(see March 26 posts for report on visit to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center)
Yesterday’s earthquake produced no killer tsunami, but it could have reinforced a mindset among Pacific Tsunami Warning Center scientists that may impede the flow of information to distant populations.
The big story today coming out of the PTWC is that it was perfectly able to communicate with the Indian Ocean region. The Honolulu Advertiser’s story quotes a geophysicist:
“We had phone numbers and we had e-mail addresses from places that had contacted us after the big December earthquake so we had lots of numbers. This time around we had people to contact and we called everybody very quickly. Instead of having no one to talk to we had lots of people to talk to.”
But if the whole point of the communications effort is to inform potentially endangered people and save their lives, how sensible is it to rely exclusively on intermediaries in the system without also using the mass media?
A Honolulu Star-Bulletin story quotes PTWC Director Charles McCreery as saying the Center had more success in communicating with the Indian Ocean region after Monday's quake than it did in December "...so they can take some action and get people out of harm's way."
A suggestion for the mainstream media: Ask authorities in the region how or if they did that. How many of the e-mails carrying the PTWC’s first bulletin at 11:29 p.m. local time in the region were read at that hour? How many phone calls got through to their intended targets around midnight? And if they did get through, what did those recipients do with the information at that hour – sit on it or pass it on? And if they passed it on, how long did that take, what form did it take and was the information useful to individual citizens?
Asking the “What If?” Question
There was no tsunami of consequence, but what if there had been? Would populations at risk have been alerted to their peril at midnight? What systems were in place for those recipient agencies to communicate to the ultimate consumers of the PTWC’s information?
This may be at the heart of the matter: If you ask the PTWC who it serves, the first answer is the Member States in the Pacific Tsunami Warning System. Since December 26 there’s been a grudging acknowledgement that although it’s not the PTWC’s job to alert “outside” nations, they also can benefit from PTWC-generated information.
But judging by PTWC officials’ comments, that’s where it stops. They don’t see the individual in the seaside village as a link in the official communications chain. And that’s why early involvement of the international news media doesn’t have much of a priority within NOAA.
The mass media must be engaged early to ensure that life-saving information can flow throughout a threatened region no matter what happens in government agencies there. The danger is that the apparent satisfaction that all went well on March 28 may delay the PTWC's stated intention to open a dialogue with the media (see March 26 posts).
Aftershocks
Each one of these incidents prompts questions that deserve downstream attention by mainstream media. For example:
PTWC Director McCreery expresses surprise in the Advertiser article that Monday’s 8.7 earthquake didn’t generate a tsunami because, he is paraphrased as saying, earthquakes 8.0 and stronger usually generate major tsunamis.
But three months ago this expectation about 8.0 and higher earthquakes seems to have been absent. NOAA’s timeline for the December 26 earthquake says that 11 minutes after the initial shock the PTWC “initially underestimated the size as around a magnitude 8.0.” Yet no mention was made of a possible tsunami until 65 minutes after the quake, and scientists were quoted repeatedly saying they first learned of the tsunami from news reports.
Why did scientists wait 54 minutes before transmitting their presumed expectation of a tsunami in a bulletin? Has the PTWC adjusted its procedures since December? What other adjustments have been made in the Center’s standard operating procedures?
The Advertiser story reinforces the widespread notion that PTWC scientists telephoned their colleagues even before the December tsunami reached some countries in the Indian Ocean region:
When the earthquake struck on Dec. 26, the warning center staff said it frantically tried to contact Indian Ocean nations of a potential disaster. But with only two clients in the Indian Ocean – Australia and Indonesia – and no contact list, valuable time was lost. They worked for hours, sounding warnings as the tsunami swept across the vast ocean basin with deadly results.
Here again is the description of scientists who suspected a tsunami unsuccessfully trying to contact people in the region before the tsunami arrived.
PTWC Director Charles McCreery adamantly disputed a similar point I made during my March 25 visit to the PTWC (March 26 posts). Are all these reporters making it up? Not likely. Are they relying on a new “urban legend” about the the December tsunami? Maybe so, but to fully understand the recent past, the issue deserves to be clarified and resolved.
Yesterday’s earthquake thankfully did not generate a tsunami and it hopefully did not sweep away questions that must be answered about the PTWC’s communications readiness.
Doug Carlson
Honolulu, HI
March 29, 2005
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