"Like a monster, it destroys everything. "That's how one school girl described a tsunami (海啸).
On Dec. 26, 2004, a magnitude-9. 1 earthquake in Indonesia set off a massive tsunami. It killed more than 230,000 people across four countries and cost an estimated $ 10 billion in damage.
Nov. 5 is World Tsunami Awareness Day and at the United Nations Wednesday, disaster risk reduction was high on the agenda.
"What I can tell you is that the tsunami wave cannot be stopped," said Bulgarians U. N. Ambassador Georgi Velikov Panayotov. He was on vacation in Thailand in 2004 and survived the tsunami. "What we can do is build early warning systems and, of course, educate the population about the damaging power of the tsunami wave," he said.
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake rocked northeastern Japan triggering a fierce tsunami that also damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, south of Sendai.
"When the big earthquake hit Japan in 2011, people thought that we were prepared for it," said Japan's U. N. Ambassador Koro Bessho. "It caused severe damage. We had dams; we had drills. However, we had been counting on something that hits every 100 years and the earthquake was of the size of possibly every 500 years or thousand years, he said.
These two events sent the countries of the region into overdrive to review and improve disaster preparedness. In 2015 the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was born. It aims to help create a better understanding of disaster risk and improve preparedness for an effective response.
Indonesia is made up of thousands of islands which are disaster-prone (易受灾地区). Willem Rampangilei, head of the Disaster Management Agency of Indonesia, said his government now has plans for every disaster-prone city.
Countries at risk are also expanding their education programs. Children from an early age are taught how to react in case of a tsunami and then go with their classmates to higher ground away from coastal areas to avoid the walls of water the tsunami triggers.
