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BRISBANE - Memories of the Asian Boxing Day tsunami were never far from the minds of Australians who headed for the hills in panic after a tsunami warning this week.
Chaos reigned across parts of Australia after a tsunami alert was issued for the east coast in the wake of a massive earthquake which struck the Solomon Islands early Monday morning.
Roads out of north Queensland cities, which would have been the first to be hit, were jammed with hundreds of motorists in search of higher ground.
Schools, businesses, hospitals, transport services -- including Sydney's ferries -- were shut down and beaches closed in NSW and Queensland.
As local authorities and residents scrambled for more information, the Queensland government was locked in meetings, debating whether to begin door-knocking homes and ordering evacuations.
It was far from the usually well-planned response Queenslanders are used to when it comes to natural disasters like cyclones and floods.
While the tsunami petered out long before it hit Australian shores, it has sparked debate about the nation's preparedness for a tsunami and whether any lessons have been learned from the 2004 Boxing Day disaster.
"We were badly under-prepared for a tsunami," tsunami expert Professor Jon Nott said.
"People didn't know where to go. People just had images of Banda Aceh and thought the whole coastal plain was going to be swamped by the ocean."
Prof Nott, of James Cook University in Cairns, said while Australia's tsunami warning systems were adequate, there were no plans in place to deal with such a catastrophe.
"You certainly can't blame the public - they did the right thing which was to evacuate," he said.
"I think the governments have been very lax in not taking tsunamis seriously in this country.
"We've been talking to them for well over a decade about it ... and people just take the attitude, 'Well, it's not going to happen to us'."
According to Geoscience Australia, minor tsunami are recorded about once every two years in Australia, but most are small and present little threat to coastal communities.
The tsunami threat to Australia varies from "relatively low" for most of the coastline, to "moderate" on the north-west coast of WA due to its proximity to Indonesia and other countries in that region prone to large earthquakes and volcanic activity.
Several large tsunami have hit Australia's north-west coast -- the largest at Cape Leveque, WA, in 1977, measured at 6m.
In May 1960, an earthquake in Chile generated the largest recorded tsunami along the east coast of Australia.
The event generated tsunami waves of just under a metre and damaged boats at Lord Howe Island, Evans Head, Newcastle, Sydney and Eden.
Prof Nott said the 1960 event was the last time Australians had experienced such a major tsunami alert.
Queensland Premier Peter Beattie demanded better early warning systems for tsunamis, arguing his government had little detail about the threat to pass on to residents.
"We were trying to work out the magnitude of it but we were shooting blind, and I don't believe this is good enough for Australia," he said.
He has written to Prime Minister John Howard asking him to push forward the introduction of offshore monitoring systems around the Australian coastline.
Currently some buoys with monitoring equipment are scheduled for placement in the Coral Sea by the end of this year, but the full-scale monitoring system is not scheduled to come online until 2009.
However Howard was satisfied with the way Australia responded to the tsunami threat.
The man responsible for overseeing the roll-out of Australia's tsunami warning system, federal MP Bob Baldwin, accused Beattie of failing to act decisively.
"He almost plunged the state into panic by the fact that he didn't seem to know what he was doing," he said.
Queensland's director of disaster operations, Mike Shapland, said emergency services did as best they could under the circumstances.
"The science behind it is very difficult -- we can predict the fact of an earthquake and that it will take some time to reach the various coastal areas involved," he said.
"The difficulty is we can't detect with any certainty the height of that wave or the destructiveness of that wave."
The Queensland government is already talking about ways to warn the public about such threats, such as the introduction of an SMS service and the possibility of going back to air raid sirens.
However, Prof Nott said it should be focusing on better ways to respond.
He said a tsunami mitigation plan, similar to plans for cyclones and floods, should be adopted.
"In many ways we could have extra buoys out there and know more precisely how big the wave might be, but it's not going to change the fact that we still need to evacuate people pretty well as soon as we get the first warning," he said.
"By the time a tsunami gets to our buoys in the Coral Sea ... it could be too late."
- AAP
