March 6, 2005
By Bob Keefer
The Register-Guard


Photo: A tsunami warning sign on a bench near the beach in Yachats. Experts say that if a big quake hits, wait for the ground to stop shaking - then run. (Paul Carter / The Register-Guard)

Don't expect to hear a siren. For the most part, there are no sirens, except for a few in scattered communities, and certainly none along the miles and miles of empty coastline that tourists come to Oregon to enjoy every year.

If a tsunami strikes Oregon, the only warning you may get is the violent shaking of the ground from a massive earthquake just offshore. And if that happens, experts say, the moment the ground stops shaking you must run for your life to high ground.

Then, when the waters subside, you may be on your own to find food, water and shelter for the next few days or weeks.

That assessment comes from a variety of state and local emergency officials, who say the best thing Oregonians can do to prepare for a tsunami is to educate themselves.

Getting ready for a tsunami in Oregon means planning for two quite different kinds of disasters.

In one case, a distant earthquake - perhaps in Alaska's Aleutian chain, or even as far away as Japan - triggers a tsunami that is detected by remote buoys as it crosses the northern Pacific Ocean on its way to Oregon. The waves will take hours to reach the Northwest, meaning there is time for official warnings, whether by sirens or other methods. People on the Oregon Coast should have ample time to round up their families, pack their cars and follow marked evacuation routes to higher ground.

The second case happens much faster.

In that scenario, a major earthquake strikes the Cascadia subduction zone, an active earthquake fault within 200 miles of the Oregon Coast. The massive quake, which is strong enough to destroy some buildings, will have barely stopped shaking when the tsunami strikes.

There is no time for an alarm, no time for orderly evacuation, no time to find family and friends, and no time to drive a car over roads and bridges that already may be destroyed. The waves could hit some places as soon as 10 minutes after the quake.

The advice for people on the Oregon Coast in this case is simple and straightforward: As soon as the ground stops shaking, drop everything and run to high ground. Try to reach 100 feet above sea level. Don't wait a second before fleeing.

"It's not a very pretty picture," says Jay Wilson, tsunami and earthquake coordinator for the Oregon Office of Emergency Management. "The buoy system that will give us notice for long-range tsunamis will do us no good in a short-range tsunami. The earthquake will be our warning. And minutes all are very critical."

The only real preparedness for this second kind of tsunami, the experts say, is public education. The more people who understand how quickly they need to flee, the more will survive.

That message is echoed by Linda Cook, emergency manager for the Lane County sheriff's office.

Cook's office has done little to prepare specifically for a tsunami. "We have more of an earthquake preparedness plan," she says. "We really approach it as an earthquake. I wouldn't say we have anything specific to tsunamis."

Lane County's focus, she says, is on "all hazards."

"Many of the protocols and procedures are the same regardless of the type of disaster."

Last week, emergency managers from the coast gathered in Salem to prioritize their most pressing needs and figure out what parts of the coast are "tsunami-ready."

The consensus: not much. They need more stockpiles of emergency supplies, a way to reach outsiders once electricity and cell phone communication are disrupted and, most importantly, a culture of awareness among residents and businesses along the coast about what to do if a tsunami strikes.

The group is sorting through the results of the two-day workshop and plans to present its findings to state and federal lawmakers at a "tsunami summit," to be held sometime next month.

In Lane County, much of the burden of preparing for - and later dealing with - the effects of a tsunami will fall to John Buchanan. As chief of Siuslaw Valley Fire and Rescue in Florence, he is Lane County's disaster coordinator on the coast.

And Buchanan has thought a lot about tsunamis. He detailed a two-part alert system that he says should warn most - though he doesn't have actual numbers - of the people living in coastal areas likely to be hit in a tsunami. The first part is the media alert system, familiar to the public since the days of the Cold War, that sends out messages on radio and television. ("This is a test of the emergency broadcast system ...")

The second, higher-tech part is the Community Emergency Notification System, known by planners as CENS and popularly called "reverse 911." CENS equipment, which is based in the Midwest, can call 4,000 phone numbers a minute and play a recorded warning.

Assuming about 15,000 people live in Lane County's inundation zone - the land area that would be flooded by a tsunami - Buchanan pointed out, those calls would be completed in less than four minutes.

CENS has flaws. It doesn't break in if someone is on the phone, but "camps" onto the number and rings as soon as the caller hangs up. It doesn't call cell phones, though officials are working to remedy this.

So who gets missed by the tsunami warning?

"Anyone with no access to radio, TV or telephone," Cook says.

In the summer, that could mean a lot of people, though neither official could estimate how many.

Cook and Buchanan say there are no specific plans to try to alert people at remote coastal campgrounds. Individual law enforcement officers might try to alert campers if they had time.

"If there are people out walking their dog on the beach, they are going to get missed," Buchanan says. "Even if we had sirens, they aren't going to hear it. Unfortunately, we can't deal with every individual as an individual. We have to work toward the masses."

Lane County has no tsunami warning sirens. Buchanan is skeptical that they would do any good and doesn't think they're worth the money.

"Sirens are 1950s technology, where we are in the 2000s," he said. "They cost $10,000 each. By the time you get sirens and the electronics, it's going to cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars - and people don't even hear our sirens on our fire engines."

Nevertheless, he said, the public really likes sirens, and he may yet be persuaded to buy them.

Wilson, the tsunami and earthquake coordinator, also is skeptical of sirens. "Where there are sirens they have a selective amount of coverage," he says. "A lot of Tillamook County has sirens, and Lincoln County, too, but they have a finite amount of reach. That is governed also by the weather. A strong wind or storm, and sirens really fall off in effectiveness."

Neither the sirens nor the CENS system are likely to work in a major earthquake just off the Oregon Coast, Buchanan says.

"In a major earthquake, all the infrastructure in the community is going to be gone," he says. "You're not going to have sirens, there's not going to be telephones, there's not going to be power. At that point it is just going to be survival."

One of the questions that's difficult to resolve is, Just where is safety? How far is a tsunami likely to travel inland? How far do you have to run?

The answer is not a simple matter of taking a contour map and marking some safe elevation above sea level, says George Priest, a geologist with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries who has been working on inundation maps of the Oregon Coast.

Historically, Priest says, "run-ups" - the highest places on land hit by water - in Oregon tsunamis have gone 40 to 65 feet above sea level. But at any given place on the coast, that figure depends on a complex brew of local detail, including the exact configuration of the sea floor.

The biggest problem in a massive tsunami on the Oregon Coast might be what happens after the waters subside. No community has resources to deal with the kind of devastation that occurred, for example, in December in Banda Aceh, which was first hit by a huge earthquake just offshore and then almost immediately struck by the resulting tsunami.

That is where individual preparedness may be the most important.

Cook says that in a large quake, Florence could be physically isolated for days. Some estimate that it could be as long as two weeks.

"Between landslides blocking highways and bridges being out, people are looking at needing some kind of storage for sustenance," Cook said. "It would be difficult to get anything in there."

Ultimately, preparation is up to individuals and families, and Cook says it's not a bad idea to stockpile food, water and minimal camping supplies.

"I can't emphasize the importance of having a `grab-and-go' bag," she said. "Imagine you were going camping with your family for 72 hours - that's what you want to have in it."

The community has no such stash of emergency food and supplies.

"You have to build the facility," Cook says. "And locate it someplace it wouldn't be susceptible to the event. And then you have to stock it, and rotate that stock. Implementing that in today's world would be a challenge."

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/03/06/a1.tsunami.0306.html