Tsunami warning system to cover Caribbean

PROVOKED BY the disaster in Southeast Asia and eastern Africa, US officials announced Friday that they will rapidly deploy a tsunami  warning system for the Caribbean and the East Coast of the United States. According to a report in the Miami Herald yesterday, the system involves placement of about 30 deepwater detection  buoys and other sensors in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Pacific. It will contribute to a global programme being discussed by dozens of nations.

Though planned years ago, deployment in the Atlantic and Caribbean  was accelerated by last month’s mammoth disaster in and around the Indian Ocean. The expanded system — which also will better protect  residents of Central and South America — will cost about US$37.5 million and could be in place by mid-2007. “The world’s attention has been focused on people who live near the edge of oceans, and we have a responsibility to respond to their needs,’’ John H Marburger III, science advisor to US president Bush, said during a news conference in Washington, DC. Still, tsunamis occur from time to time in the Atlantic basin, which includes the Caribbean  Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, and virtually all coastal residents are at least theoretically vulnerable to the series of giant waves that can mark a tsunami.

Most at risk in this part of the world are the Caribbean islands, which sit atop or near a fault line. Tsunamis — smaller than last month’s but deadly nevertheless — struck the Virgin Islands in 1867, Puerto Rico in 1918 and the Dominican Republic in 1946. A tsunami battered several eastern Caribbean islands with 20-foot waves in 1755. A tsunami warning system already is in place at a university in Puerto Rico, but its scope is limited, focused mostly on Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.