“In the aftermath of the Friday earthquake and ensuing tsunami that destroyed thousands of homes and killed more than 1,200 people on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, officials are beginning to sort out what went wrong with the country’s early warning system for tsunami detection. Indonesia’s system, completed in 2008, consists of seismographic sensors, buoys, tidal gauges and GPS. None of these measures were able to adequately predict the scale of Friday’s tsunami, which reached heights of 20 feet in the city of Palu, south of the earthquake’s epicenter.”
Source: What Went Wrong With Indonesia’s Tsunami Early Warning System – The New York Times
