BANGKOK, Thailand — Until two weeks ago, Smith Thammasaroj was a prophet without honor. As chief of Thailand’s meteorological department in 1998, he was accused of scaremongering when he warned that the country’s southwestern coast could face a deadly tsunami.

He retired from his post under a shadow, dismissed as a crackpot, accused of causing panic and jeopardizing a critical tourist industry that grew up around the tropical resort island of Phuket.

Today, Smith is being lionized for his foresight after the devastating Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people around the region, including 5,300 in Thailand, where another 3,600 are listed as missing.

Less than a week after the tragedy, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra appointed Smith as a vice minister and put him in charge of the newly established National Disaster Warning Office, which will work with local and foreign seismologists to establish a tsunami early warning system.

Now when Smith speaks, people listen. And he has a new message : The United States must take some of the blame for the grievous number of casualties caused by the calamity.

Smith said he believed that if the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center had acted quickly enough, many lives could have been saved.

"I’m not angry at them for failing to warn Thailand, because at that time they did not know for sure. They merely said a tsunami was possible after the earthquake," Smith said in an interview.

But after the giant waves hit southern Thailand, the center had more than an hour to alert India, Bangladesh and the Maldives, "and if they warned those countries, they could have saved thousands of lives," he said.

"It’s their failure to do so that makes me mad at them," he said.

The Hawaii center, set up in 1948, hosts the only regional network of its kind in the world, but is set up solely to monitor Pacific Ocean countries.

Workers at the Hawaii center have said they tried to warn Indian Ocean nations about the possible effects of the earthquake, but were not equipped to monitor that part of the world and did not even have phone numbers for the right officials.

Smith has been equally critical of his own country’s meteorologists. He said earlier that staff at the Meteorological Department working on Dec. 26 knew what was coming, but failed to act because they were ignored earlier.

The country’s Meteorological Department has said it knew about the Dec. 26 earthquake and the possibility that it could trigger a tsunami about an hour before waves began slamming ashore.

But they said they had no way to determine the size of the waves — and therefore the threat they posed — and were reluctant to issue a warning without such information because it could harm the country’s tourist industry and anger the government.

"In 1998 when I warned everyone concerned after a major earthquake in the region that we had to prepare for a tsunami, everyone criticized me for damaging the tourist industry, and someone even said I was insane," Smith said Tuesday.