Early in the morning of Sept. 29, an earthquake deep under the Pacific caused a massive tsunami to devastate the islands of Samoa and American Samoa, killing 111 people, devastating villages and flattening homes. The earthquake itself struck at 6:48 a.m., measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale. By 7:04 a.m., an emergency alert from the Tsunami Warning System, a global network of sensors monitored by scientists, went out. Less than 10 minutes later, the tsunami, with waves measuring nearly 15 feet high, hit land.
But as bad as the damage was, it could have been much worse. Laura Kong, head of the International Tsunami Information Center in Hawaii, says Independent Samoa had run a tsunami drill with planned evacuation routes in Oct. 2007 and again last year; the preparation saved countless lives during this week’s disaster.
When it comes to surviving a tsunami, every preparation — and every second — counts. In 2004, an earthquake off the coast of Indonesia launched the massive Indian Ocean Tsunami, which killed more than 230,000 people. While the Pacific has had a Tsunami Warning System in place since 1965, it was only after that disaster that Indian Ocean nations developed one of their own. As many as 95 percent of tsunamis are local, Kong says, striking within an hour of the earthquake — the 2004 disaster included. That time frame gives community members little time to react — if they are even aware of the danger at all.
The Pacific’s Tsunami Warning System is jointly operated by three control centers in Japan, Alaska and Hawaii, where it is headquartered. It uses earthquake information from seismic stations that are part of the Global Seismic Network overseen by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey, with contributing instruments, data and cash from countries around the world. The centers themselves can cost hundreds of millions of dollars just to implement, Kong says, with the money coming from the countries that support each center as well as from donors like the Red Cross and U.N. organizations. Once an earthquake strikes, the system analyzes its location and magnitude. If the quake fits the parameters for tsunami-like conditions, a warning is issued to each country within range of danger. The warning will often include likely arrival times for coastal communities.
Once the warning is sent to local governments, however, the safety of citizens at risk often depends on how advanced the infrastructure in each country is. Developing nations may lack the communications system to get the word out effectively. “Some countries have the infrastructure already,” Kong says, “some countries are developing it, and some countries may never have it.”
People like Brian Carlson, IT director for humanitarian and emergency affairs at World Vision, are working on technology that would improve such early-warning infrastructure. Carlson, who traveled to India shortly after the 2004 tsunami, said he noticed two communities just miles apart — one full of survivors while the other was wiped out entirely. The reason was the surviving village was notified by a family related to a man in Singapore who simply saw the tsunami warning on TV and called his family. “It was a simple phone call on a cell phone that saved hundreds of people,” Carlson says. He now works on researching technology that will improve disaster response as a whole. “It’s literally word of mouth right now,” Carlson says. If coastal residents don’t know a tsunami is on the way, “they find out as soon as the wave makes landfall.”
Graphic: What Causes a Tsunami
