8 charged with negligence after calling off 2010 Chilean tsunami warning
Employees of Chile's emergency response offices have been charged after misinforming the public that there was no threat of a tsunami that killed 156 people, writes guest blogger Steven Bodzin.
Employees of Chile's emergency response offices have been charged after misinforming the public that there was no threat of a tsunami that killed 156 people, writes guest blogger Steven Bodzin.
鈥� A version of this post ran on the author's blog. 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La Segunda鈥檚聽version [in Spanish].
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Among other tidbits already to emerge from the trial,聽according to La Segunda聽(translation mine):聽
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this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Talcahuano, a little less in聽Juan Fernandez. A minute before the undersecretary went on TV to say there was no tsunami, the US put out a聽second alert, confirming that instruments had detected a tsunami:
鈥� Steven Bodzin is the Santiago, Chile correspondent for the Monitor. He also blogs at Setty's Notebook.