Samoa tsunami lesson: Early warning system too slow

Sydney – International aid has begun arriving on the Samoan islands, after a tsunami Tuesday killed at least 150 people and destroyed dozens of coastal villages.Even as relief teams confront the aftermath of the tsunami – which threw successive walls of water up to 650 feet inland and was followed by another earthquake Wednesday – the disaster is drawing attention to how much warning residents could have gotten ahead of time.This week's events in the South Pacific demonstrate that early-warning systems are not fail-safe and education is as important as technology, seismologists and disaster management experts say."People assume that if they have an early-warning system, their problems are solved," says James Goff, director of the Australian Tsunami Research Centre, based at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "But it's only one of a suite of ways of being aware what's going on. What's really needed is education about the natural indicators. If you live by the coast and there's a very large earthquake, or if you see the water receding very quickly and going much lower than low tide, you need to move uphill"....
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