Sri Lanka's first Tsunami Protection Village

Sri Lanka, Monday (Reuters) The next time monster waves tear through this quiet little village on Sri Lanka's ruined southern coast, the man who runs the local cafe is poised to sound the alarm.

There were no early warning systems or evacuation plans when one of the strongest earthquakes in recorded history set of a tsunami that killed 228,000 people and left more than a million homeless in a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean rim on Dec. 26.

Tsunami-affected countries are taking various routes to deal with the next one which residents, unnerved with every big aftershocks, fear can happen at any time. Walagedo, a tidy little hamlet about 80 kms (50 miles) south of Colombo, is the first of Sri Lanka's Tsunami Protection Villages.

Chandrasana de Silva is in charge of sounding the horn, when the Geological Survey and Mines Bureau calls to warn of an approaching tsunami.

The horn sits atop a thin pole planted in a boulder on the beach behind his house and cafe on the main road. A twisted blue wire snakes out from a window by the phone, across the grass and palmettos, through coconut trees and over the beach to the pole.

De Silva acknowledges this is not an ideal arrangement. For one thing, he takes tourists on adventure excursions around Sri Lanka and is not home a good deal of time. "This is just temporary," he explains. "Next month Colombo wants to connect direct to the siren."

Walagedo is meant to be the first of many villages with a tsunami protection plan - robust sirens on the beach, evacuation route signs posted on utility poles, public awareness campaigns.

It took the tsunami two hours to reach Sri Lanka's coastline. Indonesia was hit within a half hour.

Indonesia's reconstruction master plan proposes the construction of escape hills, scattered along Aceh's coastline on the northern tip of Sumatra. Made of concrete and covered with grass, the hills would be capable of accommodating 1,000 people at the flat top.

The hills would be situated to allow people to reach them within five to 20 minutes. The government is also planning three-storey earthquake resistant "escape buildings". "They can choose the escape hill, the escape building or the escape roads," Ibu Chairani, head of the provincial public works department in Aceh, said in an interview.

Thailand which staged the region's maiden evacuation drill on its tourist mecca of Phuket island has moved the fastest.

By the end of the year, Thailand intends to put buoys on the sea bottom that would transmit data of an approaching tsunami to the new National Disaster Centre, which will send out alerts to media, text messages to vast mobile networks and trigger sirens on 50 warning towers.

An interim warning system for the Indian Ocean should be in place by October, mainly by upgrading an existing network of tidal gauges, Patricio Bernal, head of the U.N. Oceanographic body charged with that task, told Reuters.

"Detecting a tsunami is only part of the problem," Bernal said. "The big problem is how to prepare societies and local populations so they can act appropriately to a warning."