Cry Wolf?Officials received a tsunami warning 20 minutes before the first wave (of two) hit the southern shores of Java. They did not act upon it because they were too busy monitoring the aftershocks of the 7.7-magnitude quake that triggered the tsunami to raise the alarm.
The government's science and technology minister, Kusmayanto Kadiman, confirmed last night that Indonesia had received bulletins from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii and Japan's meteorological agency after the quake, but "we did not announce them".
"If it [the tsunami] did not occur, what would have happened?" he said in Jakarta.Some 341 (and rising ~over 200 are missing) deaths would not have occurred?
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