Lessons From Major Global Disasters

The December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand, exposed the lethal consequences of a warning-system gap: seismologists detected the magnitude 9.1 earthquake within minutes, but no coastal alert system or public tsunami-education program existed anywhere around the Indian Ocean basin at the time, so that even the roughly two-hour gap before the tsunami struck India's and Sri Lanka's coasts, which could have allowed evacuation had a warning been issued, instead passed with no organized response, directly precipitating the creation of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System discussed above.