Asian disaster management news, vol. 11 no. 1, January-March 2005: early warning for natural disaster mitigation

The year 2004 ended in a tragedy of unprecedented scale and dimension. Many lessons can be drawn from the disaster that affected nine countries on two continents and claimed over 300,000 lives. One important lesson that emerged from the disaster is the need for monitoring and early warning systems. The loss of human life would have been considerably less had coastal communities had more knowledge and greater awareness of a tsunami risk. The extent of the
disaster brought to light the overall lack of awareness and low level of national preparedness. It is imperative therefore that we build systems to make our communities safer and educate citizens on the nature of these threats and the preventive and protective measures that can be taken.
In this issue:
- Early warning for natural hazard mitigation
- Managing chaos: the disaster after the disaster
- Early warning of structural collapse after a disaster
- Tsunami media coverage & global humanitarian ethics
- Forewarned is forearmed: future tsunami threats in Sri Lanka