Quotes of the Day

Charlie has worked as a water-sports instructor on Penang's Feringgi beach for 15 years. At 10:15 a.m. on Dec. 26, he received a call on his cell phone from a friend in the northern resort of Langkawi who had just watched waves destroy Pantai Cenang beach. Charlie looked out on his own stretch and saw about 100 local and foreign tourists, but didn't feel he had the authority to sound an alarm. "Then I saw a white line across the horizon," Charlie says, "and knew something was terribly wrong." Charlie started bellowing, the tourists who heard him fled to safety—"and we even managed to save all our boats."

If a single phone call could preserve up to a hundred lives in Penang, Malaysia, a more robust alarm could surely have saved tens of thousands across Asia. After all, scientific instruments never stop detecting even the faintest seismic activity, and tsunami detection in the Pacific has developed into a high, paranoid art, particularly in Japan. As beachboy Charlie proved, the human race has never been more technologically capable of calling for help or sounding a long-distance death knell.

But people don't worry about—or prepare for—natural disasters that are unlikely to occur in their lifetimes. In the countries surrounding the Indian Ocean, nature usually expends its fury in the form of cyclones: the last monster tsunami followed the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. In contrast, the Pacific has experienced nine ocean-wide tsunamis in the past century; the countries around it keep a close watch for the next. When the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center near Honolulu sends out an alert, it's based on as many as three types of up-to-the-minute data: seismic activity, the height of waves near shorelines (which are continuously monitored), and readings from deep-sea pressure recorders that sit on the ocean floor and beam up signals to satellites. On the Indian Ocean rim, waves aren't systematically monitored for signs of a tsunami, and there are no deep-sea sensors. In other words, its coastal countries are totally blind to a tsunami until it starts crashing against shorelines.

But in the Indian Ocean, awareness of the phenomenon is so low that hardly anyone thought to pick up the phone when the waves rolled in last week. The first part of Indian soil to get hit were the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, home to an Indian air-force base. The tsunami didn't strike the mainland for nearly another hour. And yet the Ministry of Science and Technology in New Delhi was getting all its information from television. "We never knew it was coming," a senior official tells TIME. "We could have saved thousands of lives with even an hour's warning."

In the immediate aftermath, the United Nations said it would try to plug the Indian Ocean into the Pacific early-warning system within a year. (At the same time, India announced it would set up its own $27 million warning system that would be independent of the Pacific system.) But buying the deep-sea sensors and making the electronic links is the easy part. Getting an alert down that last mile to the coastlines—and persuading residents to evacuate their homes—is the key challenge. Japan has a formidably fine-meshed system. When the Japan Meteorological Agency decides a tsunami threat is real, the central government sends out an alert. By law, local governments are then compelled to tell their residents to move to safety. The warnings are broadcast on radio and television; outdoor loudspeakers blare them along the coast; cars with loudspeakers troll the lanes farther from shore. To keep citizens informed in areas beyond the reach of loudspeakers, quake-prone Shizuoka prefecture has distributed 140,000 special home radios that pick up emergency broadcasts. The overall goal is to get tsunami warnings on television screens within three minutes of an earthquake occurring.

But even this most evolved system has a potentially disastrous flaw. Speed is the ultimate priority, and that leads to a very high rate of false alarms. Even among the Japanese, the most tsunami-aware people on the globe, that breeds weariness. Last year when an earthquake off Hokkaido spawned a 4-m-high tsunami, barely half of the residents in danger zones heeded instructions to evacuate their homes. The Indian Ocean nations will have the reverse problem: building a warning system and then maintaining vigilance in a region where tsunamis rarely strike. Technology can't prevent or even predict a tsunami—it can only help us outrun one.

• Anthony Spaeth
• Could an oceanic detection system have saved lives?