PEOPLE all around the Indian Ocean rim will be looking to Samoa in the Pacific over coming days to pass on sympathy, and search for big-wave lessons.

As Phuket and the Andaman coastal provinces know only too well, a tsunami can come out of a calm sea and kill without warning.

What happened in Samoa? How many escaped, how many were caught?

Where was the warning from the much-touted Pacific Tsunami Centre, the model for Thailand's own big-wave defence?

These questions will be answered, probably within the next 48 hours.

But the most important question of all for people who live and holiday on Phuket and along the Andaman coast remains unanswered. This is it:

If a second tsunami comes at 3am while everyone is asleep and the sound from the warning towers is blowing out to sea, who will wake us all up?

This is the question every visitor should ask when they check in at every coastal resort. The towers along the coast provide daylight comfort.

Any tsunami that comes between 6am and midnight is likely to be well reported in advance by radio and television.

It's a seaquake between midnight and 6am that poses the greatest threat of a repetition of a disaster on the scale of 2004, when 5400 Thais and tourists died along the Andaman. An incredible 220,000 perished throughout the region.

It's worth remembering that while a second tsunami seems unlikely, Hawaii has suffered two, 14 years apart.

And it's already plain, less than five years on, that many people on Phuket especially would prefer to let the tsunami be forgotten, to allow it to slip from memory.

That's not a tolerable situation, for anyone concerned with the safety of residents and visitors.

Have some of those blue and white tsunami evacuation signs vanished, and are those that fall down or are being souvenired being replaced?

We haven't noticed any new ones going up. Being optimistic about the future is a positive for the Phuket region. Ignoring the need for eternal vigilance is just plain foolish.

Samoa will be able to give us, as concerned onlookers, the kind of life and death experience that cannot be learned through any number of ''annual tsunami practice drills.'' This one was the real thing.