Petra Nemcova Urges Japan Tsunami Victims to Stay 'Calm and Focused

Tsunami survivor Petra Nemcova has offered her advice to the survivors of the Japanese disaster, urging citizens caught up in the disaster to stay "calm and focused". The catwalk beauty was left devastated when her photographer fiance Simon Atlee was killed while holidaying in Thailand in 2004 when the tsunami of 2004 hit. Nemcova suffered a broken pelvis in the natural disaster after clinging on to a palm tree to survive the huge tidal wave. 

Now Nemcova has spoken out following the devastating earthquake and tsunami which struck Japan on Friday, March 11, urging those caught up in the chaos to think carefully about how to get through the tough times. 

"One of the most important things when you're amongst [a] natural disaster is just to stay calm and it's very hard to do, but if you are not calm and focused, you [can miss] the opportunities to either help someone or help yourself survive," she tells Access Hollywood. 

"There's the famous saying, six degrees of separation, but when [a] natural disaster happens there's no degree of separation because... now the world is so small, so even if the earthquake happened in Japan, so many people were affected." 

"When I looked at those videos, it's very hard to look at them. And a lot of people don't know how to recognize a tsunami, what to do, what to do during an earthquake and the simple disaster preparedness education is not applied anywhere." 

"I think it's such a crime not to have disaster preparedness in the curriculum and seeing that, I know that lots of lives could be saved, just by knowing what to do, how to recognize it and being more prepared instead of being reactive."