Mon, 02 Apr 2007

Tsunami Warning

There was a “tsunami warning” here this morning. This was initiated after an 8.1ish earthquake caused a tsunami wave to spank the Solomon Islands. Here in Sydney [which is a) a long way away, and b) around the corner from the Coral Sea and sheltered, by, well, Queensland], they closed the beaches, cancelled the ferry services, and sent large ships out to sea. My goodness. You’d think that the emergency services would have had sirens and alarms going to evacuate everyone up to high ground and safety.

Nope.

I was able to sleep right through the sirens and alarms. Because there weren’t any. Yup. Good job, there.

As it happens the disturbance that finally reached us here was 15 cm high. Get your surfboards, dudes, we’re gonna go catch some waves.

They cancelled the ferry for this?

It turns out that despite its ominous name, tsunami warning actually means “oh, there might possibly be something that you might need to know about sometime later today.” Of course, by the time anyone found that out, the media were in a feeding frenzy. Apparently, tsunami warnings get issued several times a week in various places whenever there is a rumble somewhere in the hemisphere. It is supposedly followed on the danger scale by tsunami alert and then tsunami alarm. (How anyone is expected to tell the difference between these three is beyond me. It’s right up there with the American terrorism threat levels: “Oh no! We’ve switched from orange to amber to sodium-yellow! The evil-doers are coming! Quick, Martha, get out the shotgun!”)

There are a number of places in the Pacific that do have tsunami alarms, like, as in, real alarm sirens. They practice it every month on (for example) Tuesday morning at 10:00. The point is, and everyone there gets this, that if the alarm goes off at anytime other than 1st Tuesday at 10:00, you need to be running like hell up the mountain.

Meanwhile, back in our little corner of the industrialized world, the only alarm we have here is the shark alarm. And indeed, when you hear that, it’s generally considered a good time to get out of the water. I can only hope that someone clues in that if you expect people to respond to an emergency alarm of slightly greater gravity, you need to tell people what it is first, and maybe even rehearse it once in a while so people recognize it. Otherwise, the never-cry-wolf factor will kick in and some day when there really is cause for alarm, it will be ignored — and that sorta defeats the purpose of having ocean warning systems.

AfC

tsunami-warning, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/comment at 10:04, 02 Apr 2007.

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