Streamlined Indian Ocean tsunami alert key - expert

KUTA, Indonesia, Aug 1 (Reuters) Indian Ocean nations must shed national pride and ensure a planned regional tsunami warning system is simple enough to work, a top official from the United Nations' science arm said today.

When the project first started in the wake of the December 26, 2004 tsunami that killed around 230,000 people, many Indian Ocean countries wanted to host a regional alert centre, UNESCO assistant director general Patricio Bernal said.

''Everybody has their expectations that they would be able to be the centre. I think they are wrong,'' Bernal said on the sidelines of a meeting aimed at protecting Indian Ocean nations from the threat of tsunami.

''It will be complicating the protocols of transmission. If you have, say, eight centres, it will be self defeating. It will never work,'' he said, adding the Indian Ocean needed only one or two hubs to link up to national earthquake and tsunami centres.

After 18 months of work, government weather agencies in almost all members of the Intergovernmental Coordination Group for the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System have been connected.

However, they still rely on the Japan Meteorological Agency and the US Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre for tsunami alerts although both are hubs for the Pacific, not the Indian Ocean.

At the current meeting on the resort island of Bali, member states should decide who will host the Indian Ocean hub.

''They are learning that in order to have an effective system they need to lower the barriers of national pride and humbly cooperate,'' Bernal said, adding a centre was expected to begin running in 2007.

The advanced part of the project is having sophisticated tsunami detectors -- huge metal buoys with deep-ocean pressure sensors that can send instant signals to weather centres -- throughout the Indian Ocean.

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