text: In this Sunday, Sept. 30, 2018, file photo, a damaged shopping mall sits in flood water following earthquakes and a tsunami in Palu, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana, File) (Associated Press) 
   
   MAKASSAR, Indonesia (AP) — 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 U.S. National Science Foundation. 
   
   It is too late for central Sulawesi, where walls of water up to 6 meters (20 feet) high and a magnitude 7.5 earthquake killed at least 832 people in the cities of Palu and Donggala, tragically highlighting the weaknesses of the existing warning system and low public awareness about how to respond to warnings. 
   
   "To me this is a tragedy for science, even more so a tragedy for the Indonesian people as the residents of Sulawesi are discovering right now," said Louise Comfort, a University of Pittsburgh expert in disaster management who has led the U.S. side of the project, which also involves engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Indonesian scientists and disaster experts. 
   
   "It's a heartbreak to watch when there is a well-designed sensor network that could provide critical information," she said. 
   
   After a 2004 tsunami killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, more than half of them in the Indonesian province of Aceh, a concerted international effort was launched to improve tsunami warning capabilities, particularly in the Indian Ocean and for Indonesia, one of world's most earthquake and tsunami-prone countries. 
   
   Part of that drive, using funding from Germany and elsewhere, included deploying a network of 22 buoys connected to seafloor sensors to transmit advance warnings. 
   
   A sizeable earthquake off Sumatra island in 2016 that caused panic in the coastal city of Padang revealed that none of the buoys costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each were working. They'd been disabled by vandalism or theft or just stopped working due to a lack of funds for maintenance. 
   
   The backbone of Indonesia's tsunami warning system today is a network of 134 tidal gauge stations augmented by land-based seismographs, sirens in about 55 locations and a system to disseminate warnings by text message. 
   
   When the 7.5 quake hit just after 6 p.m. Friday, the meteorology and geophysics agency issued a tsunami alert, warning of potential for waves of 0.5 to 3 meters (2 to 10 feet). It ended the warning at 6:36 p.m. That drew harsh online criticism, but the agency's head said the warning was lifted after the tsunami hit. It's unclear exactly what time tsunami waves rushed into the narrow bay that Palu is built around. 
   
   "The tide gauges are operating, but they are limited in providing any advance warning. None of the 22 buoys are functioning," Comfort said. "In the Sulawesi incident, BMKG (the meteorology and geophysics agency) canceled the tsunami warning too soon, because it did not have data from Palu. This is the data the tsunami detection system could provide." 
   
   Adam Switzer, a tsunami expert at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, said it's a "little unfair" to say the agency got it wrong. 
   
   "What it shows is that the tsunami models we have now are too simplistic," he said. "They don't take into account multiple events, multiple quakes within a short period of time. They don't take into account submarine landslides." 
   
   Whatever system is in use, he said, the priority after an earthquake in a coastal area should be to get to higher ground and stay there for a couple of hours. 
   
   Power outages after the earthquake struck meant that sirens meant to warn residents to evacuate did not work, said Harkunti P. Rahayu, an expert at the Institute of Technology in Bandung. 
   
   "Most people were shocked by the earthquake and did not pay any thought that a tsunami will come," she said. 
   
   Experts say the prototype system deployed offshore from Padang — a city extremely vulnerable to tsunamis because it faces a major undersea fault overdue for a massive quake — can provide authoritative information about a tsunami threat within 1 to 3 minutes. That compares with 5 to 45 minutes from the now defunct buoys and the limited information provided by tidal gauges. 
   
   The system's undersea seismometers and pressure sensors send data-laden sound waves to warm surface waters. From there they refract back into the depths, traveling 20 to 30 kilometers (12 to 20 miles) to the next node in the network and so on. 
   
   The Padang network's final undersea point needs just a few more kilometers of fiber optic cable to connect it to a station on an offshore island where the cascades of data would be transmitted by satellite to the geophysics agency, which issues tsunami warnings, and to disaster officials. 
   
   The Associated Press first reported on the system in January 2017, when the project was awaiting Indonesian funding to lay the cables. Since then, agencies involved have suffered budget cuts and the project bounced back and forth between them. 
   
   A December 2017 quake off the coast of Java close to Jakarta reignited interest and the geophysics agency made getting funding a priority. In July, the Ministry of Finance in July approved funding to purchase and lay the cable. 
   
   But at an inter-agency meeting in September, the three major agencies involved failed to agree on their responsibilities and the project was "simply put on hold," Comfort said. 
   
   Indonesian officials who've been supportive of the new early warning system did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 
   
   Since the 2004 tsunami, the mantra among disaster officials in Indonesia has been that the earthquake is the tsunami warning and signal for immediate evacuation. Not everyone is convinced a tsunami detection system is essential. 
   
   "What Indonesian colleagues have commented upon is that people were confused about what to do with the alert information," said Gavin Sullivan, a Coventry University psychologist who works with the Indonesian Resilience Initiative on a disaster preparation project for the Indonesian city of Bandung. 
   
   The fact that people were still milling around Palu's shoreline when waves were visibly approaching shows the lessons of earlier disasters haven't been absorbed. 
   
   "This points to the failing to do appropriate training and to develop trust so that people know exactly what to do when an alert is issued," he said. "In our project in Bandung, we're finding a similar unwillingness to prepare for something that seems unlikely." 
   
   ___ 
   
   Associated Press writer Margie Mason in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report. ||||| By contrast, the fault that ruptured on Friday was a so-called strike-slip fault, in which the earth movement is largely horizontal. That kind of movement would not ordinarily create a tsunami. 
   
   But under certain circumstances it can, Dr. Patton said. 
   
   A strike-slip fault might have some amount of vertical motion that could displace seawater. Or the fault’s rupture zone, which in this case was estimated to be about 70 miles long, may pass through an area where the seafloor rises or drops off, so that when the fault moves during the quake, it pushes seawater in front of it. 
   
   Another possibility is that the tsunami was created indirectly. The violent shaking during the quake may have caused an undersea landslide that would have displaced water and created waves. Such events are not uncommon; several occurred during the 1964 9.2-magnitude Alaska earthquake, for example. 
   
   Dr. Patton said a combination of factors may have contributed to the tsunami. Studies of the seafloor will be crucial to understanding the event. “We won’t know what caused it until that’s done,” he said.
target: – The tsunami that killed hundreds, possibly thousands of people after an earthquake in Indonesia on Friday was much bigger and more devastating than would normally be expected after that kind of quake, scientists say. "We expected it might cause a tsunami, just not one that big," geophysicist Jason Patton tells the New York Times. Tsunamis like the 18-foot monster wave that wrecked cities on Sulawesi island are usually caused by "megathrust" earthquakes that move land vertically, not "strike-slip" quakes like the 7.5-magnitude one Friday, which moved the earth horizontally, Patton says. The Sulawesi event was, however, localized, unlike the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It may have been the case, Patton says, that massive undersea landslides created the tsunami, or that the narrow bay that Palu sits at the end of concentrated the wave's power. Indonesian authorities have been strongly criticized for apparently canceling the tsunami alert too early, though expert Adam Switzer at the Earth Observatory of Singapore tells the AP that this is unfair. "What it shows is that the tsunami models we have now are too simplistic," he says. "They don't take into account multiple events, multiple quakes within a short period of time. They don't take into account submarine landslides." The official death toll now stands at 844, though authorities, who have been preparing mass graves, have been unable to access some hard-hit areas, the Guardian reports.