KEY POINTS:
BANDA ACEH - Two years after the Boxing Day tsunami - which killed 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean - the area is still unprepared for a repeat.
Only a fraction of the number of hi-tech buoys and sea-level gauges designed to give early warning against a new catastrophe are in place, even though geologists warn that it could happen at any time. And most countries in the area are not sufficiently prepared to get an alarm out to coasts and beaches.
At the same time, many millions of dollars in foreign aid, promised by governments to the disaster-hit areas, have not been paid. And only a third of those made homeless two years ago have so far been rehoused.
Experts say that countless lives would have been saved from the tsunami - the worst natural catastrophe in modern times - if the Indian Ocean had had a tsunami early-warning system, like one that has been successfully operating in the Pacific for more than 35 years.
Unesco and other United Nations bodies had been urging the countries of the area to set one up for years, but their pleas were disregarded because it would be expensive, and there had not been a killer wave in the ocean for a century.
Immediately after the disaster, shocked governments agreed to establish a system based on buoys that would detect a tsunami out at sea, and sea-level gauges that would send out an alarm when it first hit land. But they then delayed taking action until after a second earthquake hit the same area three months later.
Even now, says Unesco, only five of the projected 16 buoys, and only 27 of the planned 50 gauges, have been installed. Governments around the ocean have not yet agreed fully to share information on an approaching tsunami, and few have adequate ways of getting warnings out to the people most at risk.
The best-prepared country is Sri Lanka, one of those worst hit two years ago, which has a system of transmitting warnings through its police stations. And Thailand - which was criticised after the tsunami for failing to pass on warnings, allegedly because it feared damaging its tourist industry - has set up a national disaster-warning centre, built watch towers along its coast, and drawn up a community-based evacuation plan.
But in the most devastated area of all, the Indonesian province of Aceh, just one watchtower has been built, and local sources say that nobody knows how it is supposed to work.
Unesco is working with other governments to install warning systems, but Patricio Bernal, executive director of its Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, says that many of their priorities have shifted, as the disaster has receded, to more immediate concerns such as providing healthcare and education.
Aid-giving countries have also dragged their feet, as public attention has faded. Britain, which promised £65 million ($182 million) to the World Bank-run Multi-Donor Trust Fund for Aceh and Nias, has so far delivered about one-fifth of it. China offered US$138 million ($197 million) to Sri Lanka, but has provided little more than US$1 million, while Kuwait has reportedly handed over none of the US$13 million ($18.6 million) it offered the Maldives.
Tough questions are also being asked about what aid agencies have done with the money they received for tsunami-struck communities that are still grappling with an acute lack of basic amenities. Former United States president Bill Clinton, the UN's tsunami envoy, says that only 30 to 35 per cent of people displaced by the disaster have been rehoused, and added: "We have to do better than that."
In Aceh, 70,000 people are still crammed - whole families to a single room - into reeking barracks that were built as temporary shelters, with inadequate provision for sanitation.
Professor John McCloskey of the University of Ulster, one of the world's leading authorities, says that another major earthquake will certainly occur near the Indonesian island of Sumatra - the site of the one that caused the tsunami - the only uncertainty being when.
Wave of fear
* Geologists have warned that another disaster on the scale of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 could happen at any time.
* Most countries in the area are not sufficiently prepared to get an alarm out to coasts and beaches.
* Only a fraction of the number of hi-tech buoys and sea-level gauges designed to give an early warning against a tsunami are in place.
Aid slow to arrive
* Britain promised NZ$182 million to the World Bank-run Multi-Donor Trust Fund for Aceh and Nias. So far it has delivered about one-fifth of it.
* China offered $197 million to Sri Lanka, but has provided little more than $1.4 million.
* Kuwait has reportedly handed over none of the $18.6 million it offered the Maldives.
- INDEPENDENT
