彭蒙惠英语：Newsworthy Clips（在线收听）

Newsworthy Clips

2

Lake of Warning System hindered Scientists

Who Saw Early Threat

By James Janega / © 2004, as first

appeared in Chicago Tribune. KRT.

Distributed by TMSI.

With a killer tsunami bearing down on Sri Lanka and India, an effort to save thousands of lives came down to a handful of overworked employees in Hawaii trying to telephone government officials they did not know and did not know how to reach.

For 40 years, governments around the Pacific Ocean have known the giant waves caused by massive undersea earthquakes could reach across thousands of miles of ocean and devastate coastal areas, and they had prepared accordingly. Not so around the Indian Ocean, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed recently.

Technology had given scientists a warning of the potential danger, but they had no way to get it to the people in the wave’s path. “We didn’t have a contact in place,” Dolores Clark, spokeswoman for the International Tsunami Information Center in Hawaii, said.

Within 13 minutes, the first speeding shock waves from the massive undersea earthquake had reached enough seismographs to pinpoint the shock’s epicenter—near Sumatra in the Indian Ocean—and reveal its strength: 9.0 on the Richter scale.

If the earthquake and subsequent destructive waves had originated in the Pacific Ocean, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center would have taken just minutes to employ its extensive system of tide gauges—and a warning protocol dating to 1965—to issue an alert to 26 participating countries bordering the Pacific. In the Pacific Ocean, the United States uses a system of six deep-water buoys deployed from the Alaskan coast to Mexico to confirm a tsunami has formed.

Even though no part of the Pacific basin was threatened, the Tsunami Information Center sent an advisory to Pacific Rim countries within 15 minutes.

Vocabulary Focus

gauge (n) [^edV] a device for measuring the amount or size of something

buoy (n) [bCi] an object that floats on the water to mark a location or warn of danger

advisory (n) [Ed5vaizEri] an official announcement that contains advice, information or a warning

Specialized Terms

seismograph (n) 地震仪 a piece of equipment which measures and records the strength of an earthquake

epicenter (n) 震中 the point on the Earth’s surface directly above an earthquake or explosion

Richter scale (n phr) 芮氏地震仪 a system used to measure the strength of an earthquake