Bad buoys

Wahyu Pandu, project manager at BPPT, Indonesia's technology agency responsible for supervising the country's tsunami warning devices said that the buoys did work once, but only for a short time.

Now, four buoys off the coast of Sumatra are faulty, three have been brought in for repairs, and three in the Indian Ocean south of Java no longer work at all.

The manager blames the defects on fishermen tying their boats to the floating, highly sensitive buoys, but they may also be out of order because their costly sensors were stolen.

Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the horrific tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004, when about 170,000 people were killed in Aceh province on Sumatra Island.

The tsunami was triggered by a 9.3-magnitude earthquake off Sumatra, and left in its wake more than 230,000 dead, 1.8 million displaced and hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings destroyed in over a dozen countries.

Risks remain high

To prepare for future quakes, a tsunami warning center was established in Jakarta, complete with seismometers, ocean bottom pressure sensors, tide gauges, GPS instruments and sea buoys contributed by the US, Indonesia and Germany.

But the sea buoys did not last long on Indonesian waters, and similarly fragile systems off the coast of Thailand and India have also been damaged and destroyed. Pandu says it is not easy for the Indonesian Navy to constantly patrol and check on the sea devices.

Complicated repairs

Damaged buoys have to be brought ashore to be examined and repaired, Pandu said - a long and complicated process.

"It's often difficult to get spare parts from Germany," Pandu says. "And deliveries take much too long."

Of the 14 German tsunami warning buoys off the coast of Indonesia, Pandu estimated that five might be in working order - but to function effectively, the Indonesian system needs 22 such devices. He said that this leaves Sumatra's West Coast, the southern coast of Java, and the tourist hotspots Bali and Papua all exposed to a possible tsunami.

Some experts say data from the buoys is not essential for the tsunami early warning system to function, but with most of the German buoys out of order, Indonesia is now more reliant on information from early warning systems installed in neighboring countries.

Author: Zaki Amrullah (db)
Editor: Ben Knight