SENAT
Report n° 117 (2007-2008) by M. Roland COURTEAU, Senator (for the parliament office for the evaluation of scientific and technological choices) - Appendix to the minutes of the 7 December 2007 session
Disponible au format Acrobat (21 Moctets)
b) Establishing a long-term, perennial budget
A tsunami warning system cannot be set up and function properly in the long-term if it does not benefit from a perennial budget that takes into account not only the initial equipment costs, but also the operating costs (salaries, missions, equipment maintenance, telecommunications, updating of software, etc.).
This funding must be clearly defined, in agreement with the various bodies involved in setting up the system and which must also be officially commissioned to carry out their new missions linked to tsunami monitoring and the issuance of warnings.
In addition, the government must clearly commit itself to the sums it is willing to spend in the long-term to maintain a tsunami warning system, in order to avoid this system being questioned a few years after its creation.
c) Integration of the tsunami risk into a multi-risk approach?
As the head of CEA/DASE pointed out, the future national tsunami warning centre will be confronted with the same constraints as the national centre for the monitoring of nuclear explosions: although the surveilled event occurs only rarely, when it does, the information on it must be gathered quickly and reliably; this requires high-performance equipment that is also sometimes redundant (for greater security).
Therefore, the idea behind extending the mission of the tsunami warning system to include the monitoring and prevention of other coastal-submersion risks of marine origin is to make the best use of the significant investments required to set up a tsunami warning system and to ensure the longevity of the government's financial commitment by strengthening the legitimacy of the warning centre through a multiplication of its missions.
This idea is also based on the observation that tide gauges are used to verify and quantify all coastal-inundation risks. Communicating on the multiple applications of the sea-level measuring devices should therefore contribute to justifying their acquisition and updating. Similarly, a precise cartography (both bathymetric and altimetric) of the coastal zones can be used to both forecast and manage all coastal-inundationing risks of marine origin.
While your rapporteur recognizes the pertinence of these arguments, he nevertheless remains convinced that the modalities of integrating a tsunami warning system into a multi-risk warning system are much more difficult than the supporters of this approach believe, insofar as the "competent" body for analyzing the hazard and issuing the warning to the concerned civil-protection services differs according to the nature of the risk.
Most tsunamis for which an effective warning is conceivable are generated by an earthquake. The warning system must therefore be able to be set off by a body specialized in the monitoring and evaluation of earthquakes, such as CEA in France or INGV in Italy.
The other coastal-inundationing risks of marine origin (storm surges, cyclonal swells, rising sea level) are all of meteorological origin and must therefore be managed by such weather services as Météo France.
How would these different areas of competence be divided up within the framework of a multi-risk system here in France? Would one organism be called upon to absorb another?
Your rapporteur would like to point out that in Japan, the weather services are responsible for managing all natural hazards and, as a result, include a seismological department. Nevertheless, this structure has not been adopted in France and the obstacles with which such a reform would be confronted must be weighed against the gains that could be made. In this regard, your rapporteur would like to point out the failure to set up a national multi-risk warning centre in La Réunion, which was meant to rely on Météo France. While it is true that Météo France issues tsunami as well as cyclone warnings, in reality, it is a Focal Point that is content with retransmitting the bulletins issued by PTWC and JMA, due to a lack of seismological expertise.
Therefore, your rapporteur believes that, in the short term, the multi-risk approach must primarily seek 1) the acquisition of a network of "multi-use" measuring devices whose data must be made available to all risk-management bodies and 2) the mutualization of the data-transmission means.