Hundreds flee ‘tsunami’ in Albay

STO. DOMINGO, Albay (AP) — Nearly 1,000 residents evacuated a coastal village in this town yesterday as church bells clanged a mock alert in an unprecedented drill by more than two dozen Pacific Rim countries to test a tsunami warning system.

The ocean-wide exercise, the first test of a Pacific warning system set up in 1965, was conducted to prepare for any repeat of the 2004 Asian tsunami catastrophe in which at least 216,000 were killed or left missing in 11 countries, many because they were not forewarned of the danger.

During the drill, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii sent warnings by e-mail and fax about mock earthquakes off Chile that had triggered an ocean-wide tsunami.

Governments tested how quickly they received the warnings and how rapidly they were able to relay the information to domestic emergency alert systems.

The Philippines went further by staging an evacuation of more than 800 residents of the hillside village of Buhatan in this town.

Some evacuations were also expected in American Samoa, Thailand and Malaysia, but most participating countries were expected to conduct only mock responses.

An official of the Philippine Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said it takes an hour to relay the warning from an international emergency system, and only minutes to spread the alert locally.

But engineer Allan Labayog of the Phivolcs regional observatory in Zamboanga City expressed concern over the lack of preparation of most areas in the archipelago where tsunamis could strike.

Labayog said only the Bicol Region is considered well organized and prepared.

He pointed out that Zamboanga City has no action plan nor clear areas elevated enough for an emergency relocation if a tsunami hits.

Labayog noted the city’s proximity to the Cotabato Trench, the movement of which in 1976 triggered a tsunami killing thousands of villagers in the Zamboanga Peninsula.

In Buhatan village just after dawn, village leaders used a stone and a hammer to ring the bells of a small church, signaling the start of the exodus. People then streamed out of their homes, tugging along children and struggling to carry bamboo mats, hammocks, sacks of rice, coffeepots and roosters.

The crippled and the elderly were carried on plastic chairs along the difficult, one-kilometer uphill trek on a winding road partly blocked by landslides from last week’s storm and muddied by a thunderstorm the night before.

Except for minor glitches, including a power outage that prevented one office from faxing a warning, the drill went well and Buhatan villagers managed to reach a designated safe hilltop more than two hours before the imaginary tsunami should have engulfed their village, officials said.

While many of the villagers said they were aware of the need for the drill, others appeared to have been drawn by curiosity and the sudden attention heaped by outside media on their remote, laid-back village. Many had to stop to catch their breath and rest their legs and at least four were treated by nurses in an ambulance for hypertension.

"It’s tiring but it’s important for us to do this so that when the tsunami comes we’ll know where to go," said 56-year-old carpenter Fernando Cruz, who huddled with his wife and two nieces on a grassy roadside. — With Roel Pareño