The Indonesian government has claimed that the tsunami warning system will be almost twice as fast as it is today.

"It takes only eight minutes today to send information from a receiver at the bottom of the sea to the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency," Idwan Suhardi, a deputy to the state minister for research and technology, was quoted Tuesday by English daily The Jakarta Post as saying.

In 2008, however, it will take only five minutes to send the same information, he said.

This will be the case after the entire tsunami early warning system has been put in place.

The 1.2 trillion rupiah (132 million US dollars) project, the bulk of which is being paid for by foreign donors, will eventually cover the whole archipelago.

"Currently, we are prioritizing the most westerly part of the country due to the vulnerability of that region. We will move on to the eastern part later," said Rudolf W. Matindas, head of the National Survey and Mapping Agency (Bakosurtanal).

The equipment includes seismographs and buoys. A total of 70 seismographs have been installed in the western part of the archipelago since the project began in 2005.

Eventually, there will be 160 seismographs covering the entire country.

Muhammad Rum, the director general of disaster mitigation at the Home Affairs Ministry, said the project was originally supposed to be completed in 2009.

"Vice President Jusuf Kalla, however, has asked us to speed up the project so that it will be finished by 2008," Rum said.

Fifty-five of the 70 seismographs installed to date were gifts from China, Japan, Germany, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, the University of Southern California and the California Institute of Technology, according to Prih Harjadi, the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency's deputy for data systems and information.

Two buoys, which were gifts from Malaysia and Germany, have been positioned in the waters off Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam and West Sumatra provinces.

Another buoy, produced by the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Science (BPPT), will be placed in the Sunda Strait this week, and further one, a gift from the United States, will be installed in the waters off Bali next year.

The BPPT is currently producing six more buoys.

Source: Xinhua