Tsunami Regrets, He Has a Few

The first expert to recieve alerts about the Jakarta Tsunami is experiencing considerable regret over his handling of the disaster, and is haunted by the possibility that he might have been able to lessen the over-100,000 deaths that have been reported in the region so far.

American Barry Hirshorn worries he took too long to size up the quake and the resulting tsunami and was unable to warn those in the path of the horrific wave.Hirshorn was one of two geophysicists on duty at the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre when the quake struck. It was 2.59pm on Christmas Day in Honolulu...The initial readings put the quake at an eight. Hirshorn estimated that could cause, at worst, a tsunami that might hit part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra but would not cause too much damage...About 15 minutes after the quake, according to normal procedure, a bulletin was sent to government agencies and military contacts in the 26 countries that participate in the Pacific tsunami warning system, including Australia....But most of the countries devastated by the tsunami are not part of this scheme...About 40 minutes after the bulletin was issued the size of the quake was upgraded to 8.5 - five times bigger than previously thought. (A few hours later it was finalised at 9.) "I got one of the first lumps in my stomach when we realised it was an 8.5. Then it got bigger and so did the lumps in my stomach. We thought this is really serious," he said... Hirshorn and colleague Stuart Weinstein started trying to telephone countries to warn them. But it was futile... "It was a bootstraps operation. We just didn't have numbers for that region."

It is inevitable that people involved with this disaster are feeling this way. They wonder what they might have done better, what might have been different, what might have turned aside this wave. But the fact is that this was not a mistake - it was an event, a Act of God in the most literal sense. It is not this experts fault. It is like 9/11. A previously unimaginable happening.



Though maybe it is time to put that early warning system in place for the next time. If not, then it will be our fault for not acting, once we understood.