For the last day and a half, I've been trying to figure out what, if any, warnings were given to the people in the various areas affected by Sunday's tsunami in southern Asia / India. As it turns out, it doesn't appear to be just as simple as a lack of "emergency broadcast system" such as the one offered in the United States. I am sure that some, though not necessarily all, of these places have some sort of media coming into them - radio, television, something. But it doesn't appear that anything got out to the people - including residents of these areas.

Alice Marshall points out a post by Mark A.R. Kleiman stating that it's not a good enough answer to say that there is no government-issued warning system in place. If there was warning - and there was, up to almost two hours in some cases - then at the very least the local/int'l media should have been notified and they could have done their best to disseminate this information throughout the populace. I wholeheartedly agree.

I promise you, a phone call from the International Tsunami Information Center saying "There's just been a Richter 9.0 quake in Sumatra and a big tsunami will hit the following places at the following times" will receive the undivided attention of any newsdesk in the world.

Indeed.

To boot, Kevin at Wizbang! writes about what allegedly happened in Thailand, where "experts" sat around trying to figure out what to do, and chose not to make a warning because they didn't want to scare tourists - just in case nothing actually happened. I understand their concern for the tourism industry, but what's worse - the egg on your face for being told you were "crying wolf" or the bodies of 60,000 (and counting) dead people, tourists or not. Every day, thousands of weather predictions are made, some more dramatic than others - do they all happen? No. Are they sometimes right? You betcha. I'd say airing on the side of caution would probably have been the smart thing to do in this case. Instead, we end up with one of those movie scenes where the government knows about the impending asteroid collision and decides not to tell anyone about it for fear of panic. Meanwhile, the panic is going to ensue once everyone sees the giant fireball approaching in the sky anyway.

[ed: If you are interested in donating to the relief efforts, Amazon.com seems to be leading the way in gathering funds. Jeff Jarvis says that when Glenn Reynolds originally posted at about 5pm Eastern time Tuesday, there were $112k in donations - then, at 8, it was about $360k. It's now $597k, with about 12,000 individual payments - they're accepting donations as low as $5.]