Australia successfully creates a cheap and simple an early warning of tsunami system

News24xx.com - Australia is located in meeting plates, and is also included in areas prone to earthquakes and tsunamis.

 

Dr. Gardner-Stephen said when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake hit the city of Palu, Central Sulawesi last month, the tsunami came just eight minutes later after the earthquake, and killed more than 1,300 people and destroyed hundreds of homes.

 

He said, the quake disabled the telephone network so that tsunami warnings could not be sent to villages.

 

Dr Paul Gardner-Stephen from Flinders University and scientists in Adelaide, South Australia, said they had successfully piloted a simple and inexpensive tsunami warning system in small villages in Vanuatu that could help save the lives of people in disaster-prone areas.

 

Dr. Gardner-Stephen said the prototype of this new technology would cost around USD 500,000 and launches in areas such as Vanuatu would probably cost around USD 2 million.

 

Costs will be much lower in the long run, funding is still the "only barrier" that hinders the launch of this technology. "Our recent work in Vanuatu costs around 1 percent of the investment needed to make a conventional tsunami warning tower" he said, quoted from liputan6.com, November 8th 2018

 

He explained, that a tsunami early warning system that uses small receivers connected to air horns is said to be 100 times cheaper than the current warning system when sustainable costs are a very calculated factor.

 

"This new technology does not involve large equipment which is likely to be damaged by the storm and the team has successfully tested it last month" he said.

 

"We are now at the point where we have succeeded in proving all the key parts of this technology. What we need to do now is allow funding, and this is always a challenge, but we can have this system prototype unit ready as the trial in mid 2019" he said.

 

Dr. Gardner-Stephen explained that the tsunami warning system used to use towers that were expensive to buy and maintain, and needed installation by experts, so that only a small percentage of vulnerable communities had access to the system.

 

He said this new technology uses a very small and inexpensive receiver and does not use a dish antenna that would require calibration.

 

"What we are doing in comparison is making something small, which gets signals from satellites, so that no matter what happens to local cellular networks ... we can still provide effective tsunami and other disaster warning systems like these in villages at a cost of only around USD 200 instead of USD 10,000" he said.

 

"This system will also provide villages with local radio stations so that they can get news, weather, information to help adapt to climate change, food security, water security, all things that are of value to this community."

 

He said the tsunami warning tested in Vanuatu used sirens, which could be as cheap as an airhorn. "This only needs to be heard in the area of ??the local village. The old ways are very suitable for large industrial cities where you want the sirens to be heard for several kilometers. Even in the context of rural villages in the Indo-Pacific region, we are not need to have very expensive infrastructure" he said

 

"We have the capacity to be able to launch a tsunami warning system in the region progressively from around the end of 2019. And we don't speak of big financial costs to do that, but of course we have to find partners" he concluded.

 

 

 

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