Government attempt to kill tsunami warning

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has promised to overhaul the entire disaster-protection system. He discovered just how deplorable the whole warning, rescue and emergency systems were when he went down South himself to supervise the rescue mission earlier this week. He said he learned first-hand that the country had no adequate warning system in place, no back-up communications, no emergency power supplies, no contingency plan to coordinate relief measures. What's worse, he said that local officials hadn't even gone on alert. The tsunami had already smashed six southern provinces when he discovered that these bureaucrats wouldn't even start to respond to the crisis "until I ordered them to". Why were they awaiting orders from the country's chief executive? The simple answer, drawing from recent examples - bird flu, Sars, even Bangkok's horrendous traffic jams - is: they just wanted to save their own butts. That's how they've been trained to think and taught to act.