Don’t forget tsunamis

TSUNAMIS MOVE FASTER THAN a person can run. Unfortunately, government moves closer to the speed of a glacier. After the December tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people in Southeast Asia, U.S. public officials became uncomfortably aware that our own tsunami warning system was deeply inadequate. State and federal officials passed resolutions to assess and upgrade the system. Nine months later, the improvements come to this: Instead of only one place in California designated “tsunami ready” by the National Weather Service, there are now two.

We got a frightening reminder of the lack of progress in June when a monitoring center in Palmer, Alaska, sent out the first tsunami warning for California in more than a decade. No tsunami materialized, but the response might have seemed comical if the stakes weren’t so high. Local communities didn’t know how to respond; officials in San Francisco County say they never got the warning, while agencies in other areas simply did nothing.

Tsunamis are rare in California, and it would be crazy to devote as much attention to them as we do to more present threats such as earthquakes and fires. But it would be equally foolish to ignore them.

Fortunately, the June snafu served as a wake-up call. The state Office of Emergency Services pledged to buy a more effective notification system with Homeland Security funds by October. The new system will be able to notify five local officials in every county by every available means including phones, pagers and BlackBerrys. It’s an excellent idea, if late in coming; besides tsunamis, it can be used to issue warnings on other disasters, including a nuclear plant accident. And the state and a number of cities have since collaborated on tsunami preparedness workshops to improve coordination.

At the federal level, a report will be issued by next month addressing lines of communication and coordination between federal, state and local agencies on tsunamis. And the current six tsunami-detecting buoys will be expanded to 39 over two years, with some already deployed.

So it’s heartening that progress is being made, even if it’s coming very slowly. Meanwhile, if you’re going to the beach before the upgrades are in place, you might want to head for Crescent City or UC Santa Barbara. These are the only two places in the state considered to be prepared for a tsunami.