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TSUNAMI

Sweden seeks to bury tsunami tapes

The contentious tapes detailing data traffic from the government offices in connection with the 2004 Asian tsunami are set to be classified for 70 years, according to a new proposal.

Published: 4 October 2009 09:58 CEST

“Incomprehensible,” was the response of one freedom of information expert to the proposal.

The government has also proposed amending the constitution to ensure that the principle of public access to official records (offentlighetsprincipen) does not apply to the back up copies, according to a report in the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.

The tsunami tapes are back up copies of all the data traffic from the government offices on and around Boxing Day 2004 when the tidal wave catastrophe occurred in South-East Asia.

The tapes went missing around the time of the catastrophe and during the course of the subsequent investigation into (the former Social Democrat) government inaction to manage the crisis, which affected hundreds of Swedish holidaymakers.

They were rediscovered in a cellar at the government offices several years later.

When the tapes emerged the new right-wing government sought to have them classified for 70 years and were roundly criticised by heavyweight legal counsel on the Council on Legislation (Lagrådet).

In order to gain exception from freedom of information stipulations certain criteria must be fulfilled, this was ruled to not be the case, and the government was forced to back down amid a storm of criticism.

A decision was taken by the government and the parliament to classify the tapes for three years. The government has now presented a proposal to extend the classification of the contentious tapes for a further 70 years.

The proposal if passed would mean that information from the tapes could only be released if the information “does not risk damaging the work of the government offices.”

The new proposal has also received criticism from legal experts.

“It is completely incomprehensible, then the principle of public access to official records does not exist at all,” Anders R Olsson told the newspaper.

Olsson continues to argue that the government has still not been able to satisfactorily demonstrate the concrete nature of the threat posed by the tapes.

The government has previously claimed that the tapes could be used to decipher the nature of routines and work methods applied by the government offices.

To avoid coming into conflict with the public access principle, the government has proposed that the back up tapes be permanently excluded. This means that they would never be available for public access and would serve only for internal government purposes.

The tsunami tapes are said to contain information that is not available anywhere else and thus can not be excepted from the public access principle, legal expert Jeanette Gustafsdotter argued to the newspaper.

According to Gustafsdotter the government proposal is a further indication that the principle is being weakened and undermined.

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TSUNAMI

Police call off search for Greenland tsunami missing

Four people are now presumed dead after police called off their search following the landslide and subsequent flood in western Greenland earlier this month, as experts continue to assess the cause of the disaster.

Published: 27 June 2017 11:50 CEST
Police call off search for Greenland tsunami missing
Greenland's flag flying at half mast in Copenhagen. Photo: Liselotte Sabroe/Scanpix

Three adults and one child, who have not been seen since a tsunami hit the village of Nuugaatsiaq on June 17th, are now presumed to have died in the flood.

Searches using planes helicopters, ships and dinghies were all carried out without turning up any sign of the missing people, reports Danish news agency Ritzau.

Police admitted as early as last week that they did not expected to find the missing persons alive.

The four are thought to have been washed to sea after a landslide fell into the Karrat Fjord on the west coast of the Danish autonomous territory.

Waves hit the village with such force that 11 houses were also dragged into the sea.

Artic Command told Ritzau that the area washed away by the wave measured 1100 by 300 metres.

Several villages in the area remain evacuated in a precaution against further landslides.

While authorities are still alert to the danger of further tsunamis, five villages, as well of the town of Uummannaq, were assessed Saturday as being out of the risk area should further incidents occur.

Researchers remain uncertain as to how the landslide itself was started.

READ ALSO: Experts uncertain on cause of Greenland disaster

David M. Kerrick, a former assistant professor of Mathematics and Physics at The University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, told The Local that he believed the Greenland tsunami to have been caused by an earthquake.

“Right now I am of the opinion that the tsunami in Greenland was caused by an earthquake. In general this has to do with a possible connection, I believe, between events in the Pacific Ring of Fire and the South Sandwich Trench, which ‘moves’ things along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge towards Iceland, impacting North America and Europe,” Kerrick wrote via email.

The Pacific Ring of Fire is an area in the basin of the Pacific Ocean associated with a series of oceanic trenches, volcanoes and plate movements.

The Greenland earthquake may be related to new or existing faults being opened by geophysical changes whose effects have also been seen in other unusual tremors, Kerrick said.

“As I see it, the connection between the Pacific Ring of Fire and the South Sandwich trench moving up along the mid-Atlantic ridge towards Iceland, opens up new or possibly already existing ‘hairline’ faults proceeding from Iceland moving into North America,” the professor wrote.

Experts with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) initially said the tsunami had been started by an earthquake, but began to doubt this after receiving reports of tidal waves 30 kilometres away.

The size of the tidal wave was too great to have been caused by an earthquake of the magnitude measured, GEUS seismologist Peter Voss told DR.

Reports on June 18th suggested an earthquake measuring 4.0 on the Richter scale had struck off the Greenland coast.

Trine Dahl Jensen, a senior researcher with GEUS, told Ritzau the day after the tsunami that earthquakes of that magnitude were “not normal” in western Greenland.

Voss told DR last week that data should be analysed before any conclusions could be made.

“Measurements of earthquakes and landslides resemble each other. We have to find out what started the landslide – whether or not it was an earthquake,” he said.