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Minutes after an earthquake off the Indonesian coast Monday, about 400 government officials across the nation were sent a text message on their cellphones warning them of the underwater quake, which was similar to the one in late 2004 that spawned a tsunami that killed about 200,000 people from Sumatra to Somalia.

The warning never reached many residents of the country's Java coast, where a wall of water more than two yards high was minutes from making landfall, according to officials at the Meteorological and Geophysical Agency in Jakarta who have reviewed the list of recipients of the text message. Along the coast, more than 500 people died.

The country's second tsunami in less than 19 months has cast a spotlight on shortcomings in Indonesia's warning system and raises questions about the larger regional system.

Despite calls for a more effective tsunami-warning system after the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami, little progress seems to have been made in Indonesia, which suffered the greatest number of casualties.

"The system right now is not systematically arranged," says Fauzi, head of the seismology-and-tsunami division at the agency that sent the text message. (Like many Indonesians, he goes by one name.) Of the roughly 400 people on the list of recipients, only a few dozen were local officials who might have been in a position to pass the message to police to get people away from the south coast, adds Karyono, another official at the agency.

Mr. Fauzi says his agency is trying to expand the list of people who receive earthquake updates and to create centers at the provincial level that can disseminate text messages to local officials.

Monday's tsunami was triggered by an earthquake of magnitude 7.7 and sent a wave toward the Java shoreline, where it reached hundreds of yards inland in some places and destroyed homes, hotels and restaurants. The death toll yesterday reached 531, with more than 270 missing, the Associated Press reported. An earthquake yesterday off a different part of Java's south coast made tall buildings in Jakarta sway, but there were no reports of damage.

The lack of communication was one of a series of gaps in the tsunami-warning system. Two buoys donated by Germany to help Indonesia monitor the ocean for earthquakes drifted away from their moorings sometime this year, according to Pariatmono, assistant to a deputy minister at the Ministry of Research and Technology in Jakarta. At least one has been brought on land in Jakarta for repairs.

"We are fixing it, but it's not ready to be redeployed," Mr. Pariatmono says. "I think we need some more time to think about how to anchor them." Jakarta hopes eventually to deploy 16 buoys.

Anchoring isn't the only problem. The two buoys, placed near a fault line off western Sumatra, weren't yet configured to send information directly to Jakarta, Mr. Pariatmono says -- only to Germany. While there are other active buoys in the region, Indonesia's system remains experimental and is mostly geared toward informing countries further from the epicenter, to allow them to monitor a wave as it travels toward them.

Some scientists say the best warning system for earthquakes that strike relatively close to land, as Monday's did, would be an education campaign teaching people to flee beach areas if they feel a quake or recognize other signs of an impending tsunami.

Mr. Pariatmono says the Indonesian government has installed loudspeakers along beaches in Bali, a popular international-tourist destination. That system is getting set up, he says, and won't be tested until December.

The task of transmitting a message within minutes to the mass of people living along a country's coastline is daunting. Indonesia's coastlines are extremely long, and efforts to develop warning systems are complicated by a lack of funds and by cases where the central and local governments don't work together effectively.

Some progress has been made. Indonesia has installed at least four digital-tide gauges along the country's coastline to measure the height of tsunamis that make landfall and relay information to control centers in real time, Mr. Pariatmono says -- information that could benefit other countries in a wave's path.

In Thailand, the government is stitching together a system that should offer timely and accurate alerts. Prodprasob Suraswadee, director of Thailand's National Disaster Warning Center, says the system should be completed within a year.

In Japan, a tsunami warning can be issued within minutes of an earthquake to television and radio stations, as well as local emergency officials. Machines that monitor tremors and buoys that sense waves send information to a central agency, which gets it back to the coasts.

Indonesia isn't the only country working under spending constraints. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii relies on a few dozen gauges in the region. "If we had our preference, we'd have a thousand of these coastal gauges around the Pacific and the Indian Ocean," says Charles McCreery, the center's director. "But there haven't been resources [for] that level of instrumentation."