An early warning system that could have prevented some deaths in the tsunami that hit an Indonesian island on Friday has been stalled in the testing phase for years.
The high-tech system of seafloor sensors, data-laden sound waves and fiber-optic cable was meant to replace a system set up after an earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 250,000 people in the region in 2004.
But inter-agency wrangling and delays in getting just 1 billion rupiah (USD 69,000) to complete the project means the system hasn't moved beyond a prototype developed with USD 3 million from the US National Science Foundation.
It is too late for central Sulawesi, where walls of water up to 6 metres high and a magnitude 7.5 earthquake killed at least 832 people in the cities of Palu and Donggala, tragically highlighting the weaknesses of the existing warning system and low public awareness about how to respond to warnings.
"To me this is a tragedy for science, even more so a tragedy for the Indonesian people as the residents of Sulawesi are discovering right now," said Louise Comfort, a University of Pittsburgh expert in disaster management who has led the US side of the project, which also involves engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Indonesian scientists and disaster experts.
"It's a heartbreak to watch when there is a well-designed sensor network that could provide critical information," she said.
More From This Section
After a 2004 tsunami killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, more than half of them in the Indonesian province of Aceh, a concerted international effort was launched to improve tsunami warning capabilities, particularly in the Indian Ocean and for Indonesia, one of world's most earthquake and tsunami-prone countries.
Part of that drive, using funding from Germany and elsewhere, included deploying a network of 22 buoys connected to seafloor sensors to transmit advance warnings.
A sizeable earthquake off Sumatra in 2016 that caused panic in the coastal city of Padang revealed that none of the buoys costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each were working. They'd been disabled by vandalism or theft or just stopped working due to a lack of funds for maintenance.
The backbone of Indonesia's tsunami warning system today is a network of 134 tidal gauge stations augmented by land-based seismographs, sirens in about 55 locations and a system to disseminate warnings by text message.
When the 7.5 quake hit just after 6 p.m., the meteorology and geophysics agency issued a tsunami alert, warning of potential for waves of 0.5 to 3 metres. It ended the warning at 6.36 p.m.
That drew harsh online criticism but the agency's head said the warning was lifted after the tsunami hit. It's unclear exactly what time tsunami waves rushed into the narrow bay that Palu is built around.
"The tide gauges are operating, but they are limited in providing any advance warning. None of the 22 buoys are functioning," Comfort said.
"In the Sulawesi incident, BMKG (the meteorology and geophysics agency) cancelled the tsunami warning too soon, because it did not have data from Palu. This is the data the tsunami detection system could provide," she said.
Adam Switzer, a tsunami expert at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, said it's a "little unfair" to say the agency got it wrong.
"What it shows is that the tsunami models we have now are too simplistic," he said. "They don't take into account multiple events, multiple quakes within a short period of time. They don't take into account submarine landslides."