Reports by the BBC and other media claiming that the German-Indonesian tsunami early warning system was vandalized and did not work after Monday’s quake are baseless, the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam says in a statement issued today.

Indonesia’s national tsunami warning centre in Jakarta has issued a tsunami alert exactly 4 minutes and 46 seconds after the magnitude-7.5 quake off western Sumatra at 9.47 pm local time Monday night, GFZ makes clear. The warning was immediately communicated via satellite to 400 police stations and local emergency services in all threatened regions, including the badly affected Mentawai islands where the death toll has risen to more than 300. The first and largest tsunami wave had struck the islands just minutes after the quake – at about the same time the alert was issued, but too soon for it to have been effective in saving lives.

“Contrary to reports stating otherwise, all components of the tsunami early warning system worked properly. Reports of broken or even deliberately destroyed system units are entirely unfounded,” the GFZ release says.

The early warning system does not offer “complete protection from a catastrophe,” GFZ warns.

“A comprehensive protection against earthquakes and tsunamis is not possible: directly at the source the earthquake and the arrival of the tsunami occur almost simultaneously. The greater the distance to the location of the earthquake, the longer the prewarning time. The risk is very high for the inhabitants of the island chain off Indonesia. (…) Counteracting this false sense of security is part of the work of the tsunami early warning system for Indonesia.”