Several tsunami false alarms have struck various parts of the country since the December 26 disaster but Friday’s, by all accounts, appear to have been the worst. Thousands of panic stricken people fled their homes along the coastal belt with police and officials saying that schools had been hastily closed in Batticaloa and people with homes located fairly close to the seashore left their houses and ran away. One report said that there had been several motor accidents along the main southern highway in the mad scramble to get out of harm’s way.

It is easy to pontificate after the event. But who can blame anybody who suffered the devastation of the real McCoy on Boxing Day for panicking at the slightest suggestion that a repetition was about to occur? Let us not forget that nobody, we repeat nobody, anywhere gave people at risk any kind of warning on December 26. It is now fairly established that various government agencies who might have sounded the alarm fell down on their jobs. But they also cannot really be blamed given that even historical memory of a similar disaster goes as far back as Viharamahadevi. Nobody in this country knew that kind of disaster that struck us was possible. We ran a piece in this newspaper from a British scientific expert breakfasting with his wife at a south coast hotel who observed the wave behaviour before the big one hit. He told his wife that more was to follow but admits that even he did not dream that anything of the ferocity that eventually hit would materialize.

The good lady, as the writer humorously said, accustomed in three decades of marriage to her husband’s propensity for understatement, had relayed what he told her to the hotel manager who, armed with a megaphone, managed to get those of his guests already on the beach back to relative safety. The scientist had later recounted that if he remembered his doctoral thesis of long ago, he could have had some inkling of the disaster that would follow. But he did not, although he thankfully lived to tell the tale. But now that we know all about tsunamis that can be set off by massive earthquakes on the sea-bed thousands of kilometres away, we can be wiser than we were before. For that very reason, scare stories of the sort that panicked thousands along the coast in many parts of this island can create the kind of situation we saw on Friday and, to a lesser degree, before.

IGP Chandra Fernando has spoken out very sternly and ordered that rumour mongers be instantly arrested. Police in many of the affected areas had mounted public address systems on their vehicles and drove around reassuring people and advising them to stay in their homes. It need hardly be said that the kind of panic that was evident gives robbers, thieves and other undesirables who were very visible even at the time of the disaster proper a field day. What would the vultures who stripped even dead bodies of their jewellery and looted homes that were reduced to piles of rubble of whatever valuable that could be salvaged not have done if they could in perfect safety enter other people’s houses, shops or whatever and help themselves as they pleased? Spreading tsunami panic, as the IGP and the police have seen, is obviously good for criminals.

Having said that, it follows those necessary preventives against repetition of such occurrences must be quickly put in place. The ubiquitous electronic media is best placed to be first with the news and the radio and to a lesser extent television is the best method of warning people of real danger. Today almost every home in this country including the humblest shanty is equipped at least with a cheap transistor radio. People must be taught that the first thing they must do when they scent danger is to switch on their radios. Not only must this very effective tool be used in the event of a real emergency, but it must also be used to warn people if a false alarm is gaining ground. We do not know whether it was accurate, but a news agency report said that a remark a government minister had made to a radio station triggered Friday’s alarm. That report said that the minister’s long term assessment of possible dangers had been taken by some survivors of the disaster as an instant warning. The minister concerned certainly is not the kind of person who talks foolishly or loosely. Either some unfortunate spin had been given to what he did say or some sensationalism, not unknown in the news industry, has come into play somewhere along the way. Nevertheless considerable damage was done. So we must pause to ask the question: at the time the panic was gaining ground, did anybody in authority use the electronic media to reassure people there was no danger? We don’t know whether that did or did not happen but it is certainly a lesson for the future.