Some
coincidences shouldn’t be ignored.
“The
Impossible,” a movie on one family’s harrowing experience during and after the
2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, opened in Sacramento theaters on January
4.
An
earthquake near Alaska a few hours later that evening triggered a tsunami
warning for nearby coastal regions.
And
running in the background since at least November have been media reminders of
Sacramento’s extraordinary vulnerability to flooding, which a Sacramento Bee story described as “the greatest flood risk of any
major urban area in America."
If
there’s a thread linking ocean tsunamis and river floods, now’s the time to
find it. Lessons learned from the 2004 tsunami could help Sacramento prepare
for floods that may arrive this Spring.
A
key component of any disaster preparedness plan is communications – knowing
well in advance how and when officials will alert populations to a threat or
actual disaster.
The
key dramatic moment early in "The Impossible" is the tsunami’s explosive arrival with no warning whatsoever. The family of five at the heart
of the drama, along with hundreds of thousands of coastal residents and
vacationers in Thailand and a dozen more countries, were taken completely by
surprise, with disastrous results. Deaths by some estimates were up to 300,000.
Some
Indian Ocean communities were so close to the epicenter of the
tsunami-triggering earthquake near Sumatra, Indonesia that no warning could
have been generated in time to save them.
Tsunamis
travel at jetliner speed, and waves began pounding beaches in Thailand within
an hour of the quake. But even at that speed, the tsunami took 2 hours to reach
Sri Lanka and India and 7 hours to arrive in Kenya and other East African
nations. Tens of thousands died in waves that arrived hours after the
earthquake.
Despite
the time lag, officials at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu were unable to issue an effective warning, a lapse that was well documented by
journalists at the time.
Knowing why an alert
wasn’t issued may help local authorities find holes in their own planning for
future Sacramento Valley flood disasters.
The problem in 2004
was that scientists and officials involved in the U.S. tsunami warning system
had become so reliant on high-tech devices – floating buoys, other ocean
sensors and satellites – that they lost sight of low-tech methods to send a
warning.
One globalization expert later observed that with modern communications, “the information of an
impending disaster could have been sent round the world in a matter of minutes,
by email, by telephone, by fax, not to mention by satellite television.”
Had officials played
“what-if” with enough intensity, they might have found the flaws in their
high-tech plan and realized that a single telephone call – to the Associated
Press, for example – could produce an instantaneous news alert that would be
picked up by CNN, Reuters, the BBC and other networks with links into the
Indian Ocean region.
Officials thought
they had prepared for every contingency in 2004, but the one telephone call
that could have saved perhaps a hundred thousand lives was never made.
Here in Sacramento,
we citizens are totally reliant on professional crisis response planners to
have effective communications plans in place to keep us informed and safe
during the next disaster.
our job is to remind the crisis planners that every plan can be improved –
and that we’re counting on them to do the job right.
