Nine seismic stations in Alaska will stop working in January, slowing tsunami warnings on the West Coast.

FILE – Beachgoers walk past a tsunami warning sign at Marina Beach Park on Puget Sound in Edmonds, Wash., on Nov. 11, 2025.

KUOW photo/John Ryan

It was just before midnight when the tsunami that started with an earthquake in Alaska's Prince William Sound reached Washington state.

The year was 1964.

In La Push, a 7-foot wave hit boats with a dock loose from their moorings.

Floating logs crushed oceanfront homes in Moclips, where an 11-foot wave inundated homes and swept away several cars.

In Pacific Beach, a couple and their grandchildren had a rude awakening when waves lifted their house off its foundation and pushed it 40 feet to the northwest.

Two people suffered heart attacks in Copalis, where water swept nearly a half-mile inland. A man parked his car on the State Route 109 highway bridge over the Copalis River to watch flying logs pile up on the bridge's supports. The bridge collapsed, plunging him and his car into the river.

On North Aberdeen Beach, a woman got out of her trailer and dove waist-deep in water after her trailer shook her awake. “We were up to our waist one minute and falling head over heels the next,” she told the Daily Olympian.

FILE – A car exits a tsunami danger zone on Washington Route 109 north of Mocklips, on January 12, 2024.

KUOW photo/John Ryan

A 9.2-magnitude earthquake east of Anchorage, Alaska, had triggered a tsunami about four hours earlier.

No one died in Washington, although four members of the McKenzie family from Tacoma drowned while camping on the beach in Newport, Oregon. A woman died in Gearhart, Oregon, from a heart attack after a wave hit her home, and 11 people died in Crescent City, California. The earthquake and tsunami killed 115 people in Alaska.

File – A massive earthquake on March 27, 1964, devastated Anchorage, Alaska, killing 131 people in three states, all but 9 of them caused by a tsunami.

Contributed by the Alaska Earthquake Center

At the time, only two seismic stations monitored earthquakes in the vast state of Alaska. News of the tsunami heading south toward the lower 48 states failed to reach many people in time.

Today, a network of more than 200 seismic stations spans Alaska, and the National Weather Service has tsunami warning centers in Alaska and Hawaii, designed to issue initial warnings to vulnerable areas around the Pacific Ocean within five minutes of an earthquake.

In September, NOAA officially ended funding for nine of those stations, most of which are in the seismically active Aleutian Islands.

Six of the stations are in western Alaska, one is near Valdez, east of Anchorage, and two are in southeastern Alaska.

FILE – Nine seismic stations, shown in pale blue on a map of Alaska, are expected to go dark in January due to federal funding cuts.

Courtesy of the Alaska Earthquake Center

Washington state officials say data from those stations is needed to issue quick and accurate tsunami warnings up and down the West Coast.

“The Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone is very active,” said Carrie Garrison Laney, a coastal hazard specialist at the University of Washington. “It is more likely to generate a tsunami heading toward the Washington coast than any other part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.”

Tsunami experts say tsunami warnings in Alaska would still be issued without the nine stations, but they could be less accurate or delayed, leaving people less time to flee to higher ground.

“Losing nine seismic stations could provide a really large geographic gap, and then it could take minutes for other seismic stations that are located very far away for seismic waves to reach those stations,” said Maximilian Dixon, risk supervisor for the Washington State Department of Emergency Management. “You can have a significant amount of delay.”

“This could shorten the amount of time we have, for example, to initiate evacuation plans in coastal areas,” said Harold Tobin, a Washington state seismologist.

Tobin said that Washington will not ignore the tsunami waves coming from Alaska, as he believes some media reports about funding cuts imply.

“I'm actually confident that it will eventually be resolved, and that remote seismometers will eventually detect this event, and then they will be able to calculate the size and location of the earthquake that could be the source,” Tobin said.

Even with waves that take three to four hours to reach Washington, time is of the essence, Dixon said.

“Three-and-a-half hours is not a long time to be able to know the tsunami threat, issue all the alerts and get people to safety,” Dixon said. “It's very difficult to accurately predict a tsunami. It usually takes about 90 minutes to about two hours to tell us how high those waves are.”

Tectonic plates collide in the Pacific “Ring of Fire” subduction zones, with subduction zones in the US territory marked in red, generating volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

US Geological Survey

Losing coverage of the Aleutian Islands, a thousand-mile arc of volcanic islands extending toward Kamchatka, would leave a huge gap.

“If you and I had to bet on where the next tsunami in the United States will come from, we should put our money on the Aleutian Islands,” said Michael West, an Alaska state seismologist. “The Aleutians are an incredibly massive source of tsunamis.”

The Alaska Earthquake Center, which he heads, relies on annually renewed funding from NOAA to operate the nine stations, West said. Federal funds stopped arriving, without explanation, in 2024, he said.

“I was never told,” West said. “This is not a highly competitive research grant. It is an annual contract that has been in place for a very long time.”

The University of Alaska provided temporary funding to continue its work.

In May 2025, West applied to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to fund the stations through 2028. In September, the agency informed him that it did not have the funding for even one-year operations.

The nine plants were scheduled to stop operating in November, but the University of Alaska was able to secure the funding necessary to keep them operating until January. “We don't need to panic about these stations going out of business, but we do need to make sure we pay attention to long-term trends that may reduce funding for all of our tsunami preparations,” Garrison Laney said.

NOAA spokeswoman Erica Growsea declined an interview request.

The Alaska Earthquake Center “is one of many partners supporting National Weather Service tsunami operations, and the NWS continues to use several mechanisms to ensure seismic data is collected across the state of Alaska,” Grow C said in an email.

West said he believes the defunding of potentially life-saving earthquake monitoring operations stems from the chaos that has engulfed federal agencies during the Trump administration. He said he's optimistic that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will restore funding to help keep people in five states safer from tsunamis.

“We have engaged with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and they are looking at ways to solve this problem very quickly,” West said.

John Ryan is a reporter with KUOW.

This story comes to you from Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It's part of OPB's broader effort to ensure everyone in our region has access to high-quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

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