Article Raps Public for its Poor Tsunami Awareness, but Officials' Reaction Is Critical

Today’s second part of the Star-Bulletin’s series on tsunami and emergency preparation lays a lot of blame on the public for its apparent collective ignorance on what to do during a major earthquake and tsunami event.

And that’s undoubtedly true. People are people, and changing public perceptions is going to take time. Not everyone will leave the water when the warning sirens begin to wail.

What CHORE wants to keep in focus is the requirement for the paid professionals to react flawlessly during the next crisis – unlike their response on October 15th.

A tsunami expert opines that “thousands would have been killed if the Oct. 15 Big Island earthquakes had triggered a tsunami, because people in low-lying areas who felt the ground shake did not move to higher ground.”

Failures All Around

The hypothetical death toll likely would have been boosted by the failure of several key links in the communications chain on Earthquake Sunday due to the power blackout, the lack of emergency generators at radio and TV stations, communicators’ unwise reliance on cell phone networks that failed, the lack of foresight in compiling lists of unpublished emergency-only numbers at broadcast outlets, etc.

“All the money being spent to improve the tsunami warning system is a waste if people respond as they did during the earthquakes,” the expert said.

Replace “people” with “officials” in that sentence and the same will be true.