海角大神

鈥� A version of this post ran on the author's . The views expressed are the author's own.

Monday and Tuesday, Chile charged eight emergency response bureaucrats with negligent homicide for calling off a tsunami warning after the 8.8-magnitude earthquake of Feb. 27 2010.

That quake sloshed the Pacific ocean so hard that it generated a tsunami wave so high that it soaked land as much as 20 meters above sea level and hundreds of meters inland. The wave killed 156 people and left 25 missing. But even as the wave was hitting towns and villages, emergency response agencies were saying there was no tsunami. This week, some people in charge of the agencies were charged with negligent homicide in a trial that is drawing national attention. Some Santiago newspapers are blogging the trial live; here is聽聽version [in Spanish].

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Among other tidbits already to emerge from the trial,聽聽(translation mine):聽

Neither the University of Chile Seismic Service nor the regional emergency response offices had night shifts on duty the morning of the mega-quake and tsunami鈥�

There were alerts from the USA and information from domestic instruments 鈥� but despite that, 鈥渢he tsunami alert wasn鈥檛 transmitted鈥濃��

Hours after the quake, between 5 am and 6 am, both the Shoa and Onemi [emergency response offices] received reports from around the country confirming the existence of a tsunami, but they didn鈥檛 send it to the authorities. 鈥淔inally, at 8:52, when the tsunami had already hit almost the entire Chilean coast, did Shoa send an alert鈥濃��

The prosecutor related that Carmen Fernandez arrived at Onemi at 4:40 a.m.鈥�and it wasn鈥檛 until that moment that there was awareness of a tsunami alert received at 4:07 a.m..

At 4:45 a.m., [ex-Subsecretary of the Interior] Patricio Rosende gave a 13-minute interview from Onemi to TVN. In it, the ex-undersecretary said there was no possibility of a tsunami on the coasts of Chile and that this had already been affirmed by international organizations. 鈥淭hat information was false,鈥� the prosecutor said, adding that with these interviews, what was done was 鈥渢o disinform the population.鈥�

She similarly questioned the work of Shoa, in particular of Lt. Mario Andina, who said that in the Juan Fernandez islands there had been 鈥渁 minor event鈥� and that the sea-level variations recorded by instruments were 20 cm. However, prosecutor Huerta objected that these data hadn鈥檛 been confirmed by other means. She said the sea-level instrument was put out of service at 4:40 when it was torn away by the tsunami鈥�

Today, the defense has been trying to shake off the accusations. Lawyer Paula Vial said she would show that 鈥渢he errors were by the state and a system that wasn鈥檛 prepared to confront a castastrophe of these characteristics.鈥� Indeed, Subsecretary Rosende would have been committing a crime if he hadn鈥檛 followed the advice of lower-level technical staff, the defense said today. We鈥檒l see how this goes.

What鈥檚 striking to see, from two years鈥� distance, is聽聽鈥� a warning from the US Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Chileans with Blackberries and some other mobile devices still had Internet access after the quake. If they could read English and thought to check that page, they would have seen that when the US put out its alert, there remained 45 minutes to get away from the shore in聽, a little less in聽. A minute before the undersecretary went on TV to say there was no tsunami, the US put out a聽, confirming that instruments had detected a tsunami:

SEA LEVEL READINGS INDICATE A TSUNAMI WAS GENERATED. IT MAY HAVE BEEN DESTRUCTIVE ALONG COASTS NEAR THE EARTHQUAKE EPICENTER AND COULD ALSO BE A THREAT TO MORE DISTANT COASTS. AUTHORITIES SHOULD TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION IN RESPONSE TO THIS POSSIBILITY.

鈥� Steven Bodzin is the Santiago, Chile correspondent for the Monitor. He also blogs at .