Living With Fear; One year after the tsunami, with populations rapidly moving back to the coastline, Asian governments seem no better prepared for another disaster.

Byline: Joe Cochrane (With Lorien Holland in Kuala Lumpur)

Ratte Kongwat Mai refuses to move away from her beachfront home. One year ago ocean waves measuring up to 21 meters obliterated her neighborhood in the tiny Thai fishing village of Ban Nam Khem, about 160 kilometers north of Phuket. The Asian tsunami killed nearly 1,000 people in the village, including Ratte's 8-year-old daughter. In the months that followed, the survivors could not simply grieve; they were forced to confront homelessness, joblessness, destitution and death threats from an ongoing legal dispute over the land, not to mention nightmares of a repeat of the massive disaster. Some of the villagers moved farther inland, but Ratte opted to rebuild her house and stay put. She believes the spirit of her lost daughter now roams the beaches, and she refuses to abandon the child. "I'm not afraid of tsunamis coming again--my daughter died here and now she lives here," she says. "Nothing could be worse than what happened last year."

Millions of people in coastal areas from Indonesia to Somalia obviously feel the same way. One year after a 9.1- magnitude earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra sparked a tsunami that killed 216,000 people in 11 countries and left about 2 million homeless, most of the affected residents are rebuilding in the very same coastal towns and villages. In Aceh, Indonesia, which bore the brunt of the Dec. 26 tsunami's fury, waterfront communities such as Lampuuk began laying cement on their own not long after the disaster--ignoring a suggestion from the central government not to rebuild closer than a kilometer to the shoreline. In Khao Lak, Thailand, five-star beach resorts have reopened and rehired former employees.

It's perhaps unrealistic to expect people or businesses to abandon their coastal communities. After all, the sea is critical to the livelihoods of most of the returnees. As Eric Schwartz, Bill Clinton's special envoy for tsunami recovery, puts it: "Disaster preparedness does not mean pushing people away from the shoreline." What it does mean is putting emergency systems in place that can save the lives of residents should there be another tsunami. On that crucial issue, Asian governments in the Indian Ocean region get poor marks thus far. While some countries are clearly more prepared to spot and respond to a tsunami than last year, others are not. And while various national disaster centers in the region are linked by computer, efforts to build a regional tsunami warning system have faltered.

Last year no country in the region had an early-warning system of any kind, nor any emergency-evacuation plans. Now only Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia have deployed such systems. Even so, they can't communicate with one another, and some experts don't think they will allow authorities sufficient time to evacuate coastal residents if a tsunami is detected. Thailand's system is somewhat makeshift and features tide gauges that are monitored for unusual variations following any nearby earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 or higher. The catch is that it can take 30 minutes or longer to determine whether a tsunami has formed, leaving little or no time to order an evacuation. "I have to wait until the wave comes close to the shore," says Plodprasop Suraswadi, director of Thailand's National Disaster Warning Center. "It's very risky." And not exactly reliable: last July, 1 million people were mistakenly evacuated when officials misread the tide gauges.

Indonesia's warning system is said to be superior, but it also has its critics. Made in Germany, it features 10 monitoring buoys strung from Aceh to Bali. But the system activates only when a tsunami occurs, and does not provide daily signals to disaster officials. "You can imagine a system ...