WASHINGTON — Spurred to action by the devastating southern Asian tsunami, top Bush administration science officials Friday pledged to double the country's investment in a warning system by greatly expanding detection technology in the Pacific Ocean and extending it into the Atlantic.
By spending $37.5 million over two years, the government would add 32 buoys for deep-ocean monitoring to its tsunami detection and warning system. Five would be deployed in the Atlantic, two in the Caribbean Sea and the rest in the Pacific.
The funding must be approved by Congress; the initial reaction on Capitol Hill was positive.
There currently are six buoys in use for the tsunami detection system -- all of them in the Pacific, where most of the world's tsunamis have taken place. The Dec. 26 tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and other nations occurred in the Indian Ocean.
Administration officials said that when the new buoys were in place by mid-2007, the system would provide tsunami detection for nearly all of U.S. coastlines. Many other countries would benefit as well.
"What we're offering is going to cover a good part of the globe," said Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr., administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which would deploy the buoys.
With so many more buoys in the Pacific, government scientists would receive "an alert within minutes, and in some cases, within seconds, of a tsunami's formation," said John Marburger III, science advisor to President Bush.
Marburger said that the government would not be making the investment at this time were it not for the recent disaster.
"What made this event even more tragic is the fact that [many fatalities] might have been prevented if only a warning system had been in place to alert the communities that were in harm's way," he said.
The new proposal is "about doing everything we can to prevent a similar disaster in the future."
Bill Knight, a scientist at the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska, said Friday that several of the new deep-ocean buoys probably would be deployed off the coast of Southern California.
The buoys work in conjunction with scores of gauges along the coast. The buoys and gauges provide different kinds of data, and interpreting that data enables oceanographers to determine the size, location and movement of a tsunami, said Charles McCreery, director of the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
