Philip : I noticed a couple of things from the video's in japan.

The first was that the Japanese were expecting a devastating earthquake, but they thought it would come from the south of their country. Apparently they have a serious risk from faults in the ocean to the south, and they have been banking on getting hit from that direction. But they were caught totally off guard by a major earthquake coming from the northeast. That's the great difficulty with natural disasters - it's the extreme unpredictability of the whole thing.

I did see one video where an entire town in the Sendai area got the whole thing right. They got the tsunami warning in time - with at least 10 minutes to spare. Local people went door-to-door and got everybody out of their houses. People all clustered up on the 3'rd floors of some strong buildings. Then the tidal wave came in and wrecked a lot of their town. But all the people in that town were safe. That was a "picture perfect" response.

I don't know why it is that some towns in Japan were caught completely off-guard. Maybe they were located further inland.

In principle we have a tsunami warning system here on the California coast. There are sirens and they are supposed to be connected to a warning center. I honestly could not tell you whether it will work in a short-notice situation (10 mins or less). We may find out the hard way. I'm not counting on the sirens here to go off ... the sensible policy is to get moving fast as soon as the quake stops.

The Japanese death toll has now gone above 10,000 people. That's a big jump from yesterday's figures.

other Pete