By Stephen Cummings
Caribbean Net News Trinidad and Tobago Correspondent
Email: stephen@caribbeannetnews.com
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad: Over forty participants from more than twenty countries in the Caribbean and Latin American region convened on the Trinidad St Augustine campus of The University of the West Indies for a six-day Caribbean Training Course in Seismology and Tsunami Warnings.
The programme ran from June 25-30. Hosted by the UWI's Seismic Research Unit, the Course was part of an ongoing regional effort to establish a tsunami warning system for the Caribbean and adjacent areas.
It provided participants with an understanding of the science behind tsunami warnings and exposed them to operational best-practices of warning centres.
The Caribbean continues to be vulnerable to natural disasters such as tsunamis and major earthquakes and "as the regional centre of research, the UWI (therefore) has an obligation to improve regional capacity."
This, according to the UWI, St Augustine Campus Principal, Dr Bhoendradatt Tewarie. Dr Tewarie's statement was part of the welcome remarks delivered by the Prinicpal during the opening of the course.
"There is no doubt that this region must adopt pro-active programmes to minimize the damage that tsunamis and other coastal hazards can cause. The first steps that must be undertaken are those that this workshop is adopting, viz., improved co-operation and the implementation of regional and international initiatives to increase their ability to respond to such events," Tewarie was quoted as saying.
Coming from varying backgrounds of emergency planning, meteorology, and seismology, course participants engaged in wide ranging discussions on tsunamis as well as other hazards and discussed how best to develop a tsunami early warning system that enhanced mitigation against such hazards.
Running concurrently with the Seismology & Tsunami Warnings Training Course was a training programme for seismic technicians in the use of EARTHWORM, a seismic data processing package used in managing real-time seismic data streams.
The Seismology & Tsunami Warnings Training Course was developed in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the Puerto Rico Seismic Network (PRSN), and the UNESCO IOC International Tsunami Information Center (ITIC).
This was one of several activities being coordinated by the Seismic Research Unit towards the establishment of a Caribbean tsunami warning system.
Funding for the course was provided primarily by the USAID/OFDA with additional financial support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the UWI Centre for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction. |
