good network in Australia but it is not up to scratch for dealing with these very large earthquakes; it has been designed primarily for smaller Australian earthquakes, and that requires different types of instrumentation. As I mentioned before, the sea-level gauges are fairly inadequate in Australia, and the real-time processing of the seismic and sea-level data in Australia is inadequate.

One of the key gaps in knowledge is an appreciation by everybody, I think – the scientists, the government, the public – of what we are going to do about all the false warnings. What is an acceptable false warning rate? The lesson from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre is that you don’t need too many false warnings before people stop taking you seriously. But particularly in the next couple of years while we are building a fairly robust system, this is going to be an issue. We are not quite sure what the answer is to that one, but it is a matter of concern.

Other gaps, as I touched upon earlier: new systems and thinking will need to be done on how we are going to go ahead. For an Australian tsunami on, say, the north-west coast, from Java you have got less than two hours. At best you are going to get a verified warning out in 30 to 40 minutes – just the travel time; the physics limits you. And it’s about that kind of rate with the kinds of networks, realistically, that we are going to be able to put in. Japan has that down to a few minutes, but they literally have hundreds if not thousands of seismic stations scattered along their coast. No-one thinks such a system is going to be built across the entire Indonesian archipelago.

Public awareness of earthquakes and tsunami risk in Australia is very low. I expect that amongst most Australians, even those that remember Newcastle would think it was such a rare event as there is basically no earthquake or tsunami risk in Australia. Whilst it is low in comparison with countries with Indonesia, it does exist.

It was unclear to us just how prepared emergency authorities are to deal with catastrophic disasters. They are extremely skilled in dealing with containable disasters like major bushfires, major cyclones, major floods. But catastrophic ones may exceed the capacity of local authorities. Unfortunately we didn’t really have anyone in our group that could talk to that, but that was something that was of concern.

Contribution to our region (1)
(Click on image for a larger version)

Contribution to our region: this is where we thought Australia actually, across the whole, both the warning and preparedness, had a fair bit to contribute. Of the Indian Ocean countries we are the most developed nation, and we are the only country that has been running earthquake alert services for some time. We do have a great deal of expertise in ocean modelling, sea-level monitoring, operating tide gauges and things like that. So listed here are some of the things we thought were the more technical aspects that we could contribute to the region. We essentially have the expertise in doing a lot of this.

Contribution to our region (2)
(Click on image for a larger version)

The last slide was more on the preparedness and warning. There are a lot of people in Australia with expertise in developing education material, and we could play a role in helping countries develop education material and education programs – encourage these things to be built into school curriculums and the kinds of material Australia has in its mostly high school systems. We thought that any kind of long-term preparedness would probably require strong education system involvement. We are thinking something that is going to be working in 10 or 20 years’ time; we thought the schools are probably the only place to build this.

Similarly, training emergency management agencies, to help build capacity, is something Australia has expertise in and could certainly provide. And one of the issues that Hugh Davies talked about was the value of having scientists come to a region post-disaster and actually provide expertise, both to the government and to people, to reassure them about what had happened. But the flip-side of that is that not all the scientists that went to Papua New Guinea after the Sissano Lagoon actually added value. They actually used resources. So that one has to be balanced out.

The other dot point, which I didn’t get time to type in, was about warning for local tsunamis generated from nearby earthquakes, such as the Sissano Lagoon. The only real warning system is local education, and it is not clear that has been entirely understood in the region yet.

Questions/discussion

Paul Grundy – I have just one comment about the lack of knowledge on things like run-up and so on. I just wonder if we haven’t communicated en