The tsunami's real scandal

Commentators from the scientific community have been decrying the absence of a tsunami warning system in the Indian and Atlantic oceans, 40 years after the Pacific's system began. That is a scandal. But to me the greatest scandal of the tsunami was the fact that so many people, including thousands of supposedly well-educated first-world citizens, just stood there and died as the clear signs of disaster arose before their eyes. The real scandal was a failure of education.

My leading article on tsunamis makes a point that a simple education tool--a video about the 1998 New Guinea tsunami--was all it took to save the lives of a whole village in Vanuatu in 1999. Just a video! If each school in Sri Lanka, each mosque in Sumatra, each TV station in Thailand had shown such a video once in a while, what would the story be today?