January 7, 2005
NO HISTORICAL THREAT:
A Tremor, Then a Sigh of Relief, Before the Cataclysm Rushed In: After southern Asia's massive quake, experts initially were blind to the threat of a tsunami. Others were unable or unwilling to act. (Paul Watson, Barbara Demick and Richard Fausset, January 2, 2005, LA Times)
Inside the computer room of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center — a high-tech lair of flat-screen monitors, maps and digital wall displays — a computer caught his attention. The jagged lines relayed a signal from a seismic sensor thousands of miles away in the Cocos Islands, southwest of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, conveying the news of a large earthquake off that island's west coast.The computer automatically sent a pager signal to one of Weinstein's colleagues, Andrew Hirshorn, who had been napping at his home nearby. Hirshorn, a soft-spoken 48-year-old with a gray ponytail, threw on a shirt and ran over.
The two men conferred. Initial readings indicated the earthquake was magnitude 8 — significant, but not enormous. It was outside the Pacific Ocean, their area of expertise and responsibility.
The center, a U.S. government agency that does much of the work for the U.N.-sanctioned Pacific tsunami warning system, was set up in 1965 in response to a quake off the coast of Chile that had generated a tsunami, killing people as far away as Hawaii and Japan. The center monitors sophisticated tidal gauges and computerized buoys dotting the Pacific. Nothing comparable tracks the Indian Ocean.
Computers ate up 15 minutes verifying the earthquake reading, plotting its location, estimating its size. At 3:14 p.m. Hawaii time, the two men sent a bulletin on an automated e-mail and fax list to their colleagues around the Pacific Rim:
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 001
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 0114Z 26 DEC 2004
THIS BULLETIN IS FOR ALL AREAS OF THE PACIFIC BASIN EXCEPT ALASKA-BRITISH COLUMBIA-WASHINGTON-
OREGON-CALIFORNIA.
THIS MESSAGE IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY. THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING OR WATCH IN EFFECT.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS.
ORIGIN TIME -- 0059Z 26 DEC 2004.
COORDINATES -- 3.4 NORTH 95.7 EAST
LOCATION -- OFF THE COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA
MAGNITUDE -- 8.0
EVALUATION:
THIS EARTHQUAKE IS LOCATED OUTSIDE THE PACIFIC. NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS BASED ON HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA.
Already the wave had traveled roughly 100 miles from the epicenter in an ever-widening circle. In Indonesia, the first victims were about to die. [...]
When an earthquake hits, shock waves travel through the Earth and within minutes begin jiggling sensitive equipment at about 350 monitoring stations around the world. Those stations, in turn, relay data by satellite to computers at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.
Don Blakeman, a USGS geophysicist, was about to have Christmas dinner when his pager went off — a computer-generated warning that a major quake had just occurred. A colleague, Julie Martinez, also was paged and began analyzing data on her home computer while Blakeman drove to the office.
As data from more and more stations began to arrive, Blakeman revised the estimate of the temblor's magnitude to 8.5 — a threefold increase in size. He triggered a computer program that notified the White House, State Department and major relief agencies of a massive quake.
The information also went automatically to the tsunami warning center in Hawaii, where director Charles McCreery, 54, had abandoned plans to assemble his young daughters' pink bicycles and joined his colleagues watching the computer readouts.
McCreery saw that the quake was much larger than previously thought and therefore more likely to cause a tsunami. He decided to send out a second bulletin:
NO DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS FOR THE PACIFIC BASIN BASED ON HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA.
THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF A TSUNAMI NEAR THE EPICENTER.
Roughly an hour had passed since the quake. Unseen by experts, the wave already had traveled halfway across the Indian Ocean and claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Interesting long article that was easy to find at Google News after not being able to locate it at the LA Times's own site. They don't get it, huh? Posted by Orrin Judd at January 7, 2005 8:18 AM
I'm not sure I get it. The original bulletin was exactly right - there was no tsunami in the Pacific basin. As noted, the Pacific monitoring station was not qualified to determine the threat for the Indian Ocean basin.
Moreover, the threat in the Indian Ocean was discounted not because the experts were stupid, but because the instruments gave the wrong reading (8.0). IIRC, there was an 8.1 earthquake a number of years earlier in the same region which generated waves that were barely noticeable. Had this one been an 8.0 it would have barely mentioned a notice.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at January 7, 2005 1:35 PMIf you follow some links at the USGS Seismology site, you can find your way to a list of contacts for all the member nations of this Pacific Tsunami Warning network. Included are North Korea and Thailand. Unlike most of the countries lists, for the latter, there is a name, but no phone or email address. I find that facinating— I take it to mean that Thailand isn't all that interested even in protecting it's Pacific coast.
To be blaming geophysicists for not recognizing the danger is hindsight at its worse. One of the problems with science of this type is that you are too focused to realize when your problem is bigger than you think it is. A lot of science is recognizing, after the fact, the gaps in your knowledge. It's only in cases like this that it turns out that those gaps are deadly.
It took seismic sea wave disasters in the '40s and '60s to lead to the fooundation of the US system, which, except for the Japanese contribution, is the bulk of the International system. The reaction to this disaster is to begin to fund an expansion of that network, along with education on what to do during one. Ignorance killed thousands in this disaster. Not knowing that the largest wave isn't always the first, not knowing what a sudden receding of the sea means, a major earthquake felt along the coast means run for high ground, are the three that come to mind.
Remember in the days before Christmas how the probabilities of an impact by Asteroid 2004MN4 rose to an unprecedented level? Why isn't anyone connecting the two? There are all sorts of dangers lurking out there, and you can't mitigate all of them.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at January 7, 2005 1:36 PMMcCreery tried to call the countries at threat, but he didn't have a list of contacts. When he was able to figure out a number, most of the time nobody was on the other end.
It was a holiday over there.
Put it this way: Let's say somebody with a cellphone that (for the purposes of this example) could call only Orrin Judd in N.H. This person, in L.A., sees a fire and alerts Orrin.
How successful would Orrin be in getting the LAFD moving?
Posted by: Harry Eagar at January 7, 2005 10:32 PMI don't answer phones either.
Posted by: oj at January 8, 2005 12:34 AM