ANDAMAN COAST NATURAL DISASTER DRILL
A tsunami evacuation drill by the National Disaster Warning Centre (NDWC) yesterday was not the success officials had hoped for, with some of the alarms on warning towers along the Andaman coastline only making a faint sound, although the problem had been reported two years ago.
A tsunami alarm signal was transmitted from the NDWC in Bangkok to 79 warning towers in Ranong, Phangnga, Phuket, Trang, Satun and Krabi provinces, which all have coastlines on the Andaman Sea, at 9.20am yesterday. But the alarms were too faint to be heard properly in Trang and Ranong provinces.
This same lack of volume plagued drills two years ago and was reported to officials overseeing the exercise at the time.
Trang has 11 warning towers. The faint alarm was obvious on Hat Pak Meng beach where security coordinators found the solution was to turn on the sirens of their police vehicles.
Sant Chantarawong, the disaster prevention and mitigation chief of Trang, said local authorities had informed the NDWC of the faint alarms after the two previous annual drills, but the problem remained unresolved.
He assumed that the local warning towers were too short and their alarms could not penetrate the surrounding pine trees.
In Ranong, the alarms from five warning towers were both faint and short.
Ranong governor Kanchana Keeman said such a faint sound would not wake people if a tsunami happened at night. She has asked for more power for the local warning towers.
She also complained that verbal warnings in five languages took too long to finish and the interval before the second round of alarms was too long.
She recommended that people be instructed to stay calm and act properly and that this announcement replace the long, silent interval.
The NDWC and local agencies have conducted the annual tsunami evacuation drill since 2006 - two years after the tsunami struck Thai coastal provinces, killing almost 5,400 Thais and foreigners.
Rear Adm Thaworn Charoendee, the deputy director of the NDWC, admitted that some warning towers might have technical and structural problems. The sound from some warning towers might be being blocked by obstructions and the NDWC would gather information and solve the problem at each affected site, he said.
"We are considering building more warning towers in the areas where the alarms cannot be heard clearly. Additional loudspeakers will also be installed where needed," he said.
The NDWC's deputy chief also raised concerns over the lack of proper evacuation procedures from buildings in tsunami-prone areas.
"A number of communities still have no proper evacuation centre where villagers can take refuge when a tsunami strikes," he said.
Deputy prime minister Suvit Khunkitti, who supervised the drill in Phuket, said the government was planning to install another 144 warning towers in the six tsunami-hit provinces within one year.
"In the next step, authorities will focus on how to reduce accidents during an evacuation," Mr Suvit said in his capacity as chairman of the national committee on disaster warning systems.
NDWC chairman Smith Dharmasarojana said he was satisfied by the exercise because it taught people to become more alert to natural disasters.
He proposed a second tsunami detector worth 165 million baht be floated between the Andaman and Nicobar islands to back up the single buoy Thailand has been using with the US.
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