By Laura MacInnis GENEVA, May 21 (Reuters) - People in Myanmar appear to have been warned that a cyclone was approaching, but had nowhere to escape for protection from the storm, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Wednesday.

The United Nations estimates as many as 2.4 million people are struggling to survive in areas of the former Burma hardest-hit by the May 2 cyclone and its three-metre (10 feet) high storm surge that flooded and destroyed entire villages.

Nearly 134,000 people are believed to be dead or missing.

Dieter Schiessl, the United Nations agency's director of weather and disaster risk reduction, said those in the storm-hit Irrawaddy Delta did not know how to respond to the warnings that the military government disseminated about Cyclone Nargis.

"Most of the people decided to take shelter by staying home ... That turned out to be a quite disastrous decision," he told a news conference in Geneva, where the WMO is based.

Unlike in Bangladesh and other flood-prone countries, there were no evacuation systems or protective shelters set up in Myanmar to help people in the path of the storm, Schiessl said.

"There was no alternative for them," he said.

A team of WMO experts visited Myanmar to evaluate how the storm was tracked and prepared for in the Bay of Bengal country that is very rarely struck by strong tropical cyclones.

They found that the national weather service "had issued timely and accurate alerts and warnings" from April 27, with as many as six or seven advisories sent out a day.

But Schiessl said the direction and speed of the storm exacted the maximum foreseeable damage, and a blockage in the run-off of flooded water back into the sea caused devastation even far from the coasts.

"Enhanced warnings would not have made a big difference," he told journalists. "The situation was probably beyond the means we have available today to cope."

Restoring and improving Myanmar's meteorological services will cost between $5 million and $10 million, according to the WMO, which said it was imperative that weather information and warnings "are clear to and understandable by all".

Cyclones and other storm systems around the world are tracked by national and regional satellite systems and compiled by the WMO on the public website http://severe.worldweather.wmo.int.

Although storm surges like the one that hit Myanmar are possible to predict with modern tools, few developing countries can afford them, and even some wealthy governments are hesitant to share detailed information of their seabeds and coasts.

Peter Koltermann, a tsunami expert at the U.N. science and education agency UNESCO, said a lot of work was needed before similar disasters can be averted in other countries in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere, noting for instance that Indonesia had vast coastlines to document and monitor.

"There are a lot of activities underway to fill the gaps," he told the news conference. (Editing by Jonathan Lynn and David Fogarty)

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