What happened before killer ‘Wave’ hit

Midway through “Wave That Shook the World,” airing tonight as part of PBS’ “Nova” science documentary series, an eyewitness to the Dec. 26 tsunami that killed more than 250,000 people says of the monstrous wall of water, “it had no mercy.”

Without warning gigantic waves rushed ashore, toppling buildings, tossing automobiles like toys and leaving wreckage so complete that disaster photographer Geoff Mackley likens it to the devastation left by an atomic bomb.

“Wave” is a first-rate effort to explain how the tragedy occurred -- and, most compellingly, whether a better warning system could have saved lives, particularly in Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. The 60-foot waves hit Sumatra within a handful of minutes of the underwater earthquake, but it was two hours before water came crashing ashore, for example, in Sri Lanka.

With the news Monday of another giant quake under the Indian Ocean, this time with tsunami warnings coming quickly, some lessons appear to have been learned from the Dec. 26 disaster. But questions about what went wrong after the earlier quake remain more than relevant.

Patiently, and with excellent graphics, “Wave” begins by explaining how the shifting of tectonic plates, an everyday occurrence, finally resulted in an enormous upward push of water along a 700-mile-long fault parallel to the coast of Sumatra. It’s science for non-majors, and it makes the unbelievable understandable.

The four-minute quake was more powerful than the cumulative power of every quake in the previous five years in the Indian Ocean, an ocean prone to quakes. A tower of water pushed up from the sea, then split and began moving in opposite directions, with horrific results.

“Wave” has home videos of the water hitting the shoreline and unsuspecting residents and tourists screaming and fleeing for their lives. These videos and interviews don’t push the story much beyond what daily journalism was able to do in the days after the disaster.

But “Wave” grabs your attention when it provides a tick-tock of what tsunami scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii did and didn’t do in the crucial minutes after the first seismograph began to tremble.

The program was devised by the U.S. government after a tsunami struck Hilo on the island of Hawaii in 1949, catching residents unawares. The goal is to warn countries fronting the Pacific Ocean about the approach of a tsunami.

Sensors are tethered to strategic points in the Pacific, particularly in the earthquake-prone Pacific Northwest. Information is beamed to a satellite and back down to the warning center. Good thing, that.

“There is really no difference at all between the Pacific Northwest and Sumatra,” said Marine geologist Chris Goldfinger. Goldfinger says it is not a question of “if” a massive tsunami will strike the West Coast of the U.S., just when.

Despite living in earthquake central, nations fronting the Indian Ocean have not developed a tsunami warning system worthy of the name.

So when the Dec. 26 quake hit, the scientists in Hawaii knew it was large -- initially considered an 8, later revised to a 9.3 -- but they did not have enough data from the region to determine if it was liable to produce a tsunami.

Not all big undersea quakes produce tsunamis that reach land.

In the cliche of the moment, this tsunami was its own “perfect storm.” The earthquake struck close to shore -- about 155 miles -- and in shallow water -- about 30 kilometers. Further out and in deeper water, and the impact would have been marginal when the wave hit shorelines.

In Hawaii, the scientists knew almost nothing of the crucial details that could have helped predict the impact.

“We were unfortunately flying blind,” said the center’s Stuart Weinstein.

And even when the center realized that Sumatra had already been ravaged and the tsunami was barreling toward other countries, they had no advance plan for warning those countries. The center had “no contact points, no organization, no warning system that I know of in that area,” said the center’s Barry Hirshorn.

“Wave” does not make a big deal about it, but the reasonable viewer can wonder why the center was so bereft of a plan for warning Indian Ocean countries. True, the center’s responsibility is the U.S. and other Pacific Ocean countries, but a tsunami in one region can have a worldwide impact, as “Wave” points out.

Is it not reasonable to expect that the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center would have had a list of phone numbers, pagers, e-mail addresses, and satellite phone numbers for civil defense-style officials in Indian Ocean countries? Isn’t that the kind of list that summer interns are assigned to put together just in case?

The performance of the tsunami center will doubtless be debated for years, and “ “Nova” has provided an invaluable service to that debate.

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‘Wave That Shook the World’

Where: KCET

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Ratings: TV-PG-V (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for violence)

Narrator...Gene Galusha

Senior executive producer Paula S. Apsell. Executive producers for Pioneer Productions Stuart Carter, Jeremy Dear. Writer and producer Martin Williams. Directors Laura Acaster, Alex Williams. Produced for Nova, Joseph McMaster.