02 Mar 2010 2 Comments

Reflecting and Ranting About Tsunami Day

Something I remember doing maybe once in college was pulling an all-nighter. I did one Friday night and Saturday morning watching the local news. Not because I was scared – I live three miles inland and had mixed feelings of a tsunami actually hitting Hawai‘i’s shores – but because I found the possibility and gravity of such a situation quite mesmerizing. Just like how my experience with the Hawai‘i earthquake in October 2006 was completely mind-boggling, so was this one.

Except this time, the natural disaster never happened. Phew.

This weekend’s tsunami warning should not be confused with the several watches and advisories (which are both lower than a warning – the links lead to definitions for each term) that were sent out the past few months. The 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile was enough for us to be seriously concerned about a tsunami threat, especially since the one that hit Hilo in 1960 was generated by a Chilean earthquake, as well.

And let us not forget, 8.8 is damn powerful – in fact, thousands of times more powerful than the Haitian earthquake in January. Having experienced only one earthquake in my lifetime so far – Hawai‘i’s 5.3-magnitude quake – I can’t imagine what it’d be like to experience something as powerful as those quakes. And I was living at the top of a 12-story building when the Hawai‘i quake hit. Bless the people of Chile and Haiti who’ve lived and died through those disasters.

This is selfish and horrible to write, but a part of me was hoping that we’d get hit by a tsunami. A destructive tsunami hasn’t hit Hawai‘i since 1975, almost 40 years ago. Several generations who have never experienced a state of emergency due to a tsunami. Now, I’m not saying I’d like to see people getting hurt or killed by one, or anyone suffering because of one – who would? – but I suppose I’m curious to see how our state would fare in an event like that.

That said, judging from what I saw on the news, it looked like city officials, emergency personnel, and volunteers did a damn good job executing a long-established emergency plan for the state. The road closures and evacuations seem like they went off pretty smoothly. Buses travelled along Wai‘anae, picking up anyone who needed shelter from the impending tidal surge. We also found out about kinks in the system we had, like the failure of Civil Defense sirens in a few neighborhoods. Either no one cared to report that they didn’t work during monthly testings, or they just happened to fail on the day they were being used for an actual warning.

Kudos also go out to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, of course. They worked tirelessly for over 30 hours straight analyzing data that would help assess the tsunami threat. And the representatives who were grilled by our local media – that is not an easy experience to be subjected to, to not know how powerful of a tsunami it could be, and to not be able to give any solid answers.

At times, I felt like we were expecting these reps to bust out the crystal sphere and tell us our future. The initial data could only tell us whether a tsunami was coming or not – the earthquake in Chile was powerful enough to trip buoy alerts set up around the Pacific. As later measurements came in from buoys in places like the Solomon Islands and American Samoa, it got clearer that a destructive tsunami was most likely not going to happen – just tidal changes that were perhaps most visible in Hilo Bay.

I appreciated how the local media (or at least Hawaii News Now) treated this story. Perhaps because it was local, and perhaps after Hawaii News Now anchors grilled tsunami warning center officials late Friday night/early Saturday morning, it was understood that this was a waiting game, with no knowledge of any specifics about the tsunami. No one jumped to the conclusion that this would be a major disaster, unlike national news outlets like CNN, who, in their typical fashion, over-dramatized the situation and claimed we were expecting 30-foot waves.

The majority of my news-watching time was spent on Hawaii News Now. Occasionally, I flipped to CNN to see this story unfold on national news. Unlike CNN, who focused on explaining tsunami-related terms, fiddling with magic walls, and talking every now and then to a reporter on vacation on the Big Island to see how she was doing, Hawaii News Now covered many angles of tsunami preparations: updates straight from the warning center, footage of locals and tourists alike making preparations, traffic cameras that showed our roads busy one hour and deserted the next, interviews and statements from government officials, and an exclusive camera set up at a perfect vantage point at Hilo Bay.

The only thing I appreciated from CNN was their local news feeds they would cut to occasionally from KHON and KITV, a way of showing what we were watching. They also interviewed KITV’s Justin Fujioka to get some perspective on the situation.

You’d think in this day and age, the national news media would get some basic facts straight about Hawai‘i. (Or maybe not – mass media generally does a good job displaying our society’s ignorance and lack of depth.) Like how “Hawaiians” are people of our islands’ indigenous race, and isn’t a term used to describe all residents of Hawai‘i – the Associated Press stylebook was updated five years ago to acknowledge this. Or the basic knowledge that Hawai‘i is a US state – MSNBC allegedly reported that there is “a large American population” here. Go figure.

The big event I did NOT appreciate at ALL was when a CNN meteorologist lost his temper with a guest professor – a meteorologist who just moments before was bragging that this professor was his “phone-a-friend” for tsunami-related terms. That outburst was disgustingly unprofessional and unnecessary. I hope he had a talking to.

The general public, on the other hand, gets a big high-five from me. A lot of people took the safe route and stocked up on food, gasoline, and water in case of outages the tsunami could generate. Now, maybe we should have had these things well in advance, especially since hurricane season just ended, but just seeing people not take any chances about what could happen was impressive in my eyes. 500 people, most of whom I figure are homeless families living on beaches along the Wai‘anae coast, took up shelter at Nānākuli High School.

Judging from Twitter trends, Hawai‘i was the center of discussion, as it was the number one topic on the site at one point, followed by #hitsunami. I like Jennifer Chandler’s take on these Twitter trends – that this was NOT a sign of the world talking about us, but a sign of Hawai‘i as a community banding together in a time of crisis.

It would have been interesting to see how naysayers would have reacted if a destructive tsunami actually happened. No destructive tsunami and they were proven right. It makes me think about what would happen the next time a warning is issued. Would a “boy who cried wolf” effect be in place? That is, repeated false alarms desensitizing the public to the possibility of a tsunami? Or would the same thing we saw this weekend happen again, with the masses taking action to prepare?

by Liberty in current events