Rescuers picked through rubble looking for both bodies and survivors on Tuesday as the death toll from the latest tsunami to hit Indonesia topped 350.
According to wire reports, at least 368 people were killed in coastal towns along southern Java island when a two-metre tsunami caused by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake came crashing onto the shoreline.
More than 54,000 people have been displaced, and 200 are missing, officials said on Tuesday.
The tsunami highlighted what remains a major hole in the Indian Ocean tsunami warning system, deployed gradually since the December 2004 tsunami disaster which killed more than 200,000 people, more than two-thirds of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
Unesco last month announced that the Indian Ocean system was up and running but in Indonesia, authorities have so far deployed special detection buoys only off the western coast of Sumatra. Java – home to more than 100m of Indonesia’s 220m people – remains unprotected.
Moreover, officials say, as in many countries Indonesia has yet to put in place a national system to relay warnings to local authorities.
“The infrastructure for the system is out there and is functioning,” said Sue Williams, a Unesco spokeswoman. “Where there is still a lot of work to be done is in the countries themselves. … There are holes there. It’s very clear that there are holes there. But that is going to take quite a long time to put in place. It’s a big job.”
Unesco has put the initial cost of setting up an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system at around $30m. But so far just $2m of that had been spent, Ms Williams said, and the Indian Ocean system remained dependent on the Pacific tsunami warning centres in Japan and Hawaii.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued a warning on Monday following what was initially reported as a 7.2-magnitude undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean south of Java.
Survivors in the worst-affected areas, however, indicated the first they heard of the danger of a tidal wave was when people around them began yelling “Tsunami! Tsunami!”
