What Philippines Can Learn From 2004 Tsunami

Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) -- The reports coming out of thePhilippines are all too familiar. Shattered villages, corpsesstrewn across battered beaches, dazed survivors picking throughthe wreckage of their former lives. As I write, Typhoon Haiyan(described in some news reports as a “supertyphoon”) appearsto be the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history, andone of the worst ever in Asia -- a region that has known noshortage of calamities.

Many of the survivors are talking about a “wall of water”-- most of the damage was caused not by rain or winds, but by amassive storm surge that followed. Nine years ago, on Dec. 26,2004, I heard precisely the same description from survivors ofthe Asian tsunami that struck the part of the coast where Ilive, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.