Hurricane!

This story compares the tsunami of December 2005 with other great storms in the Indian Ocean.

The tsunami in the Indian Ocean wasn't really a weather event. It was a geological event. But it does teach an important lesson about the power of ocean surge.

The surge created by an underwater earthquake, as happened in the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26, has similarities to that created by a hurricane, cyclone or typhoon, which is what those storms are know as in various sectors of the world.

In fact, the Indian Ocean has produced two horrible storms in the past 35 years that are perhaps most comparable to the tsunami catastrophe. Both targeted Bangladesh. In November 1970, a cyclone killed an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people, mostly from an enormous storm surge carried across the low, swampy and very crowded nation.

A similar cyclone hit Bangladesh in April 1991, killing 138,000. Again, a storm surge, said to be about 20 feet, was blamed for many of the deaths