Opinion: Here’s another thing to prepare for (and worry about) in coastal California – tsunamis

Recent tragedies at sea — the deaths of hundreds of migrants in the Mediterranean near Greece and the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submarine — are the stuff of nightmares. We instinctively comfort ourselves: I will never set foot on a submarine, my life will never be uprooted by war or pestilence.

On the other hand, we have little control over natural tragedies.

Opinion writer

Robin Abkarian

Having grown up in Southern California, I experienced major earthquakes, which is why I’m not as afraid of them as I should be. After all, there are things we can do to reduce earthquake losses. We are establishing our foundations. We keep survival kits handy. In recent years, my neighborhood has been abuzz with the sounds of earthquake retrofits.

With wildfires, there are also steps we can take to protect ourselves and our property. With hurricanes, we can climb onto our windows and flee. With hurricanes, we can take refuge in storm cellars.

But honestly, there may not be much you can do to protect yourself from a tsunami. You can run to higher ground, but that assumes you know what’s coming.

I didn’t add a tsunami to my nightmares until the “Boxing Day” tsunami of 2004 that destroyed homes, trains, people and entire towns in 14 countries around the Indian Ocean. It brought home in a profound way that sometimes, there is simply no protection against nature’s wrath.

That particular disaster began with a 9.1-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. It killed 230,000 people before it ended, which is almost too many to imagine.

Sonali Diraniyagala, a London-based economist who was vacationing with her family in a Sri Lankan resort, was caught off guard. In “Wave,” her 2013 bestselling memoir, she recounts the unbearable pain of losing her two young sons, her husband, and her parents in the tsunami. She began with a terrifying and surreal depiction of her confusion and struggle as she and her loved ones were washed away by waves up to 30 feet high. The horror stayed with me.

This is why I was shocked a few years ago when I started noticing the signs in my neighborhood – a “tsunami evacuation route” with an arrow pointing inward.

I live in a tsunami area?

Well, yes, as it turns out.

Emergency management professionals want you to know that everyone along the edge of the West Coast is in a tsunami zone.

If you’ve spent any time near Los Angeles beaches in the past month or so, you may have seen bus shelter billboards or ads promoting tsunami awareness. The cartoon ads sound a little silly: “Are you not ready for a tsunami? Tsú ain’t for me!” (Spanish, “Preparado para un tsunami? Tsúmate-A-mi!”) But the point is, say people who get paid to worry about these things. , is to increase public awareness.

“We’re not trying to scare anyone,” said Crisanta Gonzalez, chief of preparedness and community engagement for the Los Angeles Emergency Management Department. “We just want to start a conversation.”

You can sign up for local emergency alerts at NotifyLA, and maybe learn more than you ever wanted to know at Tsunamizone.org.

Joseph Reiser, a spokesman for the administration, counted the five-week, $250,000 federally funded campaign that ended last week as a success because there were 10 times as many new registrations for the alerts as there was in “a normal month of blue skies.”

For Los Angeles County in 2023, according to Reiser, the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed earthquake risk as 100%, wildfire at 99%, and tsunami at 63%.

Okay, maybe tsunamis aren’t nearly as alarming as earthquakes and wildfires we know are inevitable, but 63% isn’t anything. In the world of emergency management, “tsunamis are one of the best disasters,” said Gonzalez. I think this is reassuring?

According to the California Geological Survey, more than 150 tsunamis have hit our coast since 1800, although only a dozen or so have caused death or major damage, most notably in 1964 when a magnitude 9.2 earthquake in Alaska sent 21 feet in The Pacific Ocean. In Crescent City, killing 10 people and destroying most of the waterfront.

In March 2011, a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake in Japan hit California 10 hours later. No one died, but the rising waters caused $100 million in damages statewide.

“When an earthquake happens in a part of the world, like Japan, we start paying attention in California,” Gonzalez told me. Signing up for alerts, and understanding what to do if you get one, makes sense. In Venice, residents are told to head east as quickly as possible, possibly on foot, because the roads are likely to be congested.

However, as much warning as they receive, scientists can’t always predict the speed and amplitude of a tsunami.

Most recently in January 2022, a volcano obliterated most of an island in Tonga, creating a wave that traveled 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean and caused damage up and down the California coast. Neighborhoods in Berkeley Marina have been evacuated. Past the Golden Gate, near Mill Valley, the tsunami damaged boats and docks in relatively sheltered Richardson Bay. In the Oceano Dunes area of ​​central California, a flash flood has caught campers by surprise. And at Ventura, the Harbor Patrol boat capsized and docks were damaged by high water and strong currents.

“Some people had to be rescued,” Rick Wilson, head of the California Geological Survey’s tsunami program, said in a taped questioning provided by the Institute of Earthquake Engineering. “We always get surfers trying to surf a tsunami.”

Because the 2022 tsunami was caused by a volcanic eruption, Wilson said, the National Tsunami Warning Center was thrown for a loop. “Their predictions are based on earthquakes,” he said, so the predictions made by their computer models were not entirely reliable.

Oh and one more thing: large meteorites that plunge into the ocean from outer space can also cause tsunamis.

As if we really didn’t have anything to worry about.

@employee

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