"Oh, and one more thing: I had someone tell me recently claiming that some in Southeast Asia are blaming America for not providing an early warning to the nations in the area, saying our military bases in the area would have had the ability to warn people but did not. Others are telling me this is nonsense and that no one of significance had even made such allegations. Anyone got the poop on that? Googling around didn't find me anything one way or the other."
Sounds like Mahathir! But unfortunately, I've heard nothing in any of the media here-ish to indicate that he's emerged from retirement to gift us with any zingers along those lines.
If there is an actual source for that one, I'm sure the military was bought off by the Jews!
I read yesterday that Thai meterologists were given warning that an earthquake had happened, but passed on issuing a tsunami warning because they decided couldn't afford the lawsuits from the tourism industry if they evacuated to coast and nothing occured.
Belmont Club is reporting there was a warning, sort of.
The Pacific tsunami warning system issued a bulletin that it was not going to affect the Pacific basin, yet there weren't persons with sufficient training in the Indian ocean area to correctly interpret it, nor with sufficient means to get the warnings to the population in place.
If we do something, we're oppressive imperialists. If we don't do something, we're cold-hearted bastards. To Hell with them. (By "them" I mean the America-hating intellectuals who constitute so-called "world opinion", not the actual victims of the quake.)
The catastrophic death toll in Asia caused by a massive tsunami might have been reduced had India and Sri Lanka been part of an international warning system designed to warn coastal communities about potentially deadly waves, scientists say.
Some 5,300 people in India and Sri Lanka were among the nearly 10,000 people killed after being hit by walls of water triggered by a tremendous earthquake early Sunday off Sumatra.
The warning system is designed to alert nations that potentially destructive waves may hit their coastlines within three to 14 hours. Scientists said seismic networks recorded Sunday's massive earthquake, but without wave sensors in the region, there was no way to determine the direction a tsunami would travel.
A single wave station south of the earthquake's epicenter registered tsunami activity less than one meter high heading south toward Australia, researchers said.
The waves also struck resort beaches on the west coast of the Thailand's south peninsula, killing hundreds. Although Thailand belongs to the international tsunami warning network, its west coast does not have the system's wave sensors mounted on ocean buoys.
The northern tip of the earthquake fault is located near the Andaman Islands, and tsunamis appear to have rushed eastward toward the Thai resort of Phuket on Sunday morning when the community was just stirring.
"They had no tidal gauges and they had no warning," said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo, which monitors seismic activity worldwide. "There are no buoys in the Indian Ocean and that's where this tsunami occurred."
...
The international warning system was started in 1965, the year after tsunamis associated with a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Alaska in 1964. It is administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Member states include all the major Pacific rim nations in North America, Asia and South America, was well as the Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand. It also includes France, which has sovereignty over some Pacific islands, and Russia.
However, India and Sri Lanka are not members. "That's because tsunamis are much less frequent in the Indian Ocean," McCreary said.
I'll admit that I do have somewhat of an emotional reaction when I see the videos. I think it's directly related to seeing something that's so completely normal and predictable -- water -- become such a destructive force almost instantly. It takes one's view of a typical every day thing and completely shatters it. And this is coming from someone who survived three direct hits from hurricanes this year.
Most of the videos I've seen, the wave just looks like a wave. It's not like a "Day after tomorrow" wave, and I think that tends to blunt some of the emotional reaction. Also, you don't really see people dying, like, say, people jumping out of buildings on sept. 11.
It's a difficult visual nut to crack, why we respond to some disaster visuals more than others. For instance, I'm watching a volcano documentary about Montserrat right now, and the pyroplastic flow comes down the mountain, and I know it's killing 19 people, and it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal.
Viewing of this stuff arouses no particular horror in me. I long have accepted the view that every single death is a tragedy, but that mass death -- 10,000, 100,000, a million or more, or whatever, is just another statistic.
Even more so with natural disasters caused by the seas.
We often forget that some 7/8 of the surface of this planet is covered by water, and nearly all of that by open ocean water. The land areas that comprise the remainder include include numerous hugely-overpopulated low-lying coastlines and relatively small islands, from all of which, escape in emergencies are either difficult, impractical, or impossible.
The relatively continuous movements -- including subduction -- of the tectonic surface plates of our planet, including not only their relationships to continental earthquakes but also to seabed earthguakes and to volcanoes, has been studied and well understood since about 1967. Along with that has come understanding of how sudden shifts in the displacement of even small parts of a seabed can cause gigantic tsunamis to race across oceans and kill large populations impartially, ubiquitously, and en masse. These have happened before many, many times. They shall recur, many, many times.
And their effects shall become exacerbated with the gradual rise of sea levels expected in this century. New Orleans, for example, is not a likely candidate for a tsunami. But the outer barrier islands of tidal swamps that absorb so much flood water around the the Louisiana delta are disappearing even faster sea levels are rising. By 2050, New Orleans, already partly below sea level and protected from the Mississippi river and lake Ponchartrain mostly by gigantic levees, is likely to become an american Atlantis within the next hundred years or so. The same for much of south Florida and areas along the eastern seaboard. This means that massive population evacuations are vital almost every time any one of a number of annual hurricanes hit the local shoreline, bringing with it a terrifying wall of ocean water sometimes 12-15 or more feet high.
But tsunamis, such as the one generated by the explosion and destruction of the island of Krakatoa in the Sunda strait in 1883, rose to stupendous heights great enough to capsize any ship and crush or drown any humanity caught on or near any coastline that it struck.
The fact is, no warning system that can be devised can be sounded in time to do any good, especially in third-world countries with large population masses living on or near coastlines exposed to such a menace. Even a well-organized country such as the United States can effectuate actions to move more than a relatively small number of persons far enough away from any US coastline threatened by a wall of ocean water that could conceivably smash everything along such a coast and even deeper inland.
What is more likely to happen is that this episode of devastation, although terrible for those whose families are numbered among the victims, will in time be forgotten. And life will return to normal. Until the next crisis brought on my man fighting the sea and losing. As always.
The world is becoming incessantly more crowded in all the wrong places even as sea levels relentlessly rise (for numerous reasons besides so-called global warming). Therefore, aside from international band-aid relief efforts, backed up by lugubrious speeches by various world notables, there really is no answer. If you want to be sure of not being drowned in salt water, stay away from oceans.
Hrm
No, the vids *do* chill me.
Maybe 2 factors
- I tend to notice the poeple being drawn into the waves and rushed out, knowing they'll never be seen alive again
- Navy vet. Its a fear, seeing that kind of flooding. I know what it can do, in a gut-sense/not intellectual kind of way.
Dean, you asked for help digging up info on whether America could have provided an early warning to the Indian Ocean area. As usual, Wretchard (of Belmont Club has some solid facts; among others, the text of a warning E-mail from the Pacific watch system that detected the quake but concluded, "THIS EARTHQUAKE IS LOCATED OUTSIDE THE PACIFIC. NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS BASED ON HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA". (All-caps in original, sorry). Wretchard concludes, "Although the recipients of the warning were the members of the Pacific group there may have been enough information in the first bulletin to ring alarm bells had any trained person concerned with the Indian Ocean read it."
My conclusion: the people responsible for watching the Pacific Ocean did their jobs. "Hmm, an earthquake. But it's not going to hit my area of responsibility. OK, dismiss that one, go on to looking for the next one." They assumed that someone was doing the same thing for the Indian Ocean, and that that person would sound the alarm. Unfortunately, no-one was.
The question being: has anyone of significance blamed the US for this? I heard one report that some public official or other had outright excoriated the US for this but I can't find confirmation of that.
As to your more interesting, psychological rather than political, point, I'm much the same way. Somehow, a wave, a volcano, a storm cloud, a nuclear mushroom cloud, don't look so scary to me by themselves, even though I know that they are. But a tornado does look terrifying to me. I've never lived in tornado territory, fortunately, but it's been one of my nightmares. Maybe from watching "The Wisard of Oz"? I don't know, that tornado took her to Oz, which was a wonderful place.
Belated update: after making that post, I received the following E-mail from Michael Jabaley, who sent it from a navy.mil E-mail address. He said, "Feel free to pass this along", so I'm posting it. The reason it's taken me until now is because the E-mail got caught in my spam-trap for a few days.
The following is a copy&paste of the complete text (although not the complete headers) of the E-mail:
From: "Jabaley, Michael E CDR CSP N70A" <xxx@navy.mil>
To: <rmunn@pobox.com>
Subject: Your Post on Dean's World
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 09:32:47 -1000
Robin,
"Dean, you asked for help digging up info on whether America could have provided an early warning to the Indian Ocean area. ........
My conclusion: the people responsible for watching the Pacific Ocean did their jobs. "Hmm, an earthquake. But it's not going to hit my area of responsibility. OK, dismiss that one, go on to looking for the next one." They assumed that someone was doing the same thing for the Indian Ocean, and that that person would sound the alarm. Unfortunately, no-one was."
I read your post on Dean's World and wanted to give some more information about the Pacific Warning Center. I don't really want to register and post for myself, but please feel free to pass on this info.
You were a bit unfair in your characterization of what the staff at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did that day. The following article is from December 29th's Honolulu Advertiser and describes a frantic effort to get in touch with anyone that could make an evacuation happen. I think it would be fair to say they did everything they could but were hampered by the lack of an organized response structure in the Indian Ocean countries. Hope this helps.
* Disease could double deaths * Former Kaua'i man a victim * Sri Lankans here organize drive for tsunami aid * Many turn to technology to find missing loved ones <<ole0.bmp>> Join our discussion board on Hawai'i-related information and stories about the tsunami disaster By Jan TenBruggencate <mailto:jant@honoluluadvertiser.com>
Advertiser Science Writer
Geophysicists frantically worked the phones from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in 'Ewa Beach on Christmas night, trying largely in vain to warn Indian Ocean nations of the incoming tsunami disaster.
In vain, because in most of those nations, there is no warning mechanism. Tens of thousands were killed.
"The first thing, when you realize the quake is a magnitude 8, you go, 'Uh!' You feel that gut hit, that this guy is big," said Barry Hirshorn, one of the geophysicists on duty Saturday afternoon. The crisis built as the magnitude was recalculated to 8.5, and then revised to 9. Each upward revision indicated the quake was several times more powerful than the geophysicists initially thought. A magnitude 9 quake is 10 times stronger than one measuring 8.
Just days later, the same officials who tried to sound the alert are brainstorming the establishment of an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system that will save lives when the next tsunami hits.
The International Tsunami Information Center in downtown Honolulu and the National Weather Service/Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in 'Ewa Beach are discussing what to do next and how to go about making sure this doesn't happen again, said Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information Center.
On the afternoon of Christmas Day in Honolulu, the 'Ewa Beach center issued a Pacificwide e-mail tsunami bulletin 18 minutes after the quake hit, but the crew quickly realized that most potential victims weren't among the center's Pacific nation clients. The biggest hit would be in the Indian Ocean. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center's only Indian Ocean clients are Australia and Indonesia, which have both Pacific and Indian ocean coasts.
And the Indian Ocean, which had not had a tsunami in recorded history, has no oceanwide tsunami detection system, and no warning system.
The folks in Honolulu knew a disaster was on its way, but they had no way to alert the potential victims - the tourists on remote resort island beaches, people in coastal towns, those in fishing villages - from Indonesia to Africa, from India to scatterings of mid-oceanic coral islands, and all the coasts between.
"We started thinking about who we could call. We talked to the State Department Operations Center and to the military. We called embassies. We talked to the navy in Sri Lanka, any local government official we could get hold of," Hirshorn said. "We were fairly careful about who we called. We wanted to call people who could help."
He and fellow duty officer Stuart Weinstein quickly called in their boss, geophysicist-in-charge Charles "Chip" McCreery.
"The three of us were full-time using every line we had. At that point, everybody was getting, not crazy, but multitasking," Hirshorn said.
The desperate effort was to warn people thousands of miles away to get off their beaches. The frustration was knowing that even if government leaders could be reached, most countries had no effective civil defense mechanism for getting the information to the people.
"We spoke to people in the foreign ministries, and everywhere we could think of. We were collecting phone numbers, e-mail addresses - whatever contact information we could. There was a conference call with officials in Madagascar," Weinstein said.
The message, if it had reached people on the coasts, was simple: start walking away from the sea.
"You just have to be a 15-minute walk away from most coasts to be safe," Hirshorn said.
The geophysicists worked through the night and into Sunday, sounding the warning as the tsunami continued to sweep across the vast ocean basin, crushing one coastal area after another.
Within hours, as aftershocks repeatedly set off the 'Ewa Beach center's alarms, the tsunami warning community started working on ways to prevent a catastrophe like this one in any future Indian Ocean tsunami.
Officials said there are two key requirements for a good warning system: sensors to detect the earthquake and any resulting tsunami, and a mechanism for alerting the public.
Hirshorn said water-level gauges are needed along coastlines throughout the region, with data sent to the Pacific Tsunami Warning System and other interested agencies. That way, the size of the tsunami can be gauged and used to warn people next in line. He also recommended more expensive but critically important deep-ocean monitoring buoy systems that detect the power of tsunamis in the mid-ocean.
"If you have gauges, you can see what's going on. The upshot is, more gauges, more lives saved," he said.
The other end of an effective network is the local warning process. Nations in the region need to establish systems for letting people in danger zones know.
"Risk reduction involves not only a technology-based warning system which is able to effectively reach people on the beach at any moment, but also the component of education, awareness and preparedness which are essential to enable citizens to sensibly act during a local or distant tsunami," Kong said.
"There is much discussion being circulated internationally and within NOAA and the USGS on how to best assist and to move forward in a manner which will develop increased capacity by nations to mitigate the hazard," she said.
Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com <mailto:jant@honoluluadvertiser.com> or (808) 245-3074.
I would like to post that as a primary article, however, I'm not sure I want to publish that mail address. Indeed, are you sure we should have that mail address public even in the comments here? It's likely to get spam-trapped.
"xxx@navy.mil" is not Mr. Jabaley's actual E-mail address; I already censored it. And after checking out the links included in E-mail, I realized that the bulk of the information in his E-mail was a copy&paste of the Honolulu Advertiser article titled "'Ewa center tried in vain to help".
As you can see by checking out that link, and the text of the E-mail, Mr. Jabaley added nothing to the article other than his personal opinion that the staff did more to help than I had originally thought. The source of the actual new information is the Honolulu Advertiser article, not Mr. Jabaley, so I don't see that his E-mail address would need to appear anywhere. I'm not even sure you'd need to mention his name, if you're concerned about privacy. I thought about omitting it myself, but decided against omitting it because I didn't want it to sound like I was claiming this was from me.
Maybe you could phrase it, "A reader in the Navy sent in this article..." if you want to keep Mr. Jabaley's name off the front page. Or if you'd like to ask him personally what he'd prefer, send me an E-mail and I'll pass on his real E-mail address to you.
Sounds like Mahathir! But unfortunately, I've heard nothing in any of the media here-ish to indicate that he's emerged from retirement to gift us with any zingers along those lines.
If there is an actual source for that one, I'm sure the military was bought off by the Jews!
The Pacific tsunami warning system issued a bulletin that it was not going to affect the Pacific basin, yet there weren't persons with sufficient training in the Indian ocean area to correctly interpret it, nor with sufficient means to get the warnings to the population in place.
It's a bit iffy, calling the Malaysian Ministry and saying "Hey, this is Hawaii, and there's a tidal wave coming!"
Here's one useful article: ...
Hope that clears things up a bit.
It's a difficult visual nut to crack, why we respond to some disaster visuals more than others. For instance, I'm watching a volcano documentary about Montserrat right now, and the pyroplastic flow comes down the mountain, and I know it's killing 19 people, and it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal.
Weird.
Even more so with natural disasters caused by the seas.
We often forget that some 7/8 of the surface of this planet is covered by water, and nearly all of that by open ocean water. The land areas that comprise the remainder include include numerous hugely-overpopulated low-lying coastlines and relatively small islands, from all of which, escape in emergencies are either difficult, impractical, or impossible.
The relatively continuous movements -- including subduction -- of the tectonic surface plates of our planet, including not only their relationships to continental earthquakes but also to seabed earthguakes and to volcanoes, has been studied and well understood since about 1967. Along with that has come understanding of how sudden shifts in the displacement of even small parts of a seabed can cause gigantic tsunamis to race across oceans and kill large populations impartially, ubiquitously, and en masse. These have happened before many, many times. They shall recur, many, many times.
And their effects shall become exacerbated with the gradual rise of sea levels expected in this century. New Orleans, for example, is not a likely candidate for a tsunami. But the outer barrier islands of tidal swamps that absorb so much flood water around the the Louisiana delta are disappearing even faster sea levels are rising. By 2050, New Orleans, already partly below sea level and protected from the Mississippi river and lake Ponchartrain mostly by gigantic levees, is likely to become an american Atlantis within the next hundred years or so. The same for much of south Florida and areas along the eastern seaboard. This means that massive population evacuations are vital almost every time any one of a number of annual hurricanes hit the local shoreline, bringing with it a terrifying wall of ocean water sometimes 12-15 or more feet high.
But tsunamis, such as the one generated by the explosion and destruction of the island of Krakatoa in the Sunda strait in 1883, rose to stupendous heights great enough to capsize any ship and crush or drown any humanity caught on or near any coastline that it struck.
The fact is, no warning system that can be devised can be sounded in time to do any good, especially in third-world countries with large population masses living on or near coastlines exposed to such a menace. Even a well-organized country such as the United States can effectuate actions to move more than a relatively small number of persons far enough away from any US coastline threatened by a wall of ocean water that could conceivably smash everything along such a coast and even deeper inland.
What is more likely to happen is that this episode of devastation, although terrible for those whose families are numbered among the victims, will in time be forgotten. And life will return to normal. Until the next crisis brought on my man fighting the sea and losing. As always.
The world is becoming incessantly more crowded in all the wrong places even as sea levels relentlessly rise (for numerous reasons besides so-called global warming). Therefore, aside from international band-aid relief efforts, backed up by lugubrious speeches by various world notables, there really is no answer. If you want to be sure of not being drowned in salt water, stay away from oceans.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Therefore, there should be no surprises here.
No, the vids *do* chill me.
Maybe 2 factors
- I tend to notice the poeple being drawn into the waves and rushed out, knowing they'll never be seen alive again
- Navy vet. Its a fear, seeing that kind of flooding. I know what it can do, in a gut-sense/not intellectual kind of way.
My conclusion: the people responsible for watching the Pacific Ocean did their jobs. "Hmm, an earthquake. But it's not going to hit my area of responsibility. OK, dismiss that one, go on to looking for the next one." They assumed that someone was doing the same thing for the Indian Ocean, and that that person would sound the alarm. Unfortunately, no-one was.
The question being: has anyone of significance blamed the US for this? I heard one report that some public official or other had outright excoriated the US for this but I can't find confirmation of that.
Oh, I'm sure these "anyone's" think they are significant, it's just the rest of us that disagree.
:-)
The following is a copy&paste of the complete text (although not the complete headers) of the E-mail:
From: "Jabaley, Michael E CDR CSP N70A" <xxx@navy.mil>
To: <rmunn@pobox.com>
Subject: Your Post on Dean's World
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 09:32:47 -1000
Robin,
"Dean, you asked for help digging up info on whether America could have provided an early warning to the Indian Ocean area. ........
My conclusion: the people responsible for watching the Pacific Ocean did their jobs. "Hmm, an earthquake. But it's not going to hit my area of responsibility. OK, dismiss that one, go on to looking for the next one." They assumed that someone was doing the same thing for the Indian Ocean, and that that person would sound the alarm. Unfortunately, no-one was."
I read your post on Dean's World and wanted to give some more information about the Pacific Warning Center. I don't really want to register and post for myself, but please feel free to pass on this info.
You were a bit unfair in your characterization of what the staff at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did that day. The following article is from December 29th's Honolulu Advertiser and describes a frantic effort to get in touch with anyone that could make an evacuation happen. I think it would be fair to say they did everything they could but were hampered by the lack of an organized response structure in the Indian Ocean countries. Hope this helps.
Michael Jabaley
'Ewa center tried in vain to help
* Disease could double deaths
* Former Kaua'i man a victim
* Sri Lankans here organize drive for tsunami aid
* Many turn to technology to find missing loved ones
<<ole0.bmp>> Join our discussion board on Hawai'i-related information and stories about the tsunami disaster
By Jan TenBruggencate <mailto:jant@honoluluadvertiser.com>
Advertiser Science Writer
Geophysicists frantically worked the phones from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in 'Ewa Beach on Christmas night, trying largely in vain to warn Indian Ocean nations of the incoming tsunami disaster.
In vain, because in most of those nations, there is no warning mechanism. Tens of thousands were killed.
"The first thing, when you realize the quake is a magnitude 8, you go, 'Uh!' You feel that gut hit, that this guy is big," said Barry Hirshorn, one of the geophysicists on duty Saturday afternoon. The crisis built as the magnitude was recalculated to 8.5, and then revised to 9. Each upward revision indicated the quake was several times more powerful than the geophysicists initially thought. A magnitude 9 quake is 10 times stronger than one measuring 8.
Just days later, the same officials who tried to sound the alert are brainstorming the establishment of an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system that will save lives when the next tsunami hits.
The International Tsunami Information Center in downtown Honolulu and the National Weather Service/Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in 'Ewa Beach are discussing what to do next and how to go about making sure this doesn't happen again, said Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information Center.
On the afternoon of Christmas Day in Honolulu, the 'Ewa Beach center issued a Pacificwide e-mail tsunami bulletin 18 minutes after the quake hit, but the crew quickly realized that most potential victims weren't among the center's Pacific nation clients. The biggest hit would be in the Indian Ocean. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center's only Indian Ocean clients are Australia and Indonesia, which have both Pacific and Indian ocean coasts.
And the Indian Ocean, which had not had a tsunami in recorded history, has no oceanwide tsunami detection system, and no warning system.
The folks in Honolulu knew a disaster was on its way, but they had no way to alert the potential victims - the tourists on remote resort island beaches, people in coastal towns, those in fishing villages - from Indonesia to Africa, from India to scatterings of mid-oceanic coral islands, and all the coasts between.
"We started thinking about who we could call. We talked to the State Department Operations Center and to the military. We called embassies. We talked to the navy in Sri Lanka, any local government official we could get hold of," Hirshorn said. "We were fairly careful about who we called. We wanted to call people who could help."
He and fellow duty officer Stuart Weinstein quickly called in their boss, geophysicist-in-charge Charles "Chip" McCreery.
"The three of us were full-time using every line we had. At that point, everybody was getting, not crazy, but multitasking," Hirshorn said.
The desperate effort was to warn people thousands of miles away to get off their beaches. The frustration was knowing that even if government leaders could be reached, most countries had no effective civil defense mechanism for getting the information to the people.
"We spoke to people in the foreign ministries, and everywhere we could think of. We were collecting phone numbers, e-mail addresses - whatever contact information we could. There was a conference call with officials in Madagascar," Weinstein said.
The message, if it had reached people on the coasts, was simple: start walking away from the sea.
"You just have to be a 15-minute walk away from most coasts to be safe," Hirshorn said.
The geophysicists worked through the night and into Sunday, sounding the warning as the tsunami continued to sweep across the vast ocean basin, crushing one coastal area after another.
Within hours, as aftershocks repeatedly set off the 'Ewa Beach center's alarms, the tsunami warning community started working on ways to prevent a catastrophe like this one in any future Indian Ocean tsunami.
Officials said there are two key requirements for a good warning system: sensors to detect the earthquake and any resulting tsunami, and a mechanism for alerting the public.
Hirshorn said water-level gauges are needed along coastlines throughout the region, with data sent to the Pacific Tsunami Warning System and other interested agencies. That way, the size of the tsunami can be gauged and used to warn people next in line. He also recommended more expensive but critically important deep-ocean monitoring buoy systems that detect the power of tsunamis in the mid-ocean.
"If you have gauges, you can see what's going on. The upshot is, more gauges, more lives saved," he said.
The other end of an effective network is the local warning process. Nations in the region need to establish systems for letting people in danger zones know.
"Risk reduction involves not only a technology-based warning system which is able to effectively reach people on the beach at any moment, but also the component of education, awareness and preparedness which are essential to enable citizens to sensibly act during a local or distant tsunami," Kong said.
"There is much discussion being circulated internationally and within NOAA and the USGS on how to best assist and to move forward in a manner which will develop increased capacity by nations to mitigate the hazard," she said.
Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com <mailto:jant@honoluluadvertiser.com> or (808) 245-3074.
I would like to post that as a primary article, however, I'm not sure I want to publish that mail address. Indeed, are you sure we should have that mail address public even in the comments here? It's likely to get spam-trapped.
As you can see by checking out that link, and the text of the E-mail, Mr. Jabaley added nothing to the article other than his personal opinion that the staff did more to help than I had originally thought. The source of the actual new information is the Honolulu Advertiser article, not Mr. Jabaley, so I don't see that his E-mail address would need to appear anywhere. I'm not even sure you'd need to mention his name, if you're concerned about privacy. I thought about omitting it myself, but decided against omitting it because I didn't want it to sound like I was claiming this was from me.
Maybe you could phrase it, "A reader in the Navy sent in this article..." if you want to keep Mr. Jabaley's name off the front page. Or if you'd like to ask him personally what he'd prefer, send me an E-mail and I'll pass on his real E-mail address to you.