NewMexiKen believes FunctionalAmbivalent is right.
The calls for a more comprehensive worldwide tsunami warning system call to mind the time, a few years ago, when we lived in California. There was a large subsea earthquake off the Aleutian Islands. The quite-well-developed American tsunami warning system kicked into gear, alerting people up and down the American west coast of the possibility of deadly tsunami.
In Los Angeles, where people sometimes view the world as if it were only as real as something on TV, thousands of people headed for the coast to watch the tsunami come in. Restaurants with decks overhanging the sand were packed. You couldn’t find a place to park at the beach as the throngs standing on the sand awaited, apparently, the excitement of their own horrifying death. Action news crews, broadcasting live from the potential devastation, reported that those who had gathered to experience the predicted killer wave were disappointed that it did not materialize.
Perhaps giving people a lot of notice of impending tsunami is not really what we need to do, at least in California.
I used to be a Red Cross disaster volunteer and during the first Gulf War there was a guy predicting a major quake along the Madrid fault. The last time a quake of this magnitude occurred, the Mississippi River actually reversed course. Within a couple weeks of his report, all the hotels within a five mile radius of the predicted epicenter were fully booked (the quake still hasn’t materialized).
The most exciting moment of their lives might have been their last. Strage people, those.
Somehow I doubt that the millions of Asians and even Africans who were in the way of the tsunami would have run down the beach with their children to watch it come in. I doubt if any of the orphanages or hospitals would have taken their charges down either.
It also seems unlikely to me after what has just happened that a significant number of people anywhere, even stupid people here in the States, would be likely to take any future tsunami warnings lightly. Well okay, maybe the stupid Americans.
Oops. In my last comment I meant “maybe ‘not’ the stupid Americans.”