KARACHI – Three recently-installed advanced tide gauge meters along Sindh and Balochistan coast are in disrepair, and thus any alerts issued by the Pakistan Meteorological Department are not based on real-time statistics but on “historical precedent,” Pakistan Today has learnt.
Fears abound that a tsunami could also hit the Pakistani coast, but Sindh’s authorities are unruffled. The PMD issued an alert on SMS that a regional tsunami warning has been generated, but Pakistan is not under threat. When Chief Meteorologist in Sindh, Muhammad Riaz, was asked how the PMD was forecasting no danger to the Pakistani coast, he claimed that the information was based on “historical data” but not on any real-time statistics.
Real-time statistics, in turn, are unavailable since the tide gauge meters – financed by United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and installed by the Pakistan Navy – are currently in disorder. “There is a technical fault due to which these gauges are not sending live data, but it will be fixed very soon,” UNESCO Project Officer Arslan Syed told Pakistan Today.
The issue of the tide gauge meters comes into focus after a ferocious tsunami was unleashed by Japan’s 8.9-magnitutude earthquake on Friday, killing hundreds of citizens and destroying infrastructure in the north-east coast of Honshu. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC) later issued regional tsunami alert for New Zealand, Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, and many other countries of the pacific region.
Following the 2004 tsunami that hit the Indonesian island Sumatra, UNESCO had started providing advanced equipment to different countries in the Indian and Pacific oceans for continuous communication with each other for national, regional or internal tsunamis. UNESCO also began providing basic equipment for early earning tsunami centres to deal more effectively with tsunamis in future. As part of the project, the Tsunami Early-Warning Centre was set up in Sindh in 2008. The three tide gauge meters were later provided, and one each installed at Keti Bandar in Sindh, and at Gawardar and Ormara in Balochistan.
But chief meteorologist Riaz, while confirming that the PMD is not receiving live data of the length of waves from the tide gauge meters, claimed that historical precedent was enough for the PMD to believe that all will be well. “It is a historical fact that any tsunami in the Pacific region can reach countries in the Indian Ocean, but not in the Arabian Sea or Pakistan,” he said. With the tide gauge meters in disrepair, and therefore not sending any real-time data to the Tsunami Early-Warning Centre, the SMS alerts sent by the centre are neither effective nor accurate.
Interestingly, the newly-appointed director-general (DG) of Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA)-Sindh, Pir Bux Jamali, does not have an “official” cell phone, and thus, would not even be informed through PMD alerts in case of a possible tsunami.
