Quotes of the Day

Alinda-Jane Hannah, a New Zealander living in Phuket, was nearly killed by the Dec. 26 tsunami. Driving along a road in the beachside town of Kamala, she and her 3-year-old daughter Nakita-Rose were almost washed away by the waves as they swamped the eastern coast of the island. A sharp intimation of mortality revisited Hannah last week when a loudspeaker in a nearby mosque woke her shortly before midnight, warning of another tsunami on the way. Hannah fled to higher ground, together with tens of thousands of other locals and tourists. Now, she says, after three months of trying to forget the terror of Dec. 26, "all the awful thoughts are back."

While Phuket trembled in fear, the small island of Nias, a surfing mecca off the western coast of Sumatra, was shaken to the ground by an earthquake that registered 8.7 on the Richter scale. Unlike the quake that struck in December, this one did not create a devastating tsunami. But in Nias, just 70 km from the epicenter, death and destruction were instantaneous. "Everything happened so fast," says Nasima Zai, 42, a shopkeeper in Gunung Sitoli, Nias' largest town. Nasima was in bed when her house started to shake. She woke her husband, grabbed their two young children, and tried to make it down three flights of stairs. Floors and walls collapsed, the lights went off, and the family found itself trapped beneath the rubble. Relatives from a nearby town spent eight desperate hours digging them out with their hands. "It was a miracle we all survived," says Nasima. Many people didn't: the official death count in the area reached 500 last week, and as soldiers and international relief organizations moved in to clear the debris, the overall toll was expected to climb to 1,300, United Nations relief officials said on Friday.

For seismologists, the quake was a strong indication that the Sumatran fault has entered an intensely unstable period. On March 17, little more than a week before the earthquake struck, Professor John McCloskey of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland published a paper in the scientific weekly Nature, arguing that the Dec. 26 quake had not relieved the stress on the tectonic plates in the area. In fact, McCloskey's team of seismologists found, the pressure had shifted farther south along the fault lines. The paper concluded that the chance of another major earthquake in the area, perhaps one capable of generating a tsunami, was high. In the case of earthquakes, McCloskey wrote in his paper, "lightning does strike twice."

The photos beamed around the world last week of flattened town centers and relief helicopters swooping onto stricken Indonesian islands were a heartbreaking flashback to the wider tragedy of the December tsunami, which left nearly 300,000 people dead or missing across the Indian Ocean region. But this time, it soon became clear that the region has—in just 12 weeks—become significantly better prepared to sound the alarm. Touring Nias last week, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told TIME that his country's official response to last week's quake was "faster" than to December's—and he could have been speaking for the entire Indian Ocean area.

Asia does not yet have a sophisticated tsunami early-warning system, but it does have cell phones, radio and television.

S. Ranjani, a nurse in the southern Indian village of Akkaraipettai—which lost 2,000 residents to the tsunami—was delivering a baby when she heard about the earthquake on TV. "I just managed to complete the job," Ranjani says, and then nurse, mother and baby boy headed for higher ground. Even more critical, seismologists from Hawaii to Japan had the relevant phone numbers at hand to get in touch with officials in Indian Ocean nations. They, in turn, exhibited little of the indecisiveness that cost countless lives in December. "We were calling harbor masters, civil-defense people, and people in governments," says Barry Hirshorn, a geophysicist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center near Honolulu. "[If they didn't speak much English] we would just call and say, 'Major earthquake' and 'Tsunami warning,' and they understood."

Smith Dharmmasaroj, a Thai official in charge of setting up his country's early-warning system, didn't have to wait for the alert from Hawaii. Ten minutes after the quake struck, he received a phone call from a friend in Bangkok who had felt its tremors. A few minutes later, Dharmmasaroj had confirmed the quake's size and location with seismologists, and then he began working the phones. The result: 40 minutes after the quake, Thai TV and radio networks were broadcasting warnings. In coastal areas, police and soldiers went out on the streets with loudspeakers. But Dharmmasaroj still sees room for improvement. He had trouble getting through to some of the largest TV networks. "It took them longer to get the message out," he says. "If a tsunami had hit, then many people still would have lost their lives." Thailand will have a more sophisticated system in place by the end of the month, Dharmmasaroj says. Warning towers are now being installed in areas hit by December's tsunami; they will use sirens and loudspeakers to sound an alarm. "We'll have a telecommunication system that will allow us to send out warnings to every mobile phone," he adds, "and we'll be able to cut into regular television broadcasts."

For now, however, the region must make do with makeshift solutions. To be effective in the long run, the countries rimming the Indian Ocean need a system that can determine not only when a tsunami might occur, but also when it won't, so that warnings can be issued judiciously. In Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, hundreds of thousands of people spent hours waiting for a tsunami that never came. In Nias, the fear of a tsunami probably cost many lives of people who were trapped in rubble because their relatives had headed for high ground. The local government was paralyzed from the start. "The officials were in a panic that there would be another tsunami," says Bachtiar Chamsjah, Indonesia's Minister for Social Affairs. "They all left their work." Some locals who fled to higher ground came to regret it for another reason. Housewife Yohanna Duha and her 20-year-old daughter ran to the hills after the earthquake. When they returned home in the morning, their house was damaged but standing, and looters had taken everything they could—"every penny I had in my drawer," says Duha, "and the cell phones we left when we ran for safety."

In the Pacific, deep-ocean pressure sensors are able to measure passing tsunamis, and coastal gauges take water-level measurements that are relayed in real time to a region-wide warning center. Nothing like that exists in the Indian Ocean. The U.N.'s International Oceanographic Commission is now working on creating an independent regional warning system that it hopes to have installed by the end of 2006. But that may prove difficult. The system will be expensive to establish and maintain, and pledges from donor countries in the tsunami's aftermath have not materialized. India has balked at the idea of an open exchange of data, fearing that nuclear secrets could be revealed. Meanwhile, competition between Indonesia and Thailand to host the warning center has led to an impasse. "We can't wait for these countries to make up their minds," says Thailand's Dharmmasaroj, "so we are setting up our own national warning center." If a system does get off the ground by the end of next year, it will not be a moment too soon. "We don't want to be guessing again," says Hirshorn, the Hawaii-based geophysicist. "If it happens next week, we just won't have any idea: maybe no tsunami, maybe a tsunami—who knows?"

For Nias, which sits near a fault line, no early-warning system is likely to be fast enough. Last week, 30-year-old construction consultant Yason Waru and his cousin Darni were sifting through the pile of rubble that was once their house. Built just a year ago, it was reduced to a 3-m-high heap of bricks, zinc roofing and chunks of cement in less than five minutes. "When the quake hit we had no time to save anything but ourselves," says Waru. Certainly, they received no earthquake warning from local officials. Because the reality is, it's still impossible to predict with any accuracy when the earth's plates will shift, triggering a quake. All the same, seismologist McCloskey believes the omens aren't good. He says the stress that brought about the two massive convulsions of the past three months has still not been relieved and has simply shifted farther south along the fault line. That means another massive temblor is not out of the question. "We dearly hope we are wrong," says McCloskey. Asia's challenge: to be better prepared in case he's not.

• Andrew Perrin
• A deadly quake shows how warning systems have improved since the Dec. 26 tsunami, and how far they have still to go