Global Courant
The recent tragedies at sea — the death of hundreds of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea off Greece and the catastrophic implosion of the submarine Titan – are the stuff of nightmares. We instinctively comfort ourselves: I will never set foot in a submarine, my life will never be uprooted by war or pestilence.
On the other hand, we have little control over natural tragedies.
Opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
I grew up in Southern California and experienced major earthquakes, which is why I don’t dread them as much as I probably should. After all, there are things we can do to reduce the toll of earthquakes. We anchor our foundations; we keep survival kits on hand. In recent years, my neighborhood has been abuzz with the sounds of retrofitting earthquakes.
With wildfires, there are also steps we can take to protect ourselves and our property. With hurricanes we can board up our windows and flee. With tornadoes, we can shelter in storm cellars.
But honestly, there may not be much you can do to protect yourself from a tsunami. You can run for higher ground, but that assumes you know what’s coming.
I hadn’t added tsunamis to my nightmares until the deadly ones 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that destroyed houses, trains, people, entire cities in 14 countries around the Indian Ocean. It brought out in a visceral way that sometimes there is simply no protection against the wrath of nature.
That particular catastrophe began as a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. It killed 230,000 people before it was over, a number almost too high to contemplate.
Sonali Deraniyagala, a London-based economist vacationing with her family at a Sri Lankan resort, was taken by surprise. In “Wave” her best-selling 2013 memoir, she talks about the agony of losing her two young sons, husband and parents in the tsunami. She opens with a chilling, surreal depiction of her confusion and struggle as she and her loved ones were washed away by waves as high as 30 feet. The terror has stayed with me.
This is why a few years ago when I started noticing signs in my neighborhood – “Tsunami Evacuation Route” with an arrow pointing inland – I was shocked.
I live in a tsunami area?
Well, it turns out.
Emergency management professionals want you to know that everyone along the edge of the west coast is in a tsunami zone.
If you’ve been near Los Angeles beaches in the past month, you may have seen billboards or bus shelter ads promoting tsunami awareness. The cartoon ads seem a bit crazy: “Unprepared for a tsunami? Tsu-NOT-I!” (In Spanish, “Preparing for a tsunami? Tsúmate-A-mi!”) But the point, say the people who are paid to worry about these things, is to raise public awareness.
“We’re not trying to scare anyone,” said Crisanta Gonzalez, chief of the Los Angeles Department of Preparedness and Community Engagement. “We just want to start a conversation.”
You can sign up for local emergency alerts at Notify LAand probably learn more than you ever wanted to know Tsunamizone.org.
Joseph Riser, spokesman for the department, counted the five-week, $250,000 government-funded campaign, which ended last week, as a success because there were 10 times as many new registrations for the alerts compared to a “normal month with blue sky”. ”
For Los Angeles County in 2023, said Riser, the Federal Emergency Management Agency scores the risk of earthquakes at 100%, forest fires at 99% and tsunamis at 63%.
OK, so maybe tsunamis aren’t nearly as worrisome as the earthquakes and wildfires we know are inevitable, but 63% isn’t nothing. In the world of emergency management, Gonzalez said, “tsunamis are one of the better disasters.” I take it that’s reassuring?
More than 150 tsunamis have hit our coast since 1800, according to the California Geological Survey, although only a dozen have caused death or significant damage, most notably in 1964 when a 9.2 earthquake in Alaska sent 21-foot tidal waves into the Pacific Ocean which crashed into Crescent City, killing 10 people and destroying most of the waterfront.
In March 2011, a tsunami caused by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake in Japan hit California 10 hours later. No one died, but the rising water caused $100 million in damage statewide.
“If there’s an earthquake in a part of the world, like Japan, we start paying attention in California,” Gonzalez told me. Signing up for alerts and understanding what to do if you receive one makes sense. In Venice, residents are told to head east as quickly as possible, and probably on foot, as the roads are likely to be jammed.
But no matter how many warnings they get, scientists aren’t always able to predict the speed and amplitude of a tsunami.
As recently as January 2022, a volcano destroyed most of an island in Tonga, generating a wave that traveled 5,000 miles across the Pacific and wreaked havoc along the California coast. Live aboards at Berkeley marina were evacuated. Far beyond the Golden Gate, near Mill Valley, the tsunami damaged boats and docks in the relatively sheltered Richardson Bay. At the Oceano Dunes in Central California, campers were unexpectedly caught in a flash flood. And in Ventura, a harbor patrol boat capsized and docks were damaged by rising water levels and strong currents.
“Some people had to be rescued,” said Rick Wilson, chief of the California Geological Survey’s tsunami program. a recorded debriefing presented by the Earthquake Engineering Institute. “We always get surfers trying to surf the tsunami.”
Because the 2022 tsunami was spawned by a volcanic eruption, Wilson said, the National Tsunami Warning Center was thrown for a loop. “Their predictions are based on earthquakes,” he said, so their computer model predictions weren’t entirely reliable.
Oh and one more thing: large meteors crashing into the ocean from space can also cause tsunamis.
As if we don’t already have enough on our minds.
