I talked to a guy today in the USGS and an officer in AGU who is going to agitate, from the vantage point that Bush has promised some amount of aid that could easily set up such an early warning network. Some combination of NOAA and the USGS is probable.

The UN should ideally take the lead, but Bush still begrudges their excellent advice to handle Iraq differently. I expect he'll try to do it without the Europeans, or just offer compassionate words, then tell them to buck up and solve their own problems, he has a huge budget deficit of his own, as comes up when we try to instrument Mt St Helens, or even raise funding for public schools closer to home.

I suspect the problem is really a local one - it is not hard to tell nearly immediately that a very large earthquake has happened, but reliably warning ALL the villages and fisherman out at sea is harder.

In addition, I won't be surprised if I hear that this M9 event is very rare. Very bad luck that might not have happened for 1000 years, but did.