Early Warning Systems Defined - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 96

The reasons are complicated, but focus on the fact that, long before the earthquake
and tsunami, an international tsunami warning system had been assumed to stop and
to be successful with the issuing of information to authorities soon after an earth-
quake, so the Pacifi c Tsunami Warning Center had no mandate, resources, assis-
tance, support, or expertise to go further (Kelman 2006 ). Realising the horrendous
danger, the staff nonetheless tried desperately to improvise, but as one example
indicating why the message did not get through, phones were not answered due to
the holiday season. As such, the Pacifi c Tsunami Warning Center had a huge suc-
cess, but the EWS system overall—which goes far beyond the Pacifi c Tsunami
Warning Center and the authorities with whom they communicate—undoubtedly
failed miserably, leading to a horrendous death toll.
The consequent lessons are the standard ethos that EWS are much more than
issuing information on the hazard and that the full EWS cannot start after the hazard
has manifested. As Maskrey ( 1997 , p. F-22) writes, 'Early warning systems are only
as good as their weakest link. They can, and frequently do, fail for a number of
reasons.'

5.2.2 Miles and Centredness

Many ways of enacting an EWS are discussed. A popular plea is for 'The Last
Mile'. The Last Mile of EWS suggests that plenty of relevant material exists for, and
plenty of efforts are put into implementing, an EWS, but a chasm nonetheless exists
in getting the information to the people who need it when they need it, in order to
produce appropriate responses. The argument is that this identifi ed gap ought to be
fi lled by closing The Last Mile between the knowledge's origin and the places and
people where EWS knowledge needs to reach.
There are two fl aws with The Last Mile's approach. First, it assumes that all
relevant EWS knowledge is external to communities, despite extensive documenta-
tion on the necessity of incorporating local knowledge into EWS without relying
exclusively on local knowledge (e.g. Gruntfest and Ripps 2000 ; Wisner 1995 ).
Second, The Last Mile implies that the people who need the EWS are the last to be
involved, simply by being an add-on to a system constructed according to external
specifi cations. Instead, the people who are affected by hazards, who have the vul-
nerabilities, and who are served by the EWS should be involved as the central
component and should be involved from the beginning of the EWS design and
operation. This approach is termed 'The First Mile' (e.g. Loster 2012 ). The key is
that the people who need EWS information can assist in providing that information
and they should be involved as the fi rst, not last, step of setting up and operational-
ising an EWS.
In that respect, The First Mile differs substantively from The Last Mile due to the
different process of creating the EWS from the beginning. That holds true even if
the technical, operational, and management approaches of the First Mile EWS and
The Last Mile EWS have signifi cant similarities and overlaps. The difference is