Thailand’s holiday coast is unprepared for another tsunami, the country’s former emergency chief has warned, with the government-run warning centre so underfunded a key detection buoy was left inoperable for months because a flat battery was not replaced.
Smith Dharmasaroja quit the National Disaster Warning Centre, saying funding and resources for the office had been eroded, risking people’s lives.
“Right now, I don’t think Thailand is capable of issuing a tsunami warning, of properly telling people what is going to happen, because we have a lack of information. We lack equipment to detect a tsunami especially, because the Government has not given enough support to the department concerned,” he told the Herald.
A US-donated deep-ocean tsunami detection buoy, installed 600 nautical miles north-west of Phuket in 2006, last sent a signal on June 16 this year because the battery ran flat. Continue reading
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