Report: revamped U.S. tsunami warning system unreliable

[unhappycamper]

Report: revamped U.S. tsunami warning system unreliable
By Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Sunday, October 3, 2010

WASHINGTON — A detection system that was expanded following an Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 230,000 people has experienced significant outages and can no longer be relied on detect the giant waves as they approach the U.S. coastline, a new report finds.

The system, known as DART, or Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis, was expanded from six deep-ocean buoy stations to 39 in the months following the massive 2004 earthquake off Indonesia that spawned killer waves that washed ashore as far away as the east coast of Africa. Though there are DART buoys in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, most of them are located around the Pacific Ocean's "Ring of Fire" to give advance warning to Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska, where a tsunami landfall is thought more likely.

But at any give time, 30 percent or more of the buoys have been inoperable, according to a recent report from the National Research Council.

An alarming number of buoys have broken their moorings and drifted away. The buoy stations have also suffered failures in sensors that can detect a sea level rise of as little as one-third of an inch. Other systems on the sophisticated buoy stations have also had problems.

"As a consequence of the pervasive outages of DART stations, the Tsunami Warning Centers cannot depend on the DART network for tsunami forecasting," said the report, which was requested by Congress.



unhappycamper comment: Just another fail for dick & dubya. They were 'working' on the Iraq occupation at the time.

Is there anything they didn't fuck up?