LOS ANGELES: American officials who detected a massive earthquake off Asia's coast on Saturday tried frantically to warn the deadly wall of water was coming, the head of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said on Sunday.

But there was no official alert system in the region because such catastrophes only happen there about once every 700 years, said Charles McCreery, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's centre in Honolulu.

"We tried to do what we could," Mr McCreery said. "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world." Within moments of detecting the quake, Mr McCreery and his staff were on the phone to Australia, then to US naval officials, various US embassies and finally the State Department.

They were unable to reach the thousands in the countries most severely affected because none had a tsunami warning mechanism to alert people, he said. "We actually issued a bulletin about the quake but it only went to the countries in the Pacific ... that subscribe ... and that would include Australia and Indonesia," Mr McCreery said.

A warning centre such as those used around the Pacific could have saved thousands of lives, Waverly Person of the US Geological Survey said. "And I think this will be a lesson to them," he said, referring to the governments of the devastated countries.

Person also said that because large tsunamis are extremely rare in the Indian Ocean, people were never taught to flee inland after they felt the tremors of an earthquake.

US officials are now trying to help officials in the region set up some sort of informal warning system and feeling badly that more couldn't have been done, Mr McCreery said.

"It took an hour and a half for the wave to get from the earthquake to Sri Lanka and an hour for it to get ... to the west coast of Thailand and Malaysia," he said. "You can walk inland for 15 minutes to get to a safe area." -Reuters