Restating the Tsunami Warning Issues & Questions as NOAA Shifts Focus to '05 Hurricane Season

•Report on visit to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (March 26)

As the December tsunami continues to fade into the background buzz, NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher Jr. and his associates have been all over the media this week with their forecasts for hurricane season, which begins in three weeks. Regions vulnerable to hurricanes – the Gulf and East Coast states and Hawaii – are well served by NOAA’s work in hurricane forecasting and tracking.

I’m sure NOAA has not lost interest in learning the lessons of the tsunami so procedures can be improved. Any perceived criticism of NOAA here is not directed at the agency’s scientific capabilities. We’ve been focused on what NOAA does with the information gathered from its science – specifically, whether current policies and practices allow communication of tsunami warnings via the news media, which arguably represent the fastest channel to populations in danger thousands of miles away.

Because we have reason to believe policies do exist that prevent the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) from directly contacting the news media (see report on my visit to the Center, linked above), the following 10 questions were sent to Admiral Lautenbacher in April. I trust that someone is attending to the answers, even as the agency works to raise awareness about the hurricane threat.

Here are the questions in the April 5 letter to Admiral Lautenbacher:

• Is there a policy that deliberately curtails PTWC contact with the media?
• If so, where is that policy to be found in writing?
• Just how does the Center send tsunami alerts to the news media? What specific channels are used and how do they operate?
• Which media receive these messages? Which organizations are on the recipient list?
• Are any media recipients outside the PTWC's traditional area of responsibility -- the Pacific Basin? Are any Indian Ocean regional media on the list?
• Have recipients been added since December 26?
• Are urgent tsunami-related messages differentiated in any way from the routine? If so, how is attention drawn to them? (One Honolulu journalist in a position to know says PTWC bulletins are inserted automatically and unobtrusively into the Associated Press's "state" wire, with no special notification to alert newsrooms that they're there.)
• Is a formal review of communications policy underway at NOAA arising from the December and March earthquakes?
• What changes in communications policy or PTWC standard operating communications procedures have been initiated since December 26?
• Scientists didn’t transmit a bulletin about a presumed tsunami in December until 65 minutes after the earthquake; that lag time was shortened to 19 minutes on March 28. Did a policy change at NOAA, NWS and/or PTWC result in the shorter time?