The tsunami: how much was bureaucracy at fault?

Red tape stopped scientists from alerting countries around the Indian Ocean to the devastating Boxing Day tsunami racing towards their shores.

Scientists at the Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii - who have complained about being unable to find telephone numbers to alert the countries in peril - did not use an existing rapid telecommunications system set up to get warnings around the world almost instantly because the bureaucratic arrangements were not in place.

Senior UN officials attending a conference in Mauritius of small island countries - some of them badly hit by the tsunami, now recognised to have been the deadliest in history - revealed that the scientists did not use the World Meteorological Organisation's Global Telecommunication System to contact Indian Ocean countries because the "protocols were not in place".

The system is designed to get warnings from any country to all other nations within 30 minutes.

It was used to alert Pacific countries to the tsunami, even though it affected hardly any of them, and could have been used in the Indian Ocean if the threat had been from a typhoon, officials said, but it could not be used to warn about a tsunami.

Dr Laura Kong, the director of the International Tsunami Information Centre which monitors the warning system in Hawaii, said: "The [meteorological organisation's] system has been set up but the protocols are not available for tsunami warnings except in the Pacific. So it was used on 26 December but only in the Pacific."

Here is the full story, from The New Zealand Herald, which I have generally found to be a reputable paper.  I urge readers to be careful in interpreting this report.  I would like to see further information, including a response.  Nonetheless the previous major accounts did not point to this particular problem.