An Indonesian official has questioned whether the government can afford to operate and maintain the planned Indian Ocean Tsunami Early Warning System (TEWS), The Jakarta Post reported Saturday.

The director of the Geophysics Data and Information Center at the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG), Prih Hajardi, said the operation and maintenance costs could be as high as US$300,000 per month for each deep-sea tsunami assessment and reporting (DART) system.

"The operational and maintenance costs will be quite high because we need to check and clean the system on a weekly and monthly basis. Regular maintenance is important because the regional and national transmission of tsunami monitoring requires satellites," he was quoted as saying.

Prih said that in the Indian Ocean alone, at least 10 DART buoys were necessary for accurate and fast warnings.

The Indian Ocean tsunami on Dec. 26 that killed hundreds of thousands of people led to calls for setting up a tsunami early warning system in the region. Indonesia's Aceh Province was the hardest hit by the tsunami.

Germany earlier this week agreed to provide 45 million euros (US$85.85 million) worth of equipment for the development of a TEWS in Indonesia for monitoring, assessments and the online and real-time transmission of data through a satellite system.

The TEWS components consist of 10 global positioning system (GPS)-based buoys, 25 seismographs, 10 GPS stations, 10 GPS tide gauges and 20 ocean bottom pressure sensors for the DART system.

The TEWS components will likely be located around North Sumatra, along the south-coast of East Nusa Tenggara, around the Banda Sea in Maluku, and in North and Central Sulawesi, according to Prih.
 
(Xinhua News Agency March 21, 2005)