India, S. Africa most prone to Tsunami after-effects

India and South Africa are likely to experience the worst damage or devastation if another Tsunami takes place in the near future, scientists have claimed.

Edinburgh, Feb.27 : India and South Africa are likely to experience the worst damage or devastation if another Tsunami takes place in the near future, scientists have claimed.

According to them, these two countries have very poor infrastructure and planning to deal with such a calamity even now.

David Ovadia, the head of international business development at the British Geological Survey, was quoted by the Scotsman as saying: "There will be another tsunami, we just don't know when. It could be tomorrow or in 100 years. Vast numbers of people still are not protected because of a lack of a proper alarm system. The technology may be state-of-the-art, but it can only do so much if there are no sirens on the beaches or evacuation drills."

Scientists have revealed that the fault line, which spawned the December 26, 2004 Tsunami has ruptured nearly 20 times this month, with three strong quakes in the past 24 hours alone.

The activity shows the stress the seam is under and could be a harbinger of worse to come, the Scotsman quoted Kerry Sieh, an American professor as saying.

Following the 2004 disaster, which killed 230,000 people in 12 Indian Ocean countries, the UN announced it would co-ordinate the creation of an early warning system.

Although a monitoring system was in place in 2006, huge swathes of coastline remain unprotected.

Simon Boxhall, from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said huge swathes of the Indonesian coast could not be safeguarded, because any tsunami warning would be too late.

Sieh and other scientists used global positioning system transmitters to measure the uplift of the quakes, and predicted another massive tremor sometime in the next 100 years or so.

The fault line is the seam in the earth where the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates have been pushing against each other for millions of years, causing huge pressure to build up.

It runs the length of the west coast of Sumatra, about 125 miles offshore.

The steady stream of quakes it has produced this month does not seem to be alarming residents too much. Witnesses say some tremors cause people to flee swaying homes, but few are aware of, or heed, the tsunami warnings that automatically accompany the big jolts.

ANI