| February 1, 2006 Race is on to prepare for Northwest tsunami By Brian Barker
and KATU.com Web Staff PORTLAND, Ore. - Last year's tsunami in Southeast Asia was a wakeup call for those of us here in the Northwest. We are overdue for a huge earthquake and a tsunami just as big as the one that killed thousands in southeast Asia on December 26, 2004. Now the race is on to prepare people along the Northwest coast, especially since geologists say we are due for a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Early last year, KATU spent two months uncovering serious danger zones. In the investigation, we found broken sirens, emergency management officials in denial and huge communities that did not know where to go. For example, while Seaside and Lincoln City had detailed evacuation maps, Astoria and Warrenton did not and as far as tourists go, many hotels provided no information at all about what to do in the event of a tsunami. A year later, things have changed along the coast, where in a town like Seaside, a 100-foot tall tsunami could slam into town less than 20 minutes after a big earthquake. However, Seaside is so big that it would take longer than 20 minutes to get from the downtown area to an area where there is high ground at about 75 feet above sea level. Right now, two warning centers send out alerts if an earthquake off the coast might cause a tsunami. If an earthquake strikes in Alaska or Japan, people would have several hours to evacuate before the wave hits. However, an earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone off the Oregon coast would hit in just minutes. Right now, two buoys that warn the West Coast of approaching tsunamis are broken and have been for a year. One of them is 200 miles from the mouth of the Columbia River. Harold Mofjeld is in charge of the federal tsunami buoy system and at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle he and others are testing a network of new high-tech buoys that put a pressure sensor five miles down on the ocean floor. However, he warns that these types of buoys should not be relied on as a form of protection. "The buoys really don't protect the coastline," he says. "What they do is provide information." In the next year and a half, 39 new buoys will warn emergency managers when a tsunami is racing across the ocean. Also, scientists are racing to build computer models that will give emergency managers an idea of exactly when and where a tsunami will strike. "We're trying to give them a tool they can use in real time and use in the decision-making process," says Diego Arcas, a tsunami modeler. While a tsunami takes hours to travel across the ocean, the models take just minutes to determine where it will hit. In other words, it would result in fewer false alarms and help avoid unnecessary evacuations. "If you think of it costing tens of millions of dollars to put it in place, one false alarm would pay for all of that," says Mofjeld. Seaside, Lincoln City and several other weak spots along the coast are now spending money to beef up warning systems and mark evacuation routes. However, most people who study tsunami dangers say people along the coast need to do a lot more to educate themselves about tsunami dangers. | 
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