I’ve been trying … to put the destruction of that tsunami into perspective. But the toll just keeps rising.

First it was an estimated 11,800 dead. Then 23,000. Then about 40,000. Then 52,000. Then about 77,000. (Editor’s note: As of Monday afternoon, the toll was approaching double the 77,000 used in columnist Bailey’s calculations.)

By the time you read this, the number probably will be much higher. Only God knows how many people he took home last weekend.

I was going to write it was the equivalent of about eight Sept. 11s, but that now stands closer to 27 – until the estimate is revised upward again. Think back to that Tuesday morning. Now imagine having to deal with 27 times the loss of life, 27 times the damage.

But even that doesn’t do it justice because we had a person – Osama bin Laden – and a thing – evil – to blame, and something to attack, somewhere to seek redress. Who do you blame for a “furious sea”?

The total number killed in those few hours was more than all those killed by every hurricane that has hit the U.S. mainland during the last 104 years, by a wide margin.

If the estimate remained 77,000, the war in Iraq would have to be about 63 times worse in order for the death toll of American soldiers to match what one major earthquake started that weekend morning, spawning waves with the energy of 1 million atomic bombs traveling faster than jetliners.

And what’s worse, there was only a remote chance it would happen there, in the Indian Ocean, which is why they didn’t have a warning system. The odds were too long, the risk considered too small.

The logic makes sense. I get it, even as I feel a little less safe knowing I live in an area where the lifestyle and economy revolve around that big, beautiful body of water, knowing my house is only a few minutes’ drive from the oceanfront.

I understand that logic, even want to agree with it, but have grown less certain after having been told the same line of reasoning has kept officials from putting a tsunami warning system in the Atlantic Ocean.

Because the odds of us getting hit are just that long, the risk so minimal.

There’s an extensive continental shelf in the Atlantic, said Paul Whitmore, scientist in charge of the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Service. That would reduce the energy of any tsunami that reached our shores. The Indian Ocean didn’t provide those 12 Asian and African countries with similar protection.

And we don’t have major subduction zones, like those off the coast of Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest, which create the strongest tsunamis.

“Just the relative lack of danger (along the East Coast) has always convinced people not to have a warning system,” Whitmore said. “But that might be re-evaluated now.”