It was Sunday morning of December 26 when an underwater earthquake of magnitude 9.1 hit near the Sumatra Coast in Indonesia. Minutes after the earthquake, waves as high as 30 meters swept through the shores of countries around the Indian Ocean such as Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. In their wake, the huge waves killed over 200,000 people. The cause of this deadly tsunami was an earthquake that is thought to have had the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs that lasted for 10 minutes.

The waves reached far into Southeast Asia and even went as far as East Africa. The Philippines was spared because there are islands and land masses between the Indian Ocean and the Philippine archipelago that blocked the tsunami, according to Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) director Renato Solidum. These are the Malay Peninsula, Borneo Island, Sumatra Island, and Java Island.

In 2006, a couple of years after the tsunami struck, Phivolc's budget proposal for a tsunami detection system finally got funded. The funding allowed the agency to set up a network of dry and wet sensors in key areas around the country.

“When the water retreats, that can be detected, and if the water will encroach the coast then that can also be detected,” Solidum explained.


Before 2004, the country did have the warning equipment used for earthquakes and tsunamis from the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (NAMRIA), but these were not online.

“We used those information to verify if indeed there were waves related to tsunami that affected some coastlines in the Philippines, but information could not be sent to their office real-time. So it’s not real-time data-gathering.”

Now, 10 years after that disaster, the country is also capable of helping other countries, as it is also part of the Pacific Warning Center, in monitoring earthquakes and sea levels all over the Pacific, Solidum said.