Agence France Presse

Port Louis, January 10:

The construction of a sea wall similar to one protecting the Maldives capital Male could blunt the full destructive power of a future tidal wave and reduce the impact of flooding on other islands, specialists have said. Several sea walls have been built in the world in countries particularly at risk from the destructive potential of a tsunami, like Bangladesh and the Maldives, where construction began after a tidal wave struck in 1997.

“The impact was less important because of the wall,” said Mohamed Latheef, the UN representative in the Maldives, reflecting on the December 26 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster.

“We couldn’t avoid having Male flooded. But without the wall, half of Male would have been totally destroyed. Male didn’t sustain any major destruction of properties,” he said. Latheef is attending a UN conference on small islands in Mauritius, where the creation of an early warning system to prevent a repeat of the catastrophe that left more than 156,000 dead was high on the agenda. The Maldives was hard hit by the December 26 tidal waves, with 82 people killed throughout the archipelago. Yet in part thanks to the sea wall there were no fatalities in Male, home to 75,000 people, a quarter of the overall population.

Mohamed Inaz, a senior official at the Maldives environment ministry, said the sea wall in Male is about 50 metres from the shoreline and sits three metres above the waterline.

He said the barrier, made up of hollowed-out, pyramid-shaped concrete blocks, could stop waves of up to two metres in height — not quite enough for the December 26 tsunami that was over 3.5 metres high. However the cost of such a wall — estimated at $4,000 a metre — makes it difficult to imagine how what Latheef described as “a necklace around the island” could be extended to protect the rest of the islands in the archipelago.

Philippe Boulle of the French Association for the Prevention of Natural Catastrophes said sea walls had their limitations.

The wall built off part of the coast of Bangladesh “did not make it possible to stop 12-metre-high waves” at the beginning of the 1990s, he said.