Almost 1,400 people are confirmed to have died in the earthquake and tsunami that struck Sulawesi last Friday. Although rescue teams and supplies are reaching survivors in Palu, many in surrounding areas remain desperate for clean water and food. Disasters are sadly familiar in the world’s fourth most populous nation: Indonesia sits on the Ring of Fire and its thousands of islands are strung across hundreds of miles of ocean.

This makes disaster risk planning particularly essential, including through the preparation and maintenance of earthquake-resistant buildings and infrastructure and warning systems. There are reports that parts of the tsunami alert system were not working; that some areas did not have sirens; and that the quake felled transmission towers, so text message warnings were not transmitted. But at least as important may have been the fact that people were not prepared.

In haunting footage, a man screams “Tsunami! Tsunami!” as the wall of water approaches. Yet while some people scramble to safety, others are milling about. It is one of the terrible paradoxes of the human mind that we worry so much about things that may never happen and yet, faced with imminent peril, we often seem unable to grasp the danger and act.

It is all the more striking in this case because Indonesia has suffered so severely from tsunamis. It lost 150,000 citizens in Banda Aceh when the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami hit in 2004. Hundreds more died in disasters in Java and the Mentawai islands in 2006 and 2010.

A year later, unforgettable images from the huge Japanese tsunami that claimed 18,000 lives showed the pitiless speed and force of the water. Yet many more would have died had it not been for the nation’s plans and drills. Every schoolchild knows what to do when an earthquake happens or the tsunami warning sounds – and has practised. The aim should not be to copy Japan’s system, but to use it as a model. The goal should be to make sure that civilians, as well as officials, understand warning signs, know how to act and – critically – have practised doing so, until reacting to a disaster seems as routine as looking out for traffic when they cross the street.

Putting this into practice is not easy. Indonesia’s government is highly decentralised. Experts at the Indonesia-based Resilience Development Initiative point out that disaster risk reduction was not listed as a mandatory duty of district governments until recently and enforcing building codes still isn’t. Local budgets are also an issue. Japanese funding is backing a UN Development Programme drive to strengthen school tsunami preparedness across the Asia-Pacific region; in Indonesia alone, 3,900 are in tsunami-prone areas. Friday’s disaster reminds us that the country needs more support to help prepare its people for those that may lie ahead. It should also remind us that a vague awareness of danger does not mean we are prepared for the worst.