Could Quake Info Have Been Faster? Initial Assessment Suggests Slow Website Response

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center gets points for updating its website to be more user friendly. The graphics are attractive (if spotty at times), and the running log of outgoing messages is easy to find.

Nevertheless, yesterday’s quake was yet another opportunity to improve on existing procedures. The job’s never done, right? As the Oahu Civil Defense administrator said a couple days ago, “Every time we pull out the contingency plan, we find something and say, ‘Why didn’t we think of that last time?’ And we update the contingency plan.”

CHORE attempted to keep a real-time log of the PTWC’s quake-related messages following yesterday’s earthquake. We may have missed some emails from the PTWC, and we’ve gone back to its site see what was there and sign up for various alerts, just to be sure we’re on the list.

That said, our conclusion is that the Center’s website lagged in posting its outgoing bulletins and advisories by up to an hour or more. We can’t be positive, but that’s our conclusion.

Serving the Individual Consumer

One might argue that the PTWC was getting the word out efficiently to the Tsunami Warning Focal Points designated in each nation in and around the Pacific, as well as to civil defense agencies and key media in Hawaii.

Still, with our world rushing ever more rapidly toward electronic point-to-point communication, we have to hope NOAA and the PTWC are constantly working to make information accessible to the individual consumer without media intermediaries.

NOAA’s communications gurus might want to run an exercise on how they expect to transmit a tsunami warning to someone without access to radio and TV. In today’s environment, he or she might be as hard to find as Diogenes’s “honest man,” but it’s a worthwhile exercise to test the warning capability if broadcasters aren’t in the picture.

Testing Assumptions

Just ask Hawaii civil defense officials about assumptions, such as their assumed reliance on cell phones to communicate in an emergency. That one was proven faulty last October on Earthquake Sunday when Oahu’s cell networks crashed.

Email and the web have emerged as channels of choice for emergency information. It therefore is reasonable to want those channels to be as efficient and timely as they possibly can. If we’re correct in concluding that the PTWC website was an hour late in posting outgoing emails, that’s an obvious area for improvement.

Complacency Is the Enemy

PTWC officials already may be hard at work on fixing glitches and enhancing their capabilities, but to fix a glitch, you have to acknowledge that it exists. What makes CHORE nervous is that nearly every utterance by PTWC officials gives the impression that the Center handled everything with absolute perfection.

CHORE’s sister blog, Tsunami Lessons, was launched one week after the December 2004 Indonesian earthquake and tsunami precisely because the PTWC could have done things to save lives that day, but didn’t. (Go to our post on the 2nd anniversary of that event for a review of what life-saving opportunities were missed by the PTWC staff.) As the Oahu Civil Defense official suggested, there is no such thing as a “final contingency plan,” and we know with certainty that NOAA and the PTWC learned from their experiences in 2004 and have changed their procedures.

Let's hope they learn from yesterday, too.