Still, Chile’s earthquake preparedness clearly saved lives. Laura Torres, 62, and her husband, Víctor Campos, 66, live in Constitución, a city flanked by the ocean and a river. When they quake struck, the earth shook so violently they could not stand.

They crawled to assist their son, who is severely brain damaged; Mr. Campos picked him up, trying to walk as the earth heaved. They ran up into the hills, amid wails from others around.

In the tsunami-prone region, earthquake training had taught them that they had about 20 minutes to make it to high ground, Ms. Torres said, but the roaring of the water, a strange sound like a plane’s motor, suggested that it was barreling in much sooner.

Still, they made it to the hills

The Gold Coast authorities used SMS for 10,000 people. How did they know these were the phones belonging to the people in the high-risk areas? Is it not common that people who are found on beaches, do not necessarily live nearby? So how did they pick the 10000 numbers? And how come they missed the head of the local disaster management group?

“Not everyone keeps their radio on.

“We need a system to make sure the low ground gets priority warning.”

Dr Wilson said a siren system, doorknocking and use of modern media such as Facebook were needed.

Emergency Management Queensland regional director Eddie Bennet said 10,000 text messages were sent to residents in seven suburbs identified as at greatest risk of flooding.

He said a blanket text message to the whole Gold Coast was not deemed as necessary.

The message that was sent directed Lakeview, Boykambil, Woongoolba, Currumbin, Cabbage Tree, Budds Beach and Paradise Point residents to seek further advice.

Mr Bennet said he believed the state’s first formal emergency alert had been successful.

“There was absolutely no confusion. There was a sound reason for this and valid purpose for sending them out.”

Local Disaster Management Group deputy chairman Councillor Ted Shepherd was not aware the texts had been sent and said he believed the level of threat did not warrant the service.

“It attracts too many spectators,” he said.

Patra Rina Dewi, director of the Tsunami Alert Community (Kogami), a nongovernmental organisation working on disaster mitigation training for communities, said the knowledge people most need is whether an earthquake has the potential to become a tsunami.

The current standard for this is an earthquake that occurs less than ten kilometres below the seafloor and is recorded as more than seven on the Richter scale.

“But this kind of information should be translated into easy information for the people,” said Patra.

She added that the most effective warning method is sirens, but these are often of limited number and can be heard only at a distance of about one kilometre.

In most countries (few exceptions being North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Papua New Guinea), mobile penetration is broad enough that cell broadcasting would be superior. Not that you cannot have a few strategically placed towers so the objectives of security theater and commissions from construction can also be satisfied.

Old-fashioned television telethons can stretch on for hours. But the latest charity appeal is short enough for Twitter: “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief.”

In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, many Americans are reaching for their cellphones to make a donation via text message. And plenty of them are then spreading the word to others on sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The American Red Cross, which is working with a mobile donations firm called mGive, said Thursday that it had raised more than $5 million this way.

Now I wonder would this be permitted in our countries? Haven’t thought about it at length, so I may be wrong, but methinks there will be some barriers. Any views? Solutions?

We are proud of what we have done, but not satisfied. There is more to be done, especially in implementing the findings of the HazInfo project with Sarvodaya. We will. Except for a media awareness event (not held because too many had been held), we delivered on every promise we made on the occasion of the three-month dana (alms giving). The Tsunami Memorial Research Fund has been fully, and productively, expended and closed down.

Five years later, the region is better prepared. We will not let up on the push to reduce risks further. That is the best remembrance of the thousands who died with no official warning.

But anyway, Newsweek was the first to publish something with a quote from LIRNEasia. I was hoping we’d get a decent Disaster Act, but we’ll settle for greater awareness. For now. But we’ll ask again.

Unfortunately, the hardest lessons to learn from Sri Lanka’s experience are incredibly difficult to implement. The most explicit reality is that the world’s most vulnerable—namely the poor who lack sturdy housing and good communication—are almost always the hardest hit. Work by the Centre for Research on the epidemiology of disasters reports that tragedy tends to kill more in the underdeveloped south than in the industrialized north. “The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami marked the starting point of a shift away from relief and recovery to risk reduction, which will give us disasters that are more like their ‘northern’ counterparts,” says Rohan Samarajiva, CEO of Lirneasia, a Sri Lankan nonprofit that has watched the tsunami recovery closely. However, accepting the fact that natural disasters are destined to continue, and understanding that climate change threatens to intensify some of Mother Nature’s most tragic handiwork, it will still take significant effort to prepare the globe’s most at-risk communities. And in a time of global financial crisis, the funds aren’t readily available.

For those who may not know, Stuart was at the controls on December 26, 2004 when the great earthquake that caused the tsunami occurred. I visited PTWC a few weeks later and met Stuart and his colleague Barry Hirshorn leading to my first piece on early warning, post-tsunami. Despite all the controversies that were swirling around, Stuart and his colleagues were incredibly forthcoming and open, even agreeing to give evidence via a video link for the useless Presidential Commission on the Tsunami. Being the practical man he is, Stuart installed some new software at the Met Department that will help them make better use of ocean level information sent by the World Meteorological Organization and has also drafted some recommendations for the Sri Lanka authorities on how to improve their processes.

Thanks to Lakshaman and Stuart for their public-spiritedness. The CSR cooperation with Vanguard continues.

There was a time gap of nearly three hours between the time Indonesia was affected and the time that Sri Lanka was affected and also the coastline was hit by the wave at different times. Even within Sri Lanka, the Eastern shores were hit first, which gradually spread to North, South and finally the West. The country simply did not have an early warning and dissemination system.

This was the first I had heard anyone in government admit even indirectly that many lives could have been saved if the government had communicated to the media the information it received from the Navy and STF on the East Coast. I thank the writer for that.

But then, I was pained by the following sentence:

Now it is over four years since the Sri Lanka Disaster Management Act was passed in Parliament on May 13, 2005 that helped create confidence among the population to a certain extent.

I have seen bad laws, but seriously this is the worst piece of junk smuggled through Parliament in several decades. Why do I say smuggled? Because it was approved in violation of Constitutional provisions that permit interested parties to examine the Bill and make representations to the Constitutional Court if required. This text was kept secret even from State Counsel in the Attorney General’s Department!

This is the one piece of legislation that does not allow the operational entity to draw from the Consolidated Fund. The current Minister had to be co-opted to serve on the Council, because it was written on the assumption that the subject would be always under the President. Here is the full analysis.

Seriously, this gives me no confidence. Better get a new Act.

But in Sri Lanka’s southern coastal village of Godawaya, a tsunami warning tower failed to emit a siren. Local fishermen who had stayed home to take part waited for a few hours and decided to go to work.

Later, officials manning the tower went around the village announcing a ”tsunami threat” through loudspeakers and calling on residents to quickly move to a Buddhist temple on higher ground. Women who were at home gathered at the temple.

Air Force SGT M.G.A. Nandana declared the drill was still a success since they an alternative warning method was found in case the warning tower failed.

Full story.

The technology and organizational structure of the HazInfo last-mile hazard warning system proved to work as designed and drew valuable lessons for a full scale implementation. However, the major dilemma was in finding resources to sustain the system. The Hoteliers’ Association of Sri Lanka agreed to obtain services from Sarvodaya for a fee to train and certify the hotel staff in disaster response. This fee would go towards the OPEX of the HazInfo emergency response planning component and operationalize a 24/7/365 Hazard Information Hub for issuing alerts; but to kick start the endeavor a nominal CAPEX is required.

The paper titled – Mobile Phones and the challenges of sustainable early warning systems: reflection on Hazinfo Sri Lanka and opportunities for future research coauthored by Gordon Gow (University of Alberta) and myself (Nuwan Waidyanatha) addressing the correlation between investment and preparedness in relation to the HazInfo as well as the possibility of leveraging mobile telephony for building socially sustainable and community driven last mile warning systems was presented at the Mobile Communication and Social Policy Conference hosted by the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. Event took place in New Brunswick, USA 9 – 11 October 2009.

The Pacific islands were so close to the epicentre of the earthquake that a wall of water hit Samoa within eight minutes after the Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii sent its first bulletin Tuesday.

Several Samoans said they heard no sirens or warnings, but fled as soon as they were woken up by the earthquake.

Nevertheless, the fact that scores left for safety underlined that lessons from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunamis have not been forgotten.

CB [cell broadcasting] is an intrinsic feature of GSM, UMTS and IS 95 CDMA networks, and is thus available in the two Maldivian networks. But it must be activated. Most handsets are capable of receiving CB messages but the feature must be turned on. However, in the early stages, getting customers to turn on the feature could be an effective way of educating them of mobile-based public warning.

Following stakeholder meetings that included sharing of information on the ongoing CB channel-standardization work of Study Group 2 of the Telecommunication Bureau of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) and experience in attempting to use CB for public warning in Sri Lanka, the recommendations to TAM are being finalized. They include the constitution of a “trust protocol board” to develop the terms of access to the CB broker server to ensure security and the conduct of live demonstrations on a test channel that will not be seen by the public. The latter is likely to bring up technical issues that require resolution before full-scale implementation.

Above is a quotation from a box on pp. 29-30 of the 2009 World Disasters Report, published by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, titled “Focus on early warning, early action.” The box, written by Rohan Samarajiva, addresses one of the most difficult problems of public warning, that of ensuring that warnings reach not only the citizens but tourists, which, at peak amount to 1/5th of the population of the Maldives.

The work was carried out at the request of the Communications Authority of the Maldives under our ongoing Mobile 2.0 research program. It is expected that the report, prepared by Natasha Udu-gama, will be released next month.

The IFRC report quotes extensively from LIRNEasia research and publications, in addition to the inclusion of the box.

We believe in using our knowledge, in addition to our pocketbooks, in responding to humanitarian crises. We could not do it on the scale that we did in the aftermath of the tsunami in 2005, but we do try. The first of my Choices columns that was written on the theme of “ideas to win the war” used some of the knowledge we had gained on e gov. The most recent ideas to win the war column takes off from the main speech at the ICA awards ceremony that I attended in Chicago last month. It continues the discussion we have been having on this website about the use of telecom in conflict situations.

Scientists have been chasing earthquake prediction — the holy grail of earthquake science — for decades. In the 1970s American seismologists declared that the goal was reachable. Yet we have little to no real progress to show for our efforts. We have a good understanding of the planet’s active earthquake zones. We’re pretty good at forecasting the long-term rates of earthquakes in different areas. But prediction per se, which involves specifying usefully narrow windows in time, location and magnitude, has eluded us.

A new mathematical formula that could be used to give advance warning of where a tsunami is likely to hit and how destructive it will be has been worked out by scientists at Newcastle University.

The research, led by Newcastle University’s Professor Robin Johnson, was prompted by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami disaster which devastated coastal communities in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.

In this instance, an earthquake in the depths of the ocean triggered a long surface wave which resulted in six massive wave fronts, one after the other.

Of these waves it was the third and largest one that caused the most devastation, hitting the beaches with terrifying speed. Reaching a height of 20m, it is this wave that lifted a train from its tracks as it travelled along the Sri Lankan coastline, killing almost 1,000 people.

The full story.