Strait data to predict disasters

AS the people of Burma struggle to recover from Cyclone Nargis, a small band from Griffith University's school of engineering is up in the Torres Strait collecting data that may help guard against loss of life should the same thing happen there.

AS the people of Burma struggle to recover from Cyclone Nargis, a small band from Griffith University's school of engineering is up in the Torres Strait collecting data that may help guard against loss of life should the same thing happen there.

Griffith was called in by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water as part of the commonwealth Government's national disaster mitigation program.

Associate professor Charles Lemckert's team planted 51 pieces of equipment, including seabed-mounted tide gauges and atmospheric pressure sensors, at 17 sites across the strait at the beginning of April.

The islands surveyed range from Thursday Island in the southern part of the strait to Boigu and Sabai, close to Papua New Guinea.

The strait covers 48,000sqkm and includes 18 island communities with 7000 residents.

The Torres Strait is generally too far north to be affected by cyclones, which are more of a risk in north Queensland, Professor Lemckert said, but the islands are small and low-lying and thus vulnerable to events such as king tides or rising sea levels.

The strait is also riddled with reefs and channels, not all of them mapped, and is also subject to high winds during parts of the year.

In early 2006, according to the local newspaper, Torres News, high tides, strong winds and heavy rain caused severe damage to half the region's inhabited islands.

Homes were damaged and sewage systems flooded.

"It's a region with a lot of unknowns and this is the first real survey of the water in that region," Professor Lemckert said.

"If we know how much the water is likely to rise in the event of a storm or some other event, we can work out how many people should be evacuated." The gauges planted by the Griffith team have measured the height of the water every minute for 35 days and the data from them will be used by NRW surveyors.

Updated estimates will also be useful in an area that carries an increasing amount of shipping.

Professor Lemckert said the researchers had also drawn on the knowledge of Torres Strait Islander communities, which are the custodians of generations of local and historical knowledge.