I guess they thought it could never happen to them. When was the last Tsunami?
>>>I guess they thought it could never happen to them. When was the last Tsunami?
::Crude Opinion from what I read at NOAA::
We have a buoy tracking system in the Pacific. There are also monitoring systems that share alerts with Japan and Australia (Pacific).
There is no buoy system in the Indian Ocean. The reason for this wasn't blatantly clear. When I find answers hard to come by, from my experience, it is due to politics.
Our tracking system picked up the initial report of reading 8.0. This was confirmed with Australia. The initial alert that went out in the warning bulletins was 8.0. This information went right up to a NOAA office in Seattle that generated THIS: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/video/tsunami-indonesia12-2004.qt predicted model of what would come from that earthquake. As we got more data, updated reports went out on the information bulletins.
Some Asian countries (like Indonesia) picked up *smaller* earthquake readings and didn't lend the reports we issued validity. This is the reason for the different reports on the magnitude. They took their reading own readings of 6.5 vs. our report from NOAA of 8.0.