Owe it to the mangrove trees
Andrea Filmer, The Star 25 Dec 09;
LIKE the previous four Boxing Days, tomorrow will be a day of reflection for the Penang Inshore Fishermen Welfare Association (Pifwa) in remembrance of the fifth anniversary of the Asian tsunami tragedy.
The fishing community in Pulau Betong, Balik Pulau in Penang owes much to the mangrove trees which broke the force of the giant waves that time, thus saving many homes and belongings from the destruction.
Fishermen returning from sea had also grabbed hold of the sturdy plants which saved them from being swept away.
Pifwa chairman Ilias Shafie said to date, the association had planted over 114,000 mangrove trees and there was no slowing down for them.
“The support is strong for the planting of mangroves, but what we are lacking is combined, sustainable support to oversee the growth of the trees,’ he said.
“People want us to plant mangroves in many areas, but we have to look at the neighbouring communities before we start.
“We need the support of the Village Development and Security Committees or community heads to monitor the development of the trees as Pifwa does not have enough manpower to do so, especially on the shores around Penang island,” Ilias said in an interview.
He said monitoring was important to ensure the trees grew healthily and were not trampled on.
“There would be no point in planting them if there was no one to maintain them,” Ilias said, adding that Pifwa had received suggestions to plant mangroves along Gurney Drive, among other places.
Next year, he said, Pifwa would focus on diversifying the mangrove species they planted as this would make the planting areas fertile spawning grounds for fish, prawns, crabs and other wildlife.
“The main species we grow now are Bakau Kurap and Bakau Minyak but we find that the more species there are in one area, the more fertile the place is for wildlife.
“We are also in discussions with the south Seberang Prai District Office to set up an eco-education centre in Sungai Chenaam where visitors, tourists and researchers can see different mangrove species at one site.
“We already have saplings of about eight mangrove species that were collected by hand from places in Penang, Kedah and Perak,” he said.
Ilias added that much of Pifwa’s current focus was planting mangroves along Sg Acheh and Nibong Tebal and they now planned to move to north and central Seberang Prai next year.
Members of Pifwa, along with their counterparts from Sahabat Alam Malaysia, will gather at Kuala Sungai Haji Ibrahim in Sungai Acheh tomorrow to plant 600 mangrove saplings.
“An important lesson to learn from the (2004) tsunami is not to wait until things go wrong.
“After some time goes by, people become less afraid of what might happen, but we should always plan for the future,” Ilias said.
Tsunami early warning must start at community level
Katherine Baldwin, Reuters 25 Dec 09;
LONDON (Reuters) - Five years on from the Indian Ocean tsunami, the region has its own early warning system but experts say the new technology will not save lives unless local communities are more involved in planning how to respond.
The 230,000 people killed in Africa and Asia by the 2004 tsunami received no formal warning of the approaching waves.
Since then, millions of dollars have gone into building a vast network of seismic and tsunami information centers, setting up sea and coastal instruments and erecting warning towers.
But studies show that the closer the warning gets to those it is designed to help, the more it fades out, and much more needs to be done to connect the technology to the people.
"The weakest link remains at the interface between the early warning system and the public, and in ensuring there's enough preparedness at the local level to react appropriately," said Bhupinder Tomar, senior officer for disaster preparedness at the International Federation for the Red Cross (IFRC) in Geneva.
In terms of technology, the region has made great strides since December 26, 2004, and is much better prepared, experts say.
Warning centers in Japan and Hawaii receive seismological and tidal data and send out alerts to national agencies in Indian Ocean countries. These agencies then warn the population, via SMS, radio, television, watch towers and loud speakers.
By 2010, regional centers in Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are set to take over primary responsibility from Hawaii and Japan for issuing the warnings.
START WITH COMMUNITIES
Many relief workers, however, believe the system's design is too top-down and that local communities should be the starting point, not the end point, in any early warning network.
Local people should be the 'first mile' in early warning, rather than the 'last mile' as they are often called, the workers say.
"You need to start with the people and move outwards," said Ilan Kelman, a senior research fellow at CICERO, the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.
In a June 2009 report, the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction found community participation in the decision-making process was insufficient.
It said the emphasis must shift from international and national policy-making to policy execution on the ground.
Similarly, Oxfam found in a recent report, "Collaboration in Crises," that disaster-affected communities wanted the chance to play a more decisive role in programs designed to help them.
Evacuation routes and drills need to be integrated into communities' day-to-day activities, experts say.
"In a heavily vegetated area, people need paths to get from the coast to inland ... and there's no reason why those paths should be different from an evacuation route," said Kelman.
"Having a development project to create more paths and maintain them is actually useful for the communities every day, as well as every decade when there's a tsunami warning."
Other community-based measures that need to be developed further include the teaching in some schools of "Shake, Drop, Run" -- when the earth shakes, drop everything and run.
Teachers and children must be taught what most fishermen know, that when the sea recedes you should run, said Kelman.
Thailand has put tsunami education on its national curriculum and more countries should do this, the experts say.
MULTI-HAZARD APPROACH
Communities must also design their own warning messages.
"We don't want to see panic, we don't want to see people taking the wrong action. So getting the words right, getting the message right and getting it delivered are key components," said Al Panico, head of the tsunami unit at the IFRC.
In order to maintain the tsunami early warning system, at the community, national and international level, it is vital to extend it to other hazards like cyclones and storm surges.
"Any warning system you don't notice is a dormant system, and treasuries don't like anything that they cannot justify," said Peter Koltermann, head of the Tsunami Coordination Unit for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), which began coordinating the Indian Ocean system in 2005.
The best approach to saving lives, however, is better urban and coastal planning to move people away from high risk areas. But experts agree this is the hardest thing to accomplish when communities and livelihoods are established.
"That is by far the best approach," said Panico. But "it's the individual who decides where to live."
(Additional reporting by Thin Lei Win in Bangkok; Editing by Jerry Norton)
FACTBOX: How the Indian Ocean gets tsunami warnings
Reuters 25 Dec 09;
LONDON (Reuters) - For more than 40 years, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) has been alerting countries in the Pacific region to the dangers of killer waves.
Following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed almost 230,000 people, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) began coordinating efforts to create an Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system.
Before 2004, there were no sea-level monitoring instruments in the Indian Ocean and many countries did not have agencies responsible for tsunami warnings or points of contact to receive messages from international warning centers.
Five years on, a vast network of seismographic centers, national warning centers or agencies, coastal and deep-ocean stations is in place across the Indian Ocean to detect potential tsunamis and pass on warnings to communities.
Here's how the system works:
WARNING CENTRES
When an earthquake strikes in the Indian Ocean region, data from a variety of sources is transmitted to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) based in Hawaii and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) in Tokyo.
The two centers currently have responsibility for providing the Indian Ocean with what are known as tsunami "watches."
By 2011, a number of so-called Regional Tsunami Watch Providers (RTWPs) in Indian Ocean countries are set to take over this function. Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center in Bangkok are on track to become regional watch providers.
Countries able to invest more in technology will share data with smaller states that cannot, such as the Maldives or the Seychelles.
In addition, the ADPC has been coordinating its own efforts since 2005 to have a multi-hazard early warning system, known as the Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System(RIMES).
RIMES will work alongside the national and regional watch providers and will also share information with Hawaii and Japan. RIMES is expected to be operable early next year.
Hawaii and Japan receive earthquake information and data from tidal gauges and Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) sensors or buoys.
They also receive news bulletins, telegrams, and information over the telephone. The Commission for the Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) also contributes data from seismographic stations.
The centers locate and determine the size of earthquakes, determine whether they have the potential to produce tsunamis and predict tsunami wave arrival times wherever possible.
It takes about 15 to 20 minutes for earthquake data to be deciphered and a tsunami watch to be issued.
SENDING TO THE COUNTRIES
The two centers issue watches, if necessary, to national bodies in the Indian Ocean and it is the responsibility of each national agency to alert its population, by whatever means.
Many national agencies will have also received their own information, from local or regional seismic centers, buoys, news bulletins and so on, and all this information will be fed back and forth between Hawaii, Japan and the region.
WARNING THE POPULATION
Warnings to the population are delivered over the airwaves -- radio, television, SMS, email -- and manually, using bells, megaphones or loud-speakers attached to mosques.
In some countries, well-rehearsed drills will kick in and local agencies will coordinate an evacuation.
On the ground in many Indian Ocean nations, NGOs and community groups are involved in educating and coordinating local populations to know what to do when they hear a tsunami warning or when they feel or see signs of an earthquake or tsunami - when the earth shakes or the sea recedes.
Technology does not reach all areas and even if it does, warnings can be confused or not in the right language for all the affected people to understand. In other areas, there are no escape routes as transport infrastructure is poor.
(Reporting by Katherine Baldwin; Editing by Jerry Norton)
