The deaths of more than 2,800 Americans in the mega-terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was caused by human malevolence and hatred; Sunday's tragedy in Asia was triggered by a spasm of an uncaring nature. The greatest earthquake recorded in modern times measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale struck deep beneath the Indian Ocean and spawned the catastrophic waves up to 30 feet high that swept beaches and coastlines in a dozen nations around the Indian Ocean.

Was the death toll unavoidable? Was the disaster an act of God against which no actions could have been taken?

The answer to both those questions is quite clearly and simply No. The technology and level of scientific know-how already exists to have cost-effectively sent warnings that could have saved the lives of tens of thousands. Simple precautions based on knowledge available for hundreds of years could have saved thousands more. But there were grim reasons -- all too simple and plausible -- to explain why nothing was done.

A high-tech international early warning system to alert nations about the threat of incoming tidal waves already exists. The only problem is that it exists in the Pacific Ocean, along the western rim of the ring of fire, the vast circle of active volcanoes and seismically active fault lines that girdle the Pacific Ocean from California to Chile and Alaska to New Zealand.

But no such early warning system had been set up for the smaller perimeter of the Indian Ocean. It did not appear to be an urgent priority.

For hundreds of years, the exceptional withdrawal of the ocean for miles down beaches has been the documented precursor to the catastrophic return of the waters in raging walls of turbulent wrath dozens of feet high. But when the waters withdrew from the idyllic tropical holiday beaches of South Asia, no local lifeguards or authorities had been trained to recognize the dramatic telltale signs. The reason was simple: No such thing had happened on any of those beaches or in any of those regions in centuries.

The same issue applies to the laments now appearing in the Indian media about why so many developments were being allowed to raise up hotels and millions of people were allowed to build and buy houses along eastern coasts of the sub-continent where the tidal waves, or tsunamis, hit.

The watery catastrophe, indeed, is not unprecedented in the modern annals of the nations of India and Bangladesh. But the reasons involved in the past were far different.

At least 300,000 people drowned -- and the figure may have been as high as a million -- when a perfect storm of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal set off a colossal tidal surge unprecedented in recorded history on Nov. 13, 1970. Successive Bangladeshi governments aided by international aid agencies drew the appropriate precautions and tried to set up as effective an early warning weather alert system based on satellite weather reconnaissance.

But Sunday's tidal waves had nothing to do with the weather. They were triggered by the most violent earthquake of modern times, an event that by definition was unprecedented.

The heaviest death toll from the catastrophe appears to have been unavoidable. By Thursday, the death toll in the western Indonesian island of Sumatra had soared to at least 80,000 and it could still go even higher. Sumatra was so near the epicenter of the quake deep beneath the ocean that it appears highly unlikely that any effective warnings to evacuate the coastlines could have been sent in time.

By contrast, the tens of thousands of dead in India and Sri Lanka might in large part have been saved if the tracking station in the Andaman Islands had called when the first waves hit there.

Already, hard questions are being asked in India about why the New Delhi government did nothing even though it had at least two and half hours to flash out warnings alerts after the huge quake hit.

The first mistake Indian scientists made was that while they recognized the quake had set off major waves, as undersea seismic upheavals usually do, they complacently assumed the waves were too far away and would not threaten India. That was the first mistake, India's Science and Technology Secretary V.S. Ramamurthy admitted in a press conference Wednesday.

The second mistake was that the Andaman Islands tracking station did not report to India or Sri Lanka the magnitude of the waves that had struck those islands. Ramamurthy tried to defend the officials responsible. When it hit, could they have sat and called? he asked.

But the Indian government's science and technology chief also had to make a series of admissions about the devastation due to the level of complacency and disorganized chaos, such as that which afflicted the U.S. government on Black Tuesday when the two hijacked airliners hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and another hit the Pentagon near Washington.

What time did the tidal waves hit the Andaman Islands? Even three days after the disaster, Ramamurthy had to admit he did not know. Also, he had to admit to the Indian public, We lost two and a half hours.

Ramamurthy's defense was simple. There was nothing we could do, he said.

The Times of India newspaper tartly commented on that response, Not everybody is convinced.

Whatever could and should have been done, one aspect of Sunday's horror appears indisputable: Even the precautions that ought to have been practical did not come to mind in any of the afflicted nations because the nature of the disaster was so unprecedented. The imagination and vision of men could not rise in time to comprehend the scale of a casual shrug of nature.

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The Sumatra-Andaman Islands Earthquake at USGS
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