At least 25 000 people have died in Southern Asia and the coast of East Africa as a result of the earthquake and the tidal waves it caused, but the number of death in Sri Lanka could be twice as high as the now known number of 12 000 casualties, in Indonesia 25 000 people may have died and in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, that belong to India, 30 000 people are missing.

Terrible, terrible cataclysm. The sad thing is, that part of these deaths were not unavoidable . If the information of the tidal waves would have reached the governments of those countries that were not near the earthquake, and if they would have put warning to television and radio, the coastal regions in countries like India and Sri Lanka could have been at least partly emptied.