NAGAPPATTINAM, India - Tens of thousands fled their homes Thursday, panicked by a false alarm that a new tsunami was about to hit after aftershocks in the Indian Ocean. India's science minister blamed the confusion on information from an American research group.
Tsunami warnings went out in India, Thailand and Sri Lanka, where millions are still traumatized by last weekend's devastating waves. India's warning said the wave could hit within an hour - but hours later with no major waves, Science Minister Kapil Sibal dismissed fears of a new strike as "hogwash."
By that time, thousands of people had made a desperate run for higher ground in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where more than half of India's 7,300 deaths Sunday occurred. Hundreds of refugees fled relief camps set up near the coastline, jostling to get into trucks and other vehicles, one police constable said.
The false alarm highlighted the lack of an organized tsunami warning system. Experts have said such a system would have saved lives after Sunday's 9.0 magnitude quake off the coast of Sumatra. The tremor sent 500 mph waves racing across the Indian Ocean, hitting unsuspecting residents thousands of miles away in Sri Lanka, India and East Africa.
The fears of a new tsunami were apparently sparked by a string of earthquakes in the previous 24 hours, but an earthquake expert at the University of Hong Kong, Jason Ali, said they were around 1,000 times less powerful than Sunday's and probably not big enough to produce tsunamis. "It's probably going to have negligible impact," he said.
Sibal, India's science minister, said the misinformation had come from Terra Research, a research group in Portland, Ore.
"(They) ... claimed they have some sensors and equipment through which they suggest there was a possibility of an earthquake," Sibal said. "So, on the basis of this communication, for anyone to reach a conclusion that a tsunami will hit the eastern coast of India is unscientific, hogwash and should be discarded."
Terra Research and Consulting Services is run by Larry Park, 46, who describes himself as an earthquake forecaster and stood by his prediction. He said Thursday a quake-spawned tsunami still could happen.
"There is a good chance of a quake coming, yes, we've got a few days' window," he said.
According to his Web site, www.terraresearch.net Park said he believes that conventional earthquake observations are misguided and conventional seismographs to measure activity in faults are inadequate.
Instead, Park contends his equipment can predict earthquakes in both known and unseen faults by measuring their resonance, or vibrations, and how they affect the elasticity of the Earth's crust. This resonant energy has its origins in what he describes as a huge supply of "ether" of the universe that he believes permeates everything and creates energy waves that are not accounted for by current physics.
India's Sibal said the Indian Meteorological Department came across a Web site warning by Terra Research. He said the U.S. office of the Indian Space Research Organization contacted the group and discussed the issue with its scientists. Although there is no proven method to predict short term earthquakes, Sibal said, his ministry decided to pass on the information to the home ministry.
He said he was never consulted before the home ministry issued its warning.
A.K. Rastogi, a senior home ministry official, said the warning was issued as a precaution. "There was no need to panic. We issued the alert as a precautionary measure," Rastogi said.
India's botched warning
NEW DELHI - Officials said Thursday that they will investigate a report that India's military got a hint a tsunami was approaching an hour before it hit the southern coast, but bad communications and bureaucratic missteps kept a warning from reaching disaster officials in time.
The Indian Express, an independent English-language daily, quoted air force chief S. Krishnaswamy as saying an air base in the southern city of Madras received a report at 7:30 a.m. Sunday that a mammoth earthquake had rocked India's Andaman and Nicobar islands.
Krishnaswamy was quoted as saying that after the initial report of the quake, the Madras post lost its communication link with an Indian air base on Car Nicobar island and took until 7:50 a.m. to restore contact.
The story said Krishnaswamy told his assistant to alert the government in New Delhi at 8:15 a.m., but the warning was mistakenly sent via fax to the home of the former science and technology minister, rather than his successor, Sibal.
U.S. response
WASHINGTON - The U.S. weather agency didn't have the phone numbers or staff to alert all Indian Ocean coastal countries when it saw the first signs that tsunamis could be heading their way, its top official said Thursday. He cautioned that the Caribbean and Atlantic also lack an early warning system.
In the face of stern questioning by some in Congress over whether enough was done, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said his agency did all it was responsible for doing in warning 26 countries in the Pacific.
"We cannot watch tsunamis in the Indian Ocean," said Conrad C. Lautenbacher, the Commerce Department's undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere and a retired Navy vice admiral.
