Article and Photosby Arthur E. Berman,editor@hgs.orgHGS Bulletin From the Editor April, 2005 Letters From Jakarta:Indian Ocean Nations Select a Tsunami Warning Systemby Arthur E. BermanAfter 12 years of siege, the armies of King Priam awoke one morning to find their Greek opponents gone from the Plain of Troy. A giant wooden horse stood alone outside the city. Priam and his men decided to bring the horse inside the walls of Troy to celebrate their victory over the Greeks. Not all of Priam'' s men, however, agreed with the decision. Chief among the king'' s counselors was an elder named Laöcoon.* Laöcoon and his sons urged Priam to reconsider the decision and to investigate the situation more fully before bringing the horse into the city. It seemed peculiar, Laöcoon argued, and out of character that the Greeks had departed for no apparent military reason and had left behind a gift. In addition, he thought he heard sounds coming from inside the horse. Laöcoon and his sons were killed by the Trojans. The horse was brought into the city and the Greek soldiers concealed within the horse emerged, sacked Troy, and won the Trojan War.[* Laöcoon is the root for the English word laconic, meaning terse or concise, often used to refer to someone who says little but, when he speaks, is worth listening to. He is known for the famous quote, "When Greeks bring gifts, I fear them, gifts and all." (Virgil, The Aeneid, Book II, 59-70) Myth accounts for his death by snakes sent by Poseidon or Athena. My interpretation is that he was killed by his fellow Trojans.]In my February From the Editor (Berman, 2005), I was critical of the leaders of the Indian Ocean nations for doing nothing to prepare their people for the possibility of a tsunami. The Malay Archipelago, on the eastern margin of the Indian Ocean, is the most active earthquake region in the world and undersea earthquakes are the principal cause of tsunamis. While no one could predict when or where an earthquake might occur large enough to produce a deadly tsunami, the plate tectonic model clearly underscored the probability of such an event around the Archipelago. As a result of that article, I received many letters from people around the world including the Hungarian Ambassador to Indonesia, Dr. György Busztin. I published Dr. Busztin'' s first letter in the March 2005 Bulletin. In it he asked me to help him communicate to Indonesian leaders what the earth science community knew about earthquakes and tsunamis so he might influence creation of greater awareness in that devastated country.In a subsequent letter, Dr. Busztin described what he had seen in Banda Aceh, the capitol of the most heavily damaged part of Indonesia, following the tsunami. He wrote:"Banda Aceh itself, the provincial capital, is like a cake cut in half. The part of the city exposed to the sea literally disappeared, with nothing remaining but the debris of buildings covered by mud, or not even that. Houses reduced to their foundations. Cars look like a giant has stepped upon them, even huge lorries squeezed into grotesque forms. A mid-size drilling tower sits in the middle of one destroyed suburb, planted there by the tsunami. Large boats were taken inland to the distance of a kilometer. "Your article has reached top destinations. The beneficiaries requested not to be named, for obvious reasons. The reactions I had were—obviously—muted. One decision maker was slightly irritated by your comments. He argued no contingency plan can deal with a situation where you can only guess when the calamity will take place, give or take a few decades."As I see it, your article is a great eye-opener and should be treated with due respect. The problem of prevention and contingency planning is essentially money. You cannot relocate people to a safe distance from the sea, nor build tsunami-proof structures without adequate funding. The reconstruction effort now under way will certainly take into consideration the looming danger of a new tidal wave, but how will you prevent people from slowly moving back to the seaside, with the sense of imminent danger fading away? For those making a living from the sea—fishermen, prawn and seaweed cultivators, etc.—there is not much alternative to living on the shore. Unless they are settled in places made disaster proof, but that needs more resources than are possibly available."Someone I can''t remember, a scientist of renown, once said: humanity can always foresee the impending catastrophe, can never avert it, but always survives it. A great truth. But no consolation for those who didn'' t make it this time."Later, he sent me a letter reporting on an important meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Phuket, Thailand January 28–29, 2005. Approximately 50 nations, including those most affected by the December 2004 tsunami, decided to accept a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) plan for a tsunami early warning center for the Indian Ocean region. The plan entails implementing a detection system of deep ocean buoys and tethered bottom bottom-moored pressure recorders (BPR) similar to the U.S.'' s Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) network in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.The Indian Ocean tsunami alert system would include shared use of satellite-based weather forecasting data, hazard maps and disaster-response strategies at a community level. The estimated cost for the plan is about $30 million but only $8 million has been pledged to-date by UNESCO nations. In the best case scenario, the alert system would be operational in 18 months, but structural and political barriers, commercial and national rivalries, as well as financial pressures resulting from the 2004 tsunami, are likely to delay implementati