“I don't know if it is our fault or their fault, but we need to get tied into the warning system...”

This quote about the November 15th tsunami is from the Crescent City, CA harbormaster after boats and piers in its bay suffered $700,000 in damage.

Crescent City is a cautionary tale for Hawaii because of the similarities between how the two locations prepared for the tsunami’s arrival.

(November 18th Update: Read more in the San Francisco Chronicle about the failure of California's warning system that left officials in Crescent City clueless to the tsunami's potential danger. Tsunami Lessons, our sister blog, asks why a tsunami warning is like the Telephone game.)

In both places, officials knew when the tsunami would arrive but predicted its effects would be minor. Officials in both places decided not to activate the siren warning system. Both places cancelled a tsunami alert before the anticipated arrival time.

The water level rose and fell rapidly in boat harbors around Hawaii, with only minor damage, and in Crescent City, where events turned dramatic hours after the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, AK cancelled its alert.

Officials there now acknowledge they could have done more to warn harbors along the Pacific Coast that wave action lasting for hours could be severe enough to cause damage. Like Hawaii officials, they said they’re worried about the “cry wolf” syndrome. “It’s something we wrestle with all the time,” one said.

Mixing Art and Science

Hawaii officials didn't activate emergency sirens, which in hindsight seems to have been a good call. Instead, they used the Emergency Alert System to break into radio and TV programming around 6 a.m. Wednesday with a warning to stay out of the water due to anticipated dangerous currents.

CHORE doesn't know if that warning also anticipated the large swells in harbors on Kauai, Oahu’s North Shore and Maui that caused minor damage. Officials on the mainland now wish they had done more to alert coastal communities. Maybe Hawaii officials feel the same; it's something we look forward to learning. (The public briefing State Civil Defense says it will hold on its response to the October 15th earthquakes might well address the tsunami event.)

What now seems certain is that there’s a huge gray area covering when and what kind of alert officials should issue, what additional “sub-warnings” are appropriate and how long they should continue.

Each earthquake and tsunami tells us there’s more “art” to this emergency response science than we had imagined.