WASHINGTON – Four months after one of the most destructive tsunamis in history killed thousands of people along the Indian Ocean basin, Congress is taking steps to try to prevent similar devastation in the United States.

The United States has a system to detect tsunamis – large, often destructive waves produced after underwater disturbances – in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and in the Caribbean Sea, but several bills are moving through Congress to expand and improve the detection system and reduce reaction times.

Immediately after last December’s Indian Ocean tsunami, President Bush requested and was granted supplemental funds for this year to expand the United States’ warning system. The president requested additional money for the plan in his proposed 2006 budget, according to an official from the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Bush’s proposal calls for spending $37.5 million over the next two years to develop 32 new detection buoys. Seven of the buoys would be placed in the Atlantic and the Caribbean and the rest in the Pacific, said Greg Romano, public affairs director for the National Weather Service, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

These “next generation” buoys, part of the Weather Service’s Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis program, would be able to collect a wide range of data about the oceans, including tsunamis, and would provide more real-time information than the current buoys, said Scott Carter, a congressional affairs specialist for NOAA.

The new system would provide the United States with improved ability to detect coastal tsunamis, allowing responses within minutes. The new system also would “expand monitoring capabilities throughout the entire Pacific and Caribbean basins, providing tsunami warnings for regions bordering half of the world’s oceans,” according to a science and technology office press release.

On the heels of Bush’s proposal, several tsunami warning bills were introduced in both chambers of Congress.

Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, co-chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, sponsored a bill exclusively focused on establishing an improved tsunami warning system.

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, another member of the committee and chairman of its Fisheries and the Coast Guard Subcommittee, reintroduced legislation that would establish a comprehensive system to monitor the condition of the nation’s oceans and coastlines, including detecting tsunamis. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, co-sponsored the bill.

The committee has approved both bills, and they are expected to go to the Senate floor for debate soon, Carter said.

According to information about tsunamis on NOAA’s Web site, movement on the ocean floor sends water upward, and as the wall of water moves closer to shore and enters shallower water, the wave becomes compressed, slowing its speed but increasing the wave length and height, causing the pileup of water that crashes to shore. The process can repeat a number of times, with flooding occurring between waves.

While a tsunami can occur anywhere, one is much less likely to hit along the Atlantic Coast or in the Caribbean Sea than in the Pacific Ocean because the Pacific has deep, actively moving fault lines that shift to cause an upheaval of water and, thus, a tsunami, Romano said. Earthquakes registering 7.0 or greater on the Richter scale are generally needed for a tsunami to occur, he said.

But the Atlantic and Caribbean areas are not without risk.

“We have in the Atlantic and Caribbean densely populated areas … so the potential impact should a tsunami occur is huge,” Romano said. “It’s important that people who live or work or visit coastal communities along any coasts understand that tsunamis could occur and that there are very simple actions that should be taken.”

For individuals, one of the most important things to do is to move inland or to higher ground, said Romano. Local communities can help prepare citizens for tsunamis through education and planning.

To that end, NOAA developed the Tsunami Ready Community program so communities can prepare for tsunamis by establishing an emergency operations center, notification system and hazard plan, according to information on NOAA’s Web site. The program is similar to NOAA’s Storm Ready program, which educates communities about how to handle tornadoes and other major storms. Once a community is storm-ready, it would not take much to become tsunami-ready as well, Carter said.

But only a handful of communities in New England are storm-ready, including Fort Fairfield, Maine, and Hampton, N.H., and no place on the East Coast is tsunami-ready. On the West Coast, where tsunamis are more likely to occur, only 15 or 16 communities are tsunami-ready, Carter said.

“If communities don’t understand what to do when they get a warning or when an earthquake happens, it’s not going to do a lot of good,” Carter said.

Depending on weather and sea conditions, tsunamis can be of varying heights, and topographic differences can affect how far inland the waves travel. The Northeast region has the advantage of having higher levels of elevation than other parts of the country, Romano said.

“If higher ground is nearby, there’s not as much need to go as far inland” to escape the tsunami, he said.

Although Maine is not at great risk for tsunamis, Snowe is concerned about a broader range of oceanic detection issues, said Antonia Ferrier, her press secretary.

“Given that we are so economically dependent on our ocean, we need to do everything we can to make sure it is a healthy and productive resource for our future,” Ferrier said.

Carter said Snowe’s bill is more “comprehensive” than Inouye’s because the detection systems she has proposed would monitor such things as wave heights, salinity, wind and currents, which are important because linking all possible ocean data would allow for better forecasting.

The current focus on ocean detection systems could help Snowe’s bill pass this session.

“We are encouraged by having more people talking about warning systems. It elevates the issue to the forefront,” Ferrier said. “It is our hope that the Senate acts swiftly on the legislation.”

The Bush administration also is working on developing a global system for countries to develop universal standards and be able to share data collected from the world’s oceans.