The effort to help Haiti recover from its devastating earthquake can draw on lessons learned in other large-scale tragedies, particularly the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed at least 230,000 people across a dozen countries, rescue officials say.

The same scenes of bodies littering the ground or stacked along roadways in Haiti are flashbacks to the tsunami devastation, but Bakri Beck, who headed relief activities in Indonesia's devastated Banda Aceh province — where 167,000 people died from the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami — said saving survivors must remain the priority.

During the tsunami, initial fears ran high over potential violence erupting in Banda Aceh with three decades of fighting between government forces and separatist rebels. But those worries quickly dissipated after foreign aid agencies were greeted by a peaceful mood, with victims bonding together.