ri Lanka has the most extensive early-warning system of any country on Earth. We just don’t bother to use it. We had enough time to evacuate our entire coastline, but we didn’t use that time. Think about it. The wave only reached some two kilometres inland at its worst, and in many places only a few hundred yards. If a person on the beach started walking away from the sea 15 minutes before the wave arrived, he or she would have been safe. The tsunami took some three hours to reach Sri Lanka, from Sumatra, after the earthquake-monitoring station at Pallekelle detected the quake. In other words, our scientists had ample warning, but didn’t use their brains and alert the public.
How does one warn the public, you may ask? Well, it would be virtually impossible to find a household in this country that doesn’t have a radio or television. What’s more, our ‘hardly-working population’ keeps them turned on at all times… In addition, this island is blessed with thousands of temples, mosques, kovils and churches which possess loudspeakers to blare out prayers. We also have about three million fixed and mobile telephones and a culture of gossiping that ensures our 19 million population would know even the most mundane event very quickly.
So, there are many ways to warn our public. But none of them were used.
We’ve got an earthquake monitoring and measuring station, a Geological Survey Department staffed by many learned scientists, a fairly modern weather-forecasting service, a huge civil service with some 1.5 million government servants – and much, much more. What we lack, however, is a little common sense. That invaluable asset could have prevented the loss of over 30,000 lives.
Let’s analyse what happened on 26 December 2004. The earthquake at 6.59 a.m. was detected immediately by monitoring stations around the world, including our own at Pallekelle and the Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii. It was initially recorded as a quake at 8.0 on the Richter Scale – which in itself made it one of the strongest quakes in recorded history, capable of flattening cities or spawning a tsunami. The location was known.
American scientists realised the possibility of a tsunami in the Indian Ocean and tried desperately to phone authorities in South Asia. But they failed, because they didn’t have the proper contacts: Sri Lanka and India, for example, were not even part of their network. Strange, how our political leaders and scientists are such global nonentities that folks in Hawaii haven’t even heard of them.
Sri Lanka’s scientists, specifically those at the Geological Survey & Mines Bureau, looked at the data from Pallekelle – and apparently did nothing. For some incredible reason, it never occurred to them that there was a danger to Sri Lanka – and that the public should be warned. If American scientists thought there was a danger of tsunamis, why didn’t our own? Our scientists have trotted out the reasoning that they didn’t expect Sri Lanka to be hit by a tsunami, because we haven’t been hit by one before. What kind of excuse is that? Any coastal area on Earth is vulnerable to being devastated by a tsunami.
Sri Lankan history has recorded two tsunamis: one in the legend of Vihara Maha Devi; and the other after the 1883 Krakatoa eruption. In addition, fishermen living along the Batticaloa coast will tell you that small tidal waves spawned by quakes off Sumatra hit the east coast every few years and cause minor damage to boats, although they usually don’t kill anyone.
Even if the geologists knew a tsunami was approaching, there was no mechanism at the Geological Bureau to alert the public. Not for them the worldly work of saving millions from the wrath of nature. These stargazers only record and analyse passively. All it would have taken was one phone call to Rupavahini or SLBC, and millions would have had the news flashed across their TV screens or radios. But to do that, someone had to show some common sense.
It’s not fair to blame the geologists alone. Parliament has been sitting on the National Disaster Response Act for years now. Of course, lawmakers have more important work to do – such as stealing maces, manhandling monks and assaulting each other…
The highest in the land was on vacation when the disaster hit – but that is a mere detail, as is the fact that she took several days to return to Sri Lanka. Let’s be charitable and assume that the national carrier, which flies twice daily to London, couldn’t find a seat for her excellency.
Foreign aid to set up a warning system? We don’t need it. We’ve got one already – we just didn’t use it.