An early warning system that might have prevented some deaths in the tsunami that hit an Indonesian island on Friday has been stalled in the testing phase for years.
The high-tech system of seafloor sensors, data-laden sound waves and fiber-optic cable was meant to replace a system set up after an earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 250,000 people in the region in 2004.
But inter-agency wrangling and delays in getting just 1 billion rupiah ($69,000) to complete the project mean the system hasn’t moved beyond a prototype developed with $3 million from the US National Science Foundation.