With plenty of time to save thousands of lives, seismologists working in Hawaii, Harvard University, Australia and Thailand had some inkling about the destructive tsunamis moving across the Indian Ocean. Those scientists wanted to get warnings out. They tried calling officials in affected countries but didn't have the right phone numbers, or no one picked up.

Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's center in Honolulu, told Reuters: "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world."