Fiji National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) plans to extend additional 26 tsunami sirens across Viti Levu.
NDMO director Vasiti Soko highlighted this while addressing and welcoming the US Congressional team at the NDMO Warehouse at Walu Bay in Suva recently.
She said 13 tsunami sirens were already installed in the Suva peninsula.
“The idea is to better prepare our coastal communities,” Ms Soko said.
“Seventy per cent of Fiji’s population resides within 5km to the coastline, so, this tsunami siren is not only there to activate warnings, it’s also a lifesaving mechanism.”
She said some lessons were learnt from the fire incident in Hawaii.
“One of the big lessons that we took from the fire in Hawaii is that we cannot have a single hazard siren.
“We need to adopt a multi-hazard sirens so that when we need to sound it, communities are aware that, okay, this is the sign that we need to either move inland or move out away from inland because of for example fire.
“So, a lot of these lessons were learnt. We are very keen to listen to our discussions with congressmen from Hawaii, having to listen about the fire that happened in Hawaii.
“We also looked into the work of our other Pacific Island countries that they are doing. We revise them and improve our systems and processes.”
She also said they were in the process of installing community flood early warning systems.
“This is to ensure that when it triggers, when it goes above warning level that the siren is activated and communities are informed to evacuate.”
Ms Soko said their emergency operations centres had been working well.
“There are a total of 33 emergency operations centre’s we have at the district level. They report to the four divisional emergency operations centre and then they reports to the national emergency operations centre.
“So in terms of the bottom-up approach, this is a system that’s been working well for Fiji since its operation.”
