A Devastating 9.0 . . .

Though it happened on the other side of the world, news of a killer tsunami striking two continents should be seen by Californians as a fundamentally local story. Our home, planet Earth, is seriously flawed.

All the death and destruction wrought by the surging Indian Ocean stemmed from that basic fact. One 620-mile-long tectonic plate buried miles beneath the ocean floor slipped and crashed onto another plate, causing an earthquake 200 times more powerful than the Northridge temblor of 1994. More than 26,000 people from Southeast Asia to East Africa died in the hours that followed. It was nothing personal, nothing political, just our creaky old planet acting up.

A natural disaster of this magnitude serves as a humbling reminder of the pettiness of human conflict and division. In the devastated island nation of Sri Lanka, the tidal wave made no distinction between Tamil rebels and supporters of the national government in Colombo. And in death, the tsunami’s victims in the largely Muslim nations of Indonesia and the Maldives are inextricably bonded to their kindred victims in predominantly Buddhist Thailand and in mostly Hindu India.

The tsunami also underscores how global disparities can exacerbate even natural disasters. Turns out that many of the people living in its path were have-nots in more ways than one, as they lacked the advance notice that scientists as far away as Alaska and Hawaii had received about what was about to hit them.

There isn’t likely to be a 12/26 commission, nor should we pretend that such calamities can be avoided, but questions must be asked about the lack of preparedness. Indonesia was too close to the epicenter to benefit much from an early warning, but a few hours’ notice could have saved many lives in India and Sri Lanka. The 27 countries of the International Coordinating Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific did issue a warning from Honolulu more than an hour before the first wave hit those countries. Alas, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand, the group’s Indian Ocean members, were the only countries in the area to get the bulletins, and even if Sri Lanka and India had received the warnings they would have found it nearly impossible to evacuate their shores without a civil emergency system in place.

Expect plenty of debate over whether the tsunami should prompt the building of a comprehensive global-warning system. A more sensible approach may be to simply expand the Pacific monitoring system and build up emergency mobilization programs in South Asian nations that could be used to respond to a wide variety of calamities.

Closer to home, where quakes are frequent, the tragedy should trigger efforts to improve California’s own tsunami warning system. It also makes sense to expand the U.S. Geological Survey’s Advanced National Seismic System, already in place in Southern California and the Bay Area, to help other earthquake-prone regions. Though the system can’t predict earthquakes, it can speed rescue workers toward the areas expected to incur the most damage.

Tectonic plates will shift again, here and elsewhere, on our flawed planet, without discriminating between nationalities. There is no reason, however, why the international community needs to wait for another natural calamity to remind us how relatively petty our conflicts really are, and the importance of better preparing for such tragedies.