The Associated Press
NEWPORT, Ore.— Thousands of coastal residents didn’t know what to do when a tsunami warning was issued on June 14, and some might have died had it been a real emergency, according to a report released this week by the Oregon Office of Emergency Management.
The report described numerous failures that left residents, mayors, sheriffs and fire chiefs confused about whether to evacuate and where to go.
Jay Wilson, the agency’s coordinator for earthquake, tsunami and volcano programs, said Wednesday that Cannon Beach and Seaside were prepared. Other communities up-and-down the coast were not.
“Some communities just waited it out to see what would happen,” he told a workshop at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. “In some places, weather radios worked; in some they didn’t. A lot of people turned on their radios and televisions and there was nothing there to tell them what was going on.”
Among the report’s key findings:
• The state’s emergency alert system suffered widespread failures. Many of the receiving stations didn’t get a warning signal because of technical issues or assumptions that someone else would be issuing a signal.
• Conflicting warning bulletins — one from a National Weather Service center in Alaska, and another from a center in Hawaii — confused emergency managers, media, residents and tourists.
• Residents flooded 9-1-1 dispatch centers, making it difficult for emergency officials to communicate with firefighters and police officers.
• People used their cars to reach higher ground, clogging emergency access routes. Others headed for the beach in hopes of seeing a big wave.
“Oregon has possibly the highest vulnerability on the West Coast to a near-shore tsunami,” Wilson wrote. “If there had been a significant tsunami generated from this earthquake, many people would likely have been killed or injured.”
The June earthquake that prompted the tsunami alert originated at 7:51 p.m. in a deformed section of the southernmost Juan de Fuca plate, which runs the length of the coast.
Such earthquakes rarely produce large tsunamis, because there’s little vertical ground displacement. That knowledge actually added to the confusion, Wilson said.
“There was a seismologist on TV saying this isn’t the kind of earthquake that produces tsunamis,” Wilson said. The weather service observed the earthquake and issued a warning, five minutes later.
But then the Hawaii center issued its bulletin three minutes after that, declaring no warning or watch.
The state’s Law Enforcement Data System distributed both bulletins to emergency officials across Oregon, and, at 8:09 p.m., the state Office of Emergency Management declared that no warning was in effect.
At 8:20 p.m., the warning was back on.
The weather service already has begun to try to fix the problems, said Stephen Todd, a meteorologist in charge of the agency’s Portland office.
From now on, Hawaii will not broadcast warnings to Oregon officials, and improvements to infrastructure on the coast should solve the technical problems that caused alerts and weather radios to fail, he said.