How US Warning Center Responded to Catastrophic Tsunami: ‘Flying Blind’ [Video]

Twenty years ago, a catastrophic tsunami devastated communities across the Indian Ocean, resulting in the deaths of more than 220,000 people.

Triggered by a massive earthquake off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia—potentially the third most powerful ever recorded—the tsunami event is considered to be one of the world’s worst natural disasters.

Now, a seismologist who was on duty at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii when the disaster struck has revealed to Newsweek the inside story of how events played out that fateful day, as his team scrambled to inform regions in the crosshairs of the wave—with relatively little success—in an attempt to save lives thousands of miles away.

The seismologist, Barry Hirshorn, tells of the almost impossible situation his team found itself in—namely, trying to respond to a powerful tsunami event occurring in a completely different ocean to the one it was set up to monitor.