The clue lies in the Japanese name that has been adopted for them around the world: tsunami. (46) {{U}}Formed from the characters for harbour and wave, and commemorated in the 19th-century woodblock print by Hokusai that decorates so many books and articles about the subject, the word shows that these sudden, devastating waves have mainly in the past occurred in the Pacific Ocean, ringed as it is by volcanoes and earthquake zones{{/U}}. Thanks to one tsunami in 1946 that killed 165 people, mainly in Hawaii, the countries around the Pacific have shared a tsunami warning centre ever since. (47) {{U}}Those around the Indian Ocean have no such centre, being lucky enough not to have suffered many big tsunamis before and unlucky enough not to count the world' s two biggest and most technologically advanced economies, the United States and Japan, among their number{{/U}}.
So when, on December 26th, the world's strongest earthquake in 40 years shook the region, with its epicenter under the sea near the northernmost tip of the Indonesian archipelago, there was no established mechanism to pass warnings to the countries around the ocean's shores. There would have been between 90 and 150 minutes in which to broadcasts warnings by radio, television and loudspeaker in the areas most affected, the Indonesian province of Aceh, Sri Lanka and the Indian chain of the Andaman and Nicobar islands. (48){{U}} Had such warnings been broadcast then many of the tens of thousands of lives lost would have been saved{{/U}}. (49) {{U}}How many, nobody can know, for the task of evacuation would have been far from easy in many of these crowded, poor and low-lying coastal communities{{/U}}. Equally, though, it will probably never be known exactly how many people have died. (50){{U}} Whereas in many disasters the initial estimates of fatalities prove too high, the opposite is occurring in this case{{/U}}.