An army of volunteers with bicycles and megaphones may have saved tens of thousands of lives when Cyclone Sidr devastated coastal Bangladesh last week.

The simple early-warning system, made up of 40,000 men and women trained in disaster response, was triggered when authorities gave warning that the worst cyclone to hit the country in a decade was tearing in from the Bay of Bengal. The volunteers, trained by the Red Crescent, the Muslim arm of the Red Cross, then raised the alarm in the villages, many by riding around on bicycles and shouting through megaphones.

As a result, an estimated 3.2 million people were removed from their homes and more than a million were inside shelters when Cyclone Sidr struck, according to the United Nations and other agencies. More than 3,500 peope were killed and about two million displaced, but UN and Red Cross officials estimate that without the warning system the cost could have been as great as that caused by a cyclone of similar intensity in 1970, which killed 300,000 people.

“Although there are still a lot of casualties, this is a real success story,” said Maryam Golnaraghi, chief of disaster risk reduction at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), a United Nations agency. “Without this, it would have been the equivalent of what happened in 1970. We’re talking about two to three thousand dead versus hundreds of thousands,” she told The Times.

She and other experts said that the cyclone had been the system’s first serious test and that it could now be a model for developing countries and remote areas of the developed world.

The idea of an early-warning system arose in the 1960s in Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, which is one of the world’s poorest and lowest-lying countries and suffers annual floods and cyclones. It gathered momentum after the 1970 cyclone and another in 1991 that killed 190,000 people. Because of political tension in the region, it did not take off until the mid1990s when the WMO teamed up with the Red Cross and national governments to create a joint mechanism.

National meteorological departments now monitor cyclones by satellite, share information and send warnings to disaster management authorities, which pass them to village volunteers. Bangladeshi authorities were thus warned of the impending disaster by the Tropical Cyclone Centre in Delhi 72 hours before Sidr made landfall, and were sent updates every three hours. The Ministry of Food and Disaster Management then issued a warning, which it passed on by radio to the network of thousands of volunteers.

“There’s no doubt it made a huge difference in saving lives,” said Anthony Spalton, a senior officer in the disaster preparedness and planning department of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “It’s literally people on bicycles with megaphones or flags and wind-up radios.”

The Bangladesh Red Crescent Society alone had moved out 600,000 people, using 5,000 hand-held loud-hailers, 10,000 torches, 1,000 bicycles and 143 VHF radios that it had issued to its volunteers. Each megaphone cost only £25, Mr Spalton said.

He also attributed the relatively low casualties to schemes that had taught villagers to reinforce their homes, store food in high places and take their animals with them. More had to be invested in early-warning systems to allow information gathered through technological means to be communicated to the most vulnerable. “Technology is only as good as the reach of the message,” he said.

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?