Bad Equipment Hurt Tsunami Warning Efforts

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A sensor system in Indonesia that could have warned of Sunday's huge waves was not working because it had been hit by lightning. In India, bureaucrats faxed a warning of possible disaster to the wrong official. A Thai meteorologist acting on a hunch sent an alert to radio stations, but it doesn't appear the warning was widely relayed.

An alert of some kind got through to some places - at a few beaches officials yelled through bull horns telling tourists to get off the beaches. Most people got no warning. "The (first) warning was that the ocean went out and people were walking down the beach wondering why there were fish flapping on the sand," said Steve Hall, an Australian who moved to Thailand a decade ago. "By the time they realized, it was too late."


Officials in southern India who had gotten a report from a military base on a Nicobar island mistakenly faxed the news to the home of the government's former science and technology minister, rather than his successor. "It looks like they forgot to update their records," said Ashok Kavdia, an aide of the former minister, who was away from home Sunday.

Even a high-tech warning system might not help India, a political analyst said. "In such disasters, we require rapid and specific responses. The Indian bureaucracy by its training and conditioning can't do it," said Balbir Arora, a New Delhi-based professor of public administration