COLOMBO: Sri Lanka affected by the South Asian tsunami should have a warning system against sea surges in place by July, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsura told Lankapuvath. He expressed the belief that Sri Lanka would be able to face tsunami situations in the future with installation of the warning system in the Asian region.
He said that there was still a long way to go before the early alert system would cover every community in the vast area that was devastated by killer waves on December 26, 2004.

"I think we will have a warning system operational from July, it does not mean every villager in every community will have a system to warn him or her, but we will have regional and national systems," he told Lankapuvath. He said that the Sri Lankan government has taken measures to install a national alert system soon.
"At the moment 17 sensors are in operation in the Indian Ocean and by July it will increase to 23. If anything happens tonight, somebody will be there to move an alert," he told Lankapuvath.

He praised Sri Lanka for setting up siren systems and drilling schoolchildren, but said all efforts needed to be directed from the highest political office in every country to avoid confusion when a climate disaster strikes, the number of people who have been affected by weather disasters had more than doubled in the past decade to 2.5 billion compared to the decade before.

At the same time, the death toll in disasters such as floods and droughts had dropped because governments and the international community had learned to react to advance warnings, thereby saving lives.