The Central Indian Government failed to act on time and then panicked all with false warning
Balaji Reddy, Special Correspondent
December 31, 2004

Now we know that the Indian military understood the Tsunami problem and informed the Government in time but the Indian Government officials failed to act with prudent and diligence. 

The Government officials have come up with kinds of pretext for not alerting the states and in some cases the state Government also failed to act on time. 

But Government’s issuance of false Tsunami warning yesterday is alarming. 

The Government was asked to implement the Tsunami warning system that cost close to $3 million. They never considered the same seriously. And after the massacre, they have issued false warning to create stampede in the panicky crowd. 

On Black Sunday, they worked in splendid isolation. On Thursday, a vague message from an experimental US firm and some random Internet downloads made the Union Home Ministry jerk its knee - and issue a tsunami alert at 10 am to all affected states, even asking them to begin evacuation. 

This set off a tidal wave of panic that hit the already battered and bruised coastline, from Tamil Nadu and Kerala to Andaman and Nicobar Islands and brought relief work to a standstill. For at least eight hours. It was only at 4.30 pm that Union Science and Technology Minister Kapil dismissed the alert urging all relief and rescue agencies to get back to the work that lay ahead. In fact, the text of the Home Ministry's warning - which until midnight hasn't yet been withdrawn - is a startling example of how not to communicate in the aftermath of a disaster. 

"A number of experts from outside the country are suggesting that another Tsunami may hit Indian Ocean today afternoon in the event of an earthquake of high intensity which may happen near Australian region". The alert admits that the Ministry was yet to carry out an assessment but shows touching faith in "various sources and the websites". And on this basis, it asks respective states and union territories to put their administrative machinery on "alert in coastal areas". But its punch-line was the one that kicked off the panic: "Arrangements may also be tied up for evacuation of people if required. Shore line up to 2 km into the main land may be made non-accessible to the general public". 

The same advice was sent out to the Armed Forces who, in turn, put their troops on alert for evacuation instead of continuing with the relief work. Within minutes, scenes of panic played out on TV from all across the affected areas. This led to a further spiral of panic prompting Sibal to make a few appearances and downplay the alert. It was only at his press conference that he said: "There was no official warning that a tsunami will hit the east coast once again in the next few hours." Using very strong words, he said that any claims of a predictions were "hogwash" and "unscientific" that need to be rejected. "We can only identify fault lines in the earth crust and suggest these areas might be prone to earthquake," Sibal said. 

To prove his point, he had with him Council for Scientific Industrial Research R A Mashelkar and Harsh Gupta from the Department of Science. "If anybody issued a warning, I say now there is no truth in assertion that earthquakes can be predicted...They were perhaps not aware of the scientific basis," said Sibal. When confronted with this, A K Rastogi, Secretary in-charge of disaster management in the Home Ministry, said: "I have no further comment. But my hunch is that the minister (Sibal) is being quoted out of context." Rastogi said the alert was based on inputs downloaded from a website of tsunami warning centre for Australia and Asia-Pacific. This was contested because the only reliable centre in the region is the one located at Hawaii. But Rastogi's refrain: "I have no further comments".

This was a complete contrast from the fact that several rooms down the same corridor, the MEA spokesperson was spelling out an ambitious effort being put together by India, US, Australia and Japan. Interestingly, one of the "foreign expert warnings" that formed the basis of the alert was a note passed from the Department of Science and Technology to the crisis management cell of the Home Ministry. 

This was a mail received from a Portland-based agency Terra Research that claimed its sensors installed in the US indicated that there was a possibility of a quake of the magnitude of 7.9-8.1 over next 12 hours at the fault line between Sumatra and New Zealand. If it happens in the water, the chance of tsunamis was real, said the warning. Sibal, however, categorically said that none of the scientists were consulted before the warning was issued in the morning.

"I even met the Home Minister in the morning who never mentioned this to me." After the panic, the scientists were asked to contact Terra Research and check its antecedents. The firm is manned by computer engineer Larry Park who is working on a "new science" based on "scalar resonance" energy that claims to predict earthquakes. When contacted by this website’s newspaper, Michael McNulty from Terra Research said: "It's a new technology with very little known about it as yet." Claiming that the firm can pick "signals" of earthquakes more then 7 on the Richter scale, McNulty claimed that his team had a forewarning of the December 26 quake but by the time they analysed data, it had already struck. "This time, we did not want to take chances, so we contacted the Indian embassy and we applaud the Indian Government for the speedy reaction and evacuation," said McNulty.