Today, coinciding with World Tsunami Awareness Day, our team is in Ecuador with the staff of the INOCAR where they prepared and installed in the North West of the Galapagos Islands a new buoy as part of the Tsunami Early Warning System that the country has implemented along its coasts. Another buoy will also be installed at the South East of the Islands, providing a total of four tsunami buoys in the Pacific Ocean.
This system is designed to immediately alert, in less than a minute, the competent authorities in the country, strengthening the prevention and protection against this type of phenomenon in the area, caused by both by regional and distant events.
History has left us great tsunamis in the world. In the last 100 years, more than 260.000 people have died from 58 tsunamis. At an average of 4.600 deaths per disaster, the figure has surpassed any other natural hazard. Hence the importance of improving preparedness for this threat. The UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission defines four fundamental pillars for tsunami risk preparedness: knowledge of risk, implementation of monitoring and warning systems, dissemination and communication, and response capacity.
Our early warning system TEWS (Tsunami Early Warning System) is a comprehensive system with high reliability and availability that is of great importance not only as a warning system for the population to prevent human losses (second pillar) but also as a tool to collect historical data allowing to increase the understanding of this phenomenon (first pillar).
To mitigate the risk of tsunamis, coordination between the different administrations and institutions of countries in risk areas is essential to spread the culture of prevention among citizens (third and fourth pillar).
MSM has developed this System in collaboration with Sonardyne to provide a complete solution with a compatible message structure capable of being integrated into the NOAA platform.
How does it work? Here you can find all the details:
