Geologic plates pressing against each other slipped violently, created the bulge on the bottom that could be as high as 10 metres and hundreds of kilometres long. A column of water of billions of tons moved. The reaction caused waves equal in power to a million atomic bombs. Having started more than 10 km beneath the sea floor close to Sumatra, Indonesia, the waves crashed into the Indian Ocean coasts on Sunday.

It is said that this undersea earth quake, that caused the tsunami on the 26 Dec. 2004, was so powerful that it even disturbed the earth’s rotation.

Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, scientists running the tsunami warning system for the Pacific had issued a cautionary report from their Honolulu hub, to 26 participating countries. India was not among them. It would seem no one communicated with those oceans away, with those who could be directly hit. Why was the information not relayed?

The waves took four hours to reach the east coast of Africa and in all that time no mention had been made of the possibility of unusual wave occurrences and no serious warning was issued. It is amazing that no monitors and satellites picked up anything unusual about the sea surface.

Go digital! We went digital. Communication is the buzz word of the 21 century. We email, fax, we SMS. We video conference, check baby’s movements in the womb. We give electronic instructions to robots to perform surgery. From the moon we talk to earth.

In Hong Kong a weather picture via satellite picks up a man getting his bike from a grid on the banks of a canal in Amsterdam. I have been told that information on the number-plate of a car can be spotted by a satellite.

Night-vision goggles cut through darkness. We can track nuclear bombs being detonated anywhere in the world.

How tragic then is that no one saw, felt or heard to give warning. How tragic then is the fact that no one talked about the possibility of a tsunami. How tragic then is this statement: “I did not know who to contact” from a man at one of the stations set up to check ocean movements. We are told that many tracking and monitoring stations were not manned because it was a holiday.

Yes, it would have been a monumental task to warn all, it would have created panic and hysteria, it would have been unbelievable. It would have saved thousands of lives.

Where were those weather stations and tidal gauges? Were there no ships at sea? No high tech navy, no super submarines? No low flying planes? Where were the Coast Guards? And where were the fishermen with their electronic equipment?

Was no one concerned enough with the irregular wave movements and tides prior to the tsunami arriving at the various shores?

We talk of what could have been in place to monitor the Indian Ocean Region. We hear of costs and priorities. It only happens very rarely, perhaps once every two centuries. Many questions arise about the mysterious ways in which Gods work. Religious leaders have different answers. We can blame it global warming and President Bush for not wanting to sign the Kyoto protocol.

The most provocative question however is “What is this failure of communication?”

Mr. Murthy, a tsunami expert, says “the waves are totally predictable. We have travel time charts of waves that cover all the Indian Ocean. There is no reason for a single individual to get killed in a tsunami.”

No, not a single, but hundreds of thousands of singles.

We have lost it.

A pall of mist covers this valley. Nature is in mourning on this full moon night, 25th. Jan 2005. The white crests of the shushing small waves move back and forth and disappear, hardly visible. A month ago, on another shore, a sharp, cold full moon, unnaturally bright, looked down. The deep velvet sky was clear. It was a cool night.

Everyone is still overwhelmed with the enormity of that day of survival and destruction. It brings to mind unbearable grief, remembrance of what took place 26th December 2004. What unfolded that day and since is deeply etched in all of us.

We have evolved. We are not able to sense, see or detect the danger? Our instincts are blunt now.

Why did we not know ? The animals did. Story after story has come to light of dogs, cats, and other domestic animals that saved themselves. Birds and bees escaped. In the ravaged southeast the waves washed floodwaters up to 3 km (2 miles) inland at Yala National Park, Sri Lanka’s biggest wildlife reserve and home to hundreds of wild animals.

Elephants, leopards, deer, jackals, crocodiles were safe. “There is not even a dead hare or rabbit” say the authorities. “I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening,” H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of Sri Lanka’s Wildlife Department, has said.

Yes, we have lost it, we have lost our finer sense. Primitive men and women sensed danger before it came. They were in tune with earth and themselves. We have lost our acute hearing, our sharp sense of smell. Our psychic abilities have left us. Our feet are not firmly planted in the ground or perhaps we should have four feet each firmly placed on earth.

Elephants to ants knew the danger. They still possess their fine acoustic sense. They can still pick up the vibrations and infrasound, changes in the air pressure.

In Khao Lak elephants knew the tsunami was coming. The animals at the elephant parks started trumpeting when the earthquake took place near Sumatra. Dang and his wife Kulada had never heard them do this. They managed to quieten them down. But they started wailing again about an hour later and this time they could not be quietened. Some charged up the hill, others that were chained broke their hefty manacles and ran up the hill.

Those on the beach picked up children and adults with their trunks and threw them over their backs and ran away from the beach about a kilometre away and the tsunami came right up to them and stopped.

A woman who could not save her children trusted her twins to another. This woman followed the wake of an enormous snake and found land and safety for the twins and herself.

We have lost our 6th sense.