How the Failure To Issue an Effective Ocean Tsunami Warning May Help Prepare the Crisis Communications Response to the Next California River Flood

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 at Citizens Helping Officials Respond to Emergencies isn’t to do the planning; 
                     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.