Hi Tony. Not quite true. The US, or at the very least those who were in a position to know what was going to happen tried in vain to get the message out. Take Care…Don in creepy town

The folks in Honolulu knew a disaster was on its way, but they had no way to alert the potential victims — the tourists on remote resort island beaches, people in coastal towns, those in fishing villages — from Indonesia to Africa, from India to scatterings of mid-oceanic coral islands, and all the coasts between.

"We started thinking about who we could call. We talked to the State Department Operations Center and to the military. We called embassies. We talked to the navy in Sri Lanka, any local government official we could get hold of," Hirshorn said. "We were fairly careful about who we called. We wanted to call people who could help."

He and fellow duty officer Stuart Weinstein quickly called in their boss, geophysicist-in-charge Charles "Chip" McCreery.

"The three of us were full-time using every line we had. At that point, everybody was getting, not crazy, but multitasking," Hirshorn said.

The desperate effort was to warn people thousands of miles away to get off their beaches. The frustration was knowing that even if government leaders could be reached, most countries had no effective civil defense mechanism for getting the information to the people.

"We spoke to people in the foreign ministries, and everywhere we could think of. We were collecting phone numbers, e-mail addresses — whatever contact information we could. There was a conference call with officials in Madagascar," Weinstein said.

The message, if it had reached people on the coasts, was simple: start walking away from the sea.

"You just have to be a 15-minute walk away from most coasts to be safe," Hirshorn said.

• Ewa Warning Center