The length of today’s post will compensate for the infrequent postings here in 2006. Tsunami warning preparedness and execution has been a media focus in the past three weeks as “major” earthquakes in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean tested new procedures at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) here in Hawaii.
Despite the Center’s new 24/7 working hours and SOPs, things didn’t go as planned, and populations that should have received a warning of the tsunami potential remained ignorant of their potential peril. More on that below.
This web log’s premise is that a tsunami warning system missing proactive, human-to-human contact with the major international news media has a weak link in its chain. The BBC, CNN, Reuters and the Associated Press all have well-tested, efficient and rapid-fire international networks that dispense news around the world within seconds. (Click here to access this blog’s earliest posts dating to January 3, 2005 on the media’s potential role to transmit timely tsunami warnings to their international audiences.)
Mission: Contact Offices or Save Lives?
It’s a given in the news business that the ultimate consumer of broadcast and cablecast news is the individual viewer or listener. That also would seem to be the logical mission of the PTWC – to alert individuals of a potential tsunami. Yet that apparently is not how the PTWC and its parent organizations – the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – see it.
All three entities persist in thinking they’ve done their jobs if tsunami warning bulletins arrive in a timely fashion at their sister agencies in American states or foreign countries – the civil defense and national disaster offices and equivalents.
One would think the 2004 tsunami experience would have shattered that mindset in light of the “office-to-office” model’s failure to save a single life. It has been documented repeatedly since the deadly tsunami that PTWC scientists had no procedure in place to alert individual men, women and children on Indian Ocean beaches that their lives were at risk.
Post-Tsunami Stories Exposed Plan’s Flaws
A March 29, 2005 NOVA broadcast on PBS revealed the lack of preparedness within the PTWC to achieve its presumed mission of alerting individuals. The focus then – and now – was on alerting offices, as revealed in a quote attributed to a PTWC scientist on duty that day:
No contact points, no organization, no warning systems that I know of, in the area. Picking up the phone and thumbing through the phone book or thumbing through the Web is useless. In fact, it can be dangerous because you're not concentrating on warning someone who can actually do something for the people. So we're brainstorming basically, “Who can we call?"
Who the PTWC could have called, of course, was the handful of major news media operations cited above – each with a global network that reaches into the Indian Ocean region around the clock every day of the year. No such media-contact protocol was in place, as a New York Times story on December 31, 2004 revealed in remarks attributed to the same scientist:
Their instinct was to somehow tell more, to warn the region that it would continue, to reach people who could clear beaches. But how? Mr. Hirshorn recalled a tsunami expert he knew in Australia, called and got an answering machine. He left a message. Someone phoned the International Tsunami Information Center, asking if they knew people in the stricken region. The center simply had no contacts in this distant world.
Note the wording of the first sentence above: “…to reach people who could clear beaches.” The focus was reaching the officials who could clear beaches -- a half-way measure that relies on people who may or may not be on the job. And in the many months since the Christmas 2004 tsunami, there have been few quotes from scientists suggesting they believe their mission is ensuring that the people ON THE BEACHES receive the warnings. The buck always stops with officials in the PTWC’s network of agencies and government offices.
Have Lessons of 2004 Actually Been Learned?
The scientists themselves probably shouldn’t be faulted for following a failed emergency warning model. Others at NOAA or NWS could have modified that model with some “what if” outside-the-box thinking to expose the missing link in the system that’s supposed to warn individuals and save lives.
But what about now, nearly 18 months after tsunami lessons presumably were learned? Fast forward to the recent tsunami episodes. Here are excerpts from an Associated Press story about what happened to the tsunami alert following the 7.8-magnitude earthquake near Tonga on May 3:
A powerful earthquake struck near the South Pacific nation of Tonga early Thursday, triggering tsunami warnings for as far away as Fiji and New Zealand. But word of the imminent danger never reached the tiny country closest to the epicenter….
But nearly 18 months after an earthquake-driven tsunami in the Indian Ocean left at least 216,000 people dead or missing, sparking international calls for a better warning system, Pacific islanders received little or no notice of Thursday's threat….
Tonga did not receive the alert because of a power failure there, said the center's acting director, Gerard Fryer. "There was problem in Tonga where there was a power outage and they didn't get our initial message," Fryer said, adding that the center needs to work with Tonga to correct the problem. He said he did not know whether the power failure was caused by the earthquake.
The “power failure” explanation stood for several days, but then the PTWC revealed that the Center itself hadn’t performed as intended:
…Tonga... was inadvertently left off a list of areas predicted to be hit by a possible tsunami following the latest earthquake. The communication failure raised troubling questions about the effectiveness of such alerts, which have come under global scrutiny since an earthquake-driven tsunami in the Indian Ocean nearly 18 months ago left at least 216,000 people dead or missing.
Power outages, human error….”if something can go wrong, it will,” the saying goes. Another saying – my friends have heard it too often – is that “the Universe makes no mistakes.” Maybe it was no mistake that weak links in the warning chain were revealed in an earthquake/tsunami episode that inflicted no human suffering.
Media Channel Credited with Warning
Two items of note from the recent earthquake: First, here’s the same scientist referenced in the stories above as quoted in an MSNBC story after the Tonga quake:
“If people don’t get it (the warning), it’s not worth anything, but we don’t have people in every country who can help keep their sirens running and their power running. It’s frustrating.”
Let's hope by "people" he means the end user, not those hard-to-reach officials we've heard so much about. Second, buried in yet another story about the Tonga quake were three sentences that should be required reading for all PTWC, NOAA and NWS policy-making officials:
In Fiji, a tsunami warning alarm sounded in the capital, Suva. But authorities apparently failed to inform citizens, many on tiny and remote islands with poor communications. At the Wakaya Club, a private luxury Fijian island resort where recent guests have included Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards, staff were alerted to the danger through satellite television news.
That last part is worth repeating: “…staff were alerted to the danger through satellite television news.”
Satellite television news -- not government officials -- told people on remote beaches that a tsunami might have been generated. And if a power outage had interrupted the TV news, battery-powered radios monitoring overseas broadcasts just as easily could have been the channel.
The Tonga experience was yet another wake-up call for NOAA, the NWS and the PTWC. It may not be pleasant for public affairs personnel (who should appreciate the media’s importance) to go up against senior officials to whom “control of the message” seems more important than warning efficiency. The challenge will be even greater to convince officials of foreign governments that it’s more important to warn their citizens than it is to maintain control of the message.
But Tonga’s lesson is obvious: The message must get through as quickly and efficiently as possible to people, not only offices. The media do that routinely through thick and thin – through power outages and contact-list mistakes and offices that don’t answer the telephone and officials who oversleep.
I don't think NOAA is asleep, but it definitely needs to brew some strong coffee and wake up to the need for change from within.
Doug Carlson
Honolulu, HI
