More than a decade ago, one of the deadliest natural disasters in history killed 227,898 people in 14 countries around the Indian Ocean—nearly 170,000 of them in Indonesia.

This morning's report of a 7.5 earthquake, which rocked the central town of Donggala located on the island of Sulawesi, triggered a tsunami warning as did the one that killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2004.

It began on the morning of December 26, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) off the west coast of Sumatra, when a magnitude 9.1 earthquake—the third largest since 1900—ruptured the ocean floor. Within eight minutes the fracture spanned 700 miles (1,127 kilometers), releasing 23,000 times more energy than the atomic bomb that