The satellite pics are pretty persuasive, I guess.
I think the problem with my theory is that it assumes the government tilt toward higher initial casualties. For every country except Indonesia, I believe this is the case. For Indonesia, however, I think there country is closed enough and paranoid enough that they may try to cover up some of the damage (although the pressure behind the relief effort may blunt this).
Kinda like disasters in the Soviet Union were the opposite of this proxy. You had to multiply the death figures by 10.
true...at best all of these numbers are just wild guesses, right now. But past tsunami numbers show how devastating they are.
Incidentally I live in a tsunami area, on the Oregon coast.
They've done casualty projections here, on a big tsunami, and we could easily hit that 20,000 figure on the Oregon coastline alone.