How should we regard the performance of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center after the devastating Sumatra earthquake?
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin thinks the Center performed admirably (January 13 editorial, “Hawaii’s tsunami warning center performed its job”) and defended it from criticism in Thailand and elsewhere for not sounding a usable tsunami warning to south Asia.
Maybe the Center did perform its job and mission well, but that depends on what the definition of “its job” is. The scientists certainly were efficient and immediately left their families on Christmas Day to gather at the Center, analyze the initial data on the earthquake and dispatch a bulletin within minutes to the 26 Pacific Rim member countries of the tsunami warning system.
And they sent another bulletin about an hour later to those same countries, accurately predicting there would be no Pacific-wide tsunami but suggesting that perhaps one had been triggered in the Indian Ocean.
At that point, suspecting that a tsunami was racing across the ocean, they started making telephone calls to government agencies in the region, with no success. Scientists have given many interviews to the media about what it was like in those moments when the suspicion of a probable tsunami finally had sunk in. The Chicago Tribune reported:
“With a killer tsunami bearing down on Sri Lanka and India at airliner speeds, an effort to save thousands of lives came down to a handful of overworked employees in Hawaii trying to telephone government officials they did not know and did not know how to reach.”
In the end, the terrible truth about the Center’s performance on Christmas Day is that not one life was saved in south Asia by what the Center’s scientists knew and what they did.
That hardly describes a great performance – unless, of course, the Center’s “job” is narrowly defined as administrative. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Conrad Lautenbacher seems to prefer that interpretation.
In a press conference on January 11, Lautenbacher said the staff’s actions were “excellent” and faithful to the warning procedures in place.
“This is a group that believes in saving lives and protecting property at all costs,” he said.
But the Center did not save any lives on Christmas Day. It did not protect any property. What are we to make of this disconnect between what the Center’s staff suspected – that a killer tsunami might have been generated – and the fact that more than 160,000 people died around the Indian Ocean rim?
Questions arose following the tragedy about why no effective warning was raised beyond the Pacific Rim. Rob Hail asked in a January 2 letter to the Star-Bulletin: “Why in the world didn’t the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center have a plan to notify the appropriate international media….?” Having just returned from southeast Asia, Hail noted that CNN, BBC and other services are popular news sources in many areas hit by the tsunami.
Confirmation that the Center and its sister NOAA agencies apparently have no media communications plan came a few days later in a UPI story that quoted NOAA spokesperson Dolores Clark:
“Following the realization that a massive tsunami had been generated, they (the Center’s scientists) did the best job they could to contact authorities. But they were fixed on reaching agencies that have responsibilities for warning, such as weather offices or disaster offices.”
Then Clark dropped a bombshell: “Not only was the Center focused on warning agencies, it does not have an official list of media contacts.”
So there it was -- no media contacts, no media phone numbers and therefore no media planning by a U.S. agency that prides itself as being the world leader in tsunami preparedness.
What’s more, there apparently has been no thought given by the Center and the International Tsunami Information Center, both located in Hawaii, as to what they could do to save lives in the absence of a high-tech warning system in the Indian Ocean. They knew there was no such system, they knew tsunamis are a threat to the region and they knew a major quake one day might trigger a massive tsunami there.
Yet when all those known factors finally came together, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center was reduced to wondering how to send an effective warning to south Asia. It doesn’t seem right for Lautenbacher to be back-patting now.
What can NOAA do? I posted a five-point program on this web log on January 12 as a suggestion on how NOAA can shift its thinking and culture to include meaningful media notification after future earthquakes that may have generated tsunamis. The process starts with facing up to the Christmas Day failure to save lives:
1. NOAA will accept constructive criticism -- rather than deny -- that actions it could have undertaken on December 25 (HST) likely would have saved lives in south Asia.
2. NOAA will resolve to change its communications culture, to include reevaluating the scope of its information-disseminating mission -- i.e., whether its mission extends beyond the Pacific Rim.
3. NOAA will rewrite it communications protocols to include early telephone calls to news organizations that have the capability of sending worldwide tsunami warnings.
4. NOAA will accomplish high-level coordination with the management of these news agencies to ensure proper execution of the alerts when received by the media.
5. NOAA will train its personnel to respond to suspected tsunamis by making direct person-to-person contact with the major news outlets based on proper prior planning.
NOAA owes it to the victims and their families to learn the lessons of the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami. Businesses routinely search for lessons after being hit by major non-scheduled events. NOAA must do the same.
Doug Carlson
Honolulu, HI
January 14, 2005
www.DougCarlsonCommunications.com
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