Seychelles takes part in tsunami exercise |10 September 2014

Different agencies took part in yesterday’s exercise

Seychelles joined 23 other countries spanning from Australia to South Africa in taking part in a United Nations-backed simulation tsunami exercise yesterday to test their capacity to forecast and tackle similar disasters.

The exercise was organised a decade after the strongest tsunami in living memory hit the region. Those who took part in the Indian Ocean wide exercise gathered at the Divisions of the Disaster and Risk Management offices at Mont Fleuri.

The Divisions of Risk and Disaster Management along with the Seychelles Meteorological Office (Meteo) and other partners seized the opportunity to test their standard operating procedures and communication systems.

For the first day, yesterday, the exercise was functional one, but today, part of Anse Boileau’s district services will be tested.
It was at its ninth session held in Jakarta, Indonesia in November 2012 that the Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System (ICG/IOTWS) decided to organise an Indian Ocean Wave Exercise (IOWave14) in the second half of 2014 and established a task team to plan and conduct the exercise. At its recent intersessional meeting held in Hyderabad, India on June 27, the task team decided to conduct the IOWave14 exercise on September 9-10, 2014.

IOWave14 is being used to simulate Indian Ocean countries being put in a tsunami warning situation and require the national tsunami warning centre (NTWC) and (optionally) the disaster management organisation (DMO) in each member state to implement their standard operating procedures. The exercise comprises two scenarios on successive days, one in the eastern Indian Ocean and the other in the north-western Indian Ocean.

The first scenario simulates a magnitude 9.1 earthquake south of Java, Indonesia and the second scenario simulates a magnitude 9.0 earthquake in the Makran Trench south of Iran and Pakistan. Both scenarios will generate simulated tsunami waves travelling across the whole Indian Ocean

Regional tsunami service providers in India, Indonesia and Australia are making exercise bulletins and detailed tsunami threat advice available on their password-protected websites during the events, and are send notification messages to national tsunami warning centres as the data is updated during the events.