Flying over the city of Banda Aceh in January 2005, former United States secretary of state Colin Powell said it looked like it had 'just been hit by a nuclear weapon'.
'Completely flattened' was how he described the desolate scene.
The 2004 tsunami stands out for the havoc it wreaked on the human population, in a decade marked by an unprecedented number of earthquakes, typhoons, cyclones, hurricanes and floods.
A report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in 2001 said an average of 255 natural disasters occurred throughout the world each year between 1991 and 2000, killing more than 650,000 people.
Earlier this year, the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters released figures showing an average of 390 disasters a year between 2000 and last year. The death toll was 770,000. In its report, the centre said Asia remained the 'most affected' continent.
Dr Amit Kumar of the Bangkok-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre told The Straits Times that disasters in Asia have been on an uptrend since the 1970s.
'We have also seen this uptrend in terms of the number of casualties... we believe that Asia remains quite vulnerable to disasters in future,' he said.
For now, analysts say, natural catastrophes still cause the most deaths. But man's own actions - or lack thereof - have aggravated the scale and impact of disasters.
For instance, the high death toll of 88,000 in last year's Sichuan quake was attributed partly to poor building codes. Many shoddily built schools collapsed from the tremors, burying thousands of students alive.
In the case of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, US government officials were blamed for their poor handling of the catastrophic flooding. A US district judge ruled last month that the levee and flood wall systems had been inadequate, while a report from a team of congressmen in 2006 also blamed officials for failing to evacuate the city's largely poor, African-American population early on. Many of those stranded for days in the waterlogged city were the poor, old or very young.
A number of Asian governments have cottoned on to the need for risk reduction. They have early warning systems for tsunamis and typhoons in place and set up government agencies to coordinate relief efforts in times of crisis.
But Dr Kumar said such efforts can be ad hoc, especially in years of calm.
'Administrators are concerned with day-to-day needs like food security and health care, so planning for the occasional disaster may take a backseat.'
The disaster preparedness centre has been urging the local authorities to take into account disaster risks and to make better plans for urbanisation.
This includes building developments that are tremor-resistant or leaving flood-prone areas as green belts, instead of removing vegetation to build skyscrapers, said Dr Kumar.
There is immense suffering when disaster hits the ill-prepared. In poorer countries, the people - already living from hand to mouth - lose their homes and livelihoods.
Cyclone Nargis, which ripped through Myanmar's rice-producing Irrawaddy delta in May last year, flooded padi fields, destroyed seed supplies and killed 120,000 farm animals used for ploughing fields. The ruling junta allowed in foreign aid and foreign aid workers only after it grasped the immense scale of damage and destruction.
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