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I had a friend in New Guinea during the last huge SE Asian tsunami. The only warning you get is the blood-chilling sight of the ocean rushing backwards, turning a half-mile of undersea shelf into a long, sloping beach. After that, the water doubles back on you with jetspeed, like a moving sheet of glass. Once this quake happened, due to the poor detection infrastructure in the Indian Ocean, thousands of people on faraway coasts were already slated to die.

I'm just surprised that Thailand never developed such a system, specifically for the island of Phuket. I know that the universities in Bangkok do some inter-college seismic research, but I guess that never included sophisticated monitoring equipment in their own region. Or if it did, the communications capability was not robust enough to get the message to the people who needed it.

When we look back on this calamity, the lesson to take away is something as simple as a warning siren on the key beaches of India and Sri Lanka could have saved thousands. Though a lot of Indian fishermen look dirt-poor, in a group of them, one man will often have a cellphone. If there is a basic warning system in place, people will be able to take care of themselves.

Indian Ocean tsunami are surprisingly rare. in the 1800s and early 1900s there were a couple a few feet high, apparently.

It's difficult to get people to spend money or worry about things that haven't happened in either their lifetime or their parent's lifetime, even when geologically you can show something has happened hundreds of times in the past 30,000 years or whatever.