Tsunami alert by SMS?

In response to the terrible tragedy that hit countries on the Indian Ocean this week an Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System has been promoted and several governments have indicated they will support it. Quite a few people have suggested that mobile phones are the best way to warn people, with an SMS message. Considering the penetration of mobile phones in even the poorest of countries this is a good suggestion, but it should always be remembered that SMS are not real time, despite many operators assurances to the contrary. There’s not going to be a lot of lee-way betweent the detection of a tsunami and a warning timely enough to do any good, so progenitors of the idea should get it right.
SmartMobs is running an article which claims the current “centralized” system didn’t work, and suggests opening a web site to collate all the warnings for all emergencies and send them out so that a “single-point-of-failure” problem with an organization doesn’t occur. Which begged me to ask myself what would happen if the web site went down? From my readings of the news reports, the problem was not in detecting the wave but in the fact that the organization which monitors it didn’t have appropriate contact details in the various countries to warn them of the problem. The system works fine in the Pacific where it has been running for 37 years, so the same structure should be transferred to the Indian Ocean. The Pacific Ocean has tsunamis far more often than the Indian Ocean, which only has one every hundred years or so. Bearing that in mind, it’s best not to look to any particular technology as a saviour since it will likely be obsolete by the time the next distaster hits.