COLOMBO: Sri Lankan authorities said Wednesday’s tsunami alert exposed serious problems of traffic management and the inability of phone networks to cope in an emergency although coastal residents appeared to be well prepared.
The Disaster Management Centre, which was formally set up in 2005, shortly after the December 2004 Asian tsunami which claimed some 30,000 lives in Sri Lanka, said their early warning system and evacuation plans worked well.
"Year-round rehearsals in coastal areas paid off yesterday," DMC director Sarath Kumara told AFP. "But, we found mobile phone networks could not cope. So we were forced to use our back ups, including Thuraya satellite phones."
Sri Lankan telecom expert Rohan Samarajiva said it was doubtful if the government could claim full credit for alerting coastal residents because social networks like Twitter were highly active in spreading the warning.
"The social media and the Internet have changed the conditions of warning irrevocably. Social media appear to be disseminating information about impending hazards extremely fast," Samarajiva said.
The evacuation order was issued about two hours and 15 minutes after the Indonesian quake.
Sri Lanka’s police said there was panic when motorists rushed to main roads, but the evacuation of coastal homes was orderly.
"The lesson from this incident is that we need to address the question of traffic management,"police spokesman Ajith Rohana told AFP. "We saw big congestion at some coastal towns as well as in Colombo." Rohana said there were no reports of any criminal activity while coastal residents were away from their homes in line with the evacuation request of the DMC.
A French national living in Sri Lanka’s southern coast said she closely followed the events on cable television and did not see the need to leave although she moved her belongings to an upper floor of her beach villa.
"There was no panic," she said. "I saw people in the neighbourhood carry suitcases and leave. It was well organised. But the traffic was something else. I thought people would get killed just by trying to cross the road."
http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=49566
No comments:
Post a Comment