Wednesday, May 17, 2006
2 dozen Pacific Rim nations conduct mass tsunami drill (12.40 p.m.)
BUHATAN -- A mock tsunami warning Wednesday set off alarms from Guam to Singapore and sent Philippine villagers scurrying to high ground as Pacific nations held an unprecedented drill organized after Asia's monster tsunami of 2004.
The massive exercise involving more than two dozen Pacific and Asian nations was conducted over two days that saw several real earthquakes hit the region, including one north of New Zealand that triggered a real, though minor, tsunami affecting only unpopulated islands.
The quakes that struck Tuesday and Wednesday, the largest measuring 7.5 quake, served as a vivid reminder of how seismically volatile the Pacific Rim can be. No damage or injuries were reported.
Wednesday's exercise was aimed at avoiding any repeat of the 2004 disaster in Asia, when killer waves hit a dozen nations and left 216,000 people dead or missing -- many of them because they were not forewarned of the danger.
At the start of Wednesday's test, emails and faxes were sent and alarms sounded in monitoring stations in the participating nations to signal a mock magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the coast of the main northern island of Luzon in the Philippines.
The exercise followed a similar test on Tuesday, when officials simulated a 9.2-magnitude quake near Chile that would have affected much of the Pacific Ocean region.
In the coastal village of Buhatan in the Philippines on Wednesday, church bells clanged the alarm that sent nearly 1,000 residents streaming from their homes and heading for a designated hill that was considered high enough to protect them in the event of a tsunami.
Just after dawn, village leaders used a stone and a hammer to ring the bells of a small church, signaling the start of the exodus. People then streamed out of their homes, tugging along children and struggling to carry bamboo mats, hammocks, sacks of rice, coffee pots and roosters.
The crippled and the elderly were carried on plastic chairs along the difficult, one-kilometer uphill trek on a winding road partly blocked by landslides from last week's storm and muddied by a thunderstorm the night before.
Some evacuations also were planned in American Samoa, Thailand and Malaysia and the Philippines, but most participating countries were expected to conduct only mock responses.
Renato Solidum, head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, said he was impressed by the strong turnout for that country's exercise. About two-thirds of Buhatan's 1,200-plus villagers joined while the rest went to work outside the village.
Pablo Torrealba, a UN Development Program official who observed the drill, cited the enthusiastic response and close coordination among local officials.
"The message is that you need two combinations: well-coordinated national institutions and prepared communities. The combination will help to save lives," he said.
Several earthquakes, meanwhile, hit the Pacific region during the two days of the drill.
The latest, a magnitude-5.8 earthquake Wednesday morning, rattled Tonga at the same time that emergency authorities on the country's islands were broadcasting simulated earthquake alerts as part of the Pacific-wide simulation.
Tonga's National Disaster Office deputy director Mali'u Takai said people in the Ha'apai island group near the epicenter of Wednesday's quake felt the ground move as officials were broadcasting mock tsunami warnings, sparking a rash of phone calls to emergency services.
Early Wednesday, New Zealand national civil defense controller Mike O'Leary said the 7.5-magnitude quake that hit north of the islands on Tuesday had generated a minor local tsunami that did not affect any populated areas.
The US Geological Survey said the quake hit at 10:39 p.m. local time (6:39 a.m. EDT) Tuesday about 145 kilometers below the seabed, and was centered about 1,140 kilometers northeast of New Zealand's largest city, Auckland.
On Tuesday, major participants included Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, the United States, Canada and several Pacific islands.
Participants Wednesday included the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Russia, China and several Pacific islands. (AP)
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