Thailand is prepared for another tsunami

Thailand is prepared for another tsunami

Inadequate warning system has been blamed for the high death toll from the tsunami that killed over 220,000 people in countries around the Indian Ocean. 8,000 of them died in Thailand's six provinces in the south.

Since then, the country's National Center for Disaster Alert (NDWC) set up warning towers and buoys in the Andaman Sea in the Indian Ocean that can quickly detect earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis.

- Within two minutes after a tsunami wave begins to form, we can estimate the speed and know just when they hit the coast, said Song Ekmahachai NDWC in the English-language Thai newspaper The Nation.

He says that accurate alarms can be sent on TV and radio and cell phones within 15 minutes via satellite and warning towers.

People need to engage

According NDWCs Director Somsak Khaosuwan, no approval required from any of the TV channels.

- We may terminate any ongoing television broadcast, he told the newspaper.

Khaosuwan point out that all the preparations are useless if people do not get involved. He encourages all who live along the coast, to participate in training programs to prepare for potential disasters.

- If they do not run from the big waves, can not someone help them, Somsak says and adds:

- The only thing that can save you from a big wave, is to run for a higher mountain as fast as you can.

Made sure the sea

Mutmainah is grieving along with his brother in a mass grave outside Banda Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. They read silently from their prayer books as they think of the five family members they lost 26 December 2004.

- We left Aceh after the tsunami, said Mutmainah. She and her brother shut shop in Banda Aceh and decided to move to Medan.

The two siblings were among hundreds who made the mass graves and the local mosques in Indonesia on Boxing Day - eight years after the tragic event.

Indonesia was hardest hit by the tsunami. 168,000 people were killed, and most of them were killed in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra.

The disaster was also highlighted in a number of other countries in Asia, including in Chennai, India, where women carrying tin buckets of milk which they spilled out into the Bay of Bengal to the memory of the dead.