C'mon, Matt!
Attention all stations.
Stand by for an urgent tsunami warning
for the Big Island and the islands of Maui, Lanai and Oahu.
This warning is based on a 7.5 magnitude earthquake
near ailua-ona.
Could it really happen?
Could a giant wave really menace the beaches of Hawaii?
There is something out there
and it threatens coastlines around the world.
It's one of nature's least understood forces: Tsunami!
We often see hurricanes and typhoons
that churn up higher-than-normal tide.
They can flood low-lying coastal communities.
But as dangerous as these storm surges can be,
they are not the worst of all possible waves.
The real monsters are tsunamis,
freak waves usually produced by undersea disturbances
like earthquake.
They can race across entire oceans and swallow cities whole.
And they can leave tens of thousands dead.
Throughout history,
tsunamis have generated legendary disasters...
Reversion the shores nearly every ocean and sea.
Without warning and without mercy.
Killer waves have struck again and again.
And tsunamis are as mysterious as they are deadly,
because so few have ever been observed by scientists.
This extraordinary footage was shot in 1952,
in the uril Islands off Russia's northern Pacific Coast.
A typical tsunami, it moved inland like a rising tide,
but with far greater speed and force.
Fortunately it caused only minor damage here...
and no deaths.
But tsunamis can be catastrophic.
In the last century alone,
more than 50,000 people have been killed by tsunamis.
Most had little or no warning.
Few were even aware of the danger.
But for the people of the Pacific Rim,
deadly tsunamis are not rare events.
They live in the most seismically active part of the planet,
an area criss-crossed by earthquake zones
and dotted with volcanoes,
so it's not surprising
that the vast majority of the world's tsunamis occur here.
In the middle of the Pacific,
the Hawaiian Islands lie isolated and exposed.
It's people are certainly no strangers to tsunamis.
But some of them are acutely aware of the risk.
Dr. Walter Dudley is director of marine science
at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and a leading expert on tsunamis.
We'll have a little on-site safety briefing.
Today he's taking one of his classes on a snorkeling field trip.
But first, a few words of caution.
Okay guys, everybody listen up.
We're only about 30 miles
from the epicenter of two of the largest earthquakes
that have ever struck this island.
In both cases,
they generated large destructive tsunamis.
The waves took about ten minutes to get here
and were about 10 to 15 feet high.
So if you are out there on the reef,
and you feel a big earthquake,
drop your gear and get out of the water
and move ashore as quickly as possible
Okay, let's have a good lab.
They are among the most catastrophic of all natural phenomenon.
Unlike things like hurricanes, there are no warning signs.
The weather doesn't get bad.
You don't feel the earth shake.
It can be just a beautiful day and then, all of a sudden,
the ocean can come up and come ashore 30 feet high.
In the Hawaiian Islands,
we've recorded tsunami wave heights
as great as 56 feet on this island from the 1946 Aleutian tsunami.
In prehistoric times,
wave heights may have reached over a thousand feet.
Hilo has been struck by tsunamis as long as there has been a Hilo.
But it was really in 1946
when there was a built-up downtown Hilo
that we had a very, very large tsunami
Nineteen forty-six... after four years of war,
Hawaiians can relax.
At last, their island paradise is safe from attack.
But more than 2,000 miles away,
a new threat emerges from the sea.
On April 1, at around 12:30 in the morning,
an undersea earthquake off the coast of Alaska
generates a huge tsunami.
Within minutes it will make its first landfall
on the Aleutian island of Unimak,
90 miles from the epicenter.
Inside the island's Scotch Cap Lighthouse,
the men feel the tremor,
but they have no idea what's heading their way.
When the wave slams into their island,
it's more than 100 feet high.
After it passes,
the Scotch Cap Lighthouse has disappeared,
and so has its crew.
The tsunami continues racing south toward Hawaii
at over 400 miles per hour.
And just as in Alaska, no one here suspects a thing.
It's first impact in the islands is deceptive.
Some waves are as small as two or three feet,
barely hinting at the tsunamis awesome power.
By the time it arrives at Coconut Island in Hilo Bay,
the tsunami has begun to swell to monstrous proportions.
Its waves wash over the island,
easily overtopping the 30-foot palm trees.
Lining Hilo Bay were dozens of homes.
Apua Heuer's family lived on a bluff high above the bay.
My family ventured as close as it could to the edge of this bluff
when we saw this mammoth wave come in.
It's 32 feet from here down to the ocean.
We had to step back because where we were standing,
all of a sudden, it was ocean.
In the city of Hilo,
residents panicked when the first waves hit,
fleeing for their lives.
Many try in vain to outrun the tsunami
We heard this horrible clash in Hilo and we knew that
the buildings on the ocean side were being knocked down.
There was turmoil all day long.
The whole town was awash with water and hurt people and lost people.
We did see people in the ocean struggling,
dogs trying to swim ashore.
We saw that.
But you couldn't do anything about it.
The force of the water was so great, you couldn't venture into it.
You had no chance.
You felt very helpless and wondered
was there anybody out there that you knew.
One photographer watches in horror
as a wave overtakes a dock worker trapped on a pier.
In the next frame,
taken after the wave has passed,
the worker is nowhere to be seen... swept away like so many others.
I had gotten up, gone downstairs to wash up...
Larry Nakagawa was 14 when the wave struck his home in Hilo.
...and as I was washing my face and brushing my teeth,
I heard this strange sound of gravel being thrown on the pavement.
So my brother came out and said
"It looks like we are having a tidal wave.
We better get on the tree."
So he hoisted me up and then my father was hoisted.
He and my father were on the same branch and,
because of the way the branch was, he had to hold my father around,
to grab hold of the trunk.
And I think that when the wave came,
he felt that if he hung onto my father...
the way...
the force of the wave would push him,
and if he hung on, he would take my father in.
So he let go and he went with the wave.
It was strict horror to go into the mortuaries.
When they found somebody, identified somebody
all the bodies were covered they put a tag on a toe.
But they were covered with a blanket.
And when you pulled back the blanket to see if you recognized them,
the horror on their death... was terrible... when they died.
They were frightened.
Eyes open, mouth agape.
And just a terror looked-face on them.
It was very unpleasant to look at.
Twenty-five miles northwest of Hilo,
the little peninsula called Laupahoehoe
lies exposed to the full fury of the tsunami.
Students have just arrived in the Laupahoehoe schoolyard
and are waiting for classes to start.
Among them are Bunji Fujimoto and his two brothers.
That day remains vivid in Bunji's memory.
I could see a wall of water coming in from out in the ocean.
It compared to filling up a cup of coffee.
You just keep pouring and once it hits the brim,
it spills over, and that's what happened back here,
up on the wall.
It didn't stop with the wall.
It just came over, spilled over.
And we could see we were in trouble.
We had to run. We started running.
When the water started coming over,
we started running up to higher ground to my left,
where the school building was.
Fortunately, we made it in time.
A bunch of the other children didn't make it,
the other students, mostly students in this area.
My brother was down here and we never found him.
We always wondered
what he would have turned out to be like later on.
He was 14 years old and just getting to his prime of life.
You can't do anything about it.
You can't do anything more than just think and talk about it
Bunji's brother was among the 25 who died at Laupahoehoe,
mostly students and their teachers.
Almost all of the bayfront area was nearly totally destroyed.
The businesses were ripped right off their foundations.
Many of the structures were wooden and they were totally collapsed.
The railway which was built on wooden railway ties
the wooden ties were floated out by the water
and the rails twisted into pretzels.
One hundred fifty-nine people died that day
96 in Hilo alone.
Over time, the city would rebuild.
But this tragedy would mark a turning point.
Those who lived in the shadow of the tsunamis
were determined to be better prepared for the next killer wave.
Just two years later, in 1948,
the U.S. Government established
the Pacific Tsunami warning center in Honolulu.
Today, the center remains on alert around the clock,
coordinating the efforts of dozens of Pacific Rim countries.
We try to get a warning out as quickly as possible,
and we have to go to our resources to find out where the earthquake is
and what its magnitude is.
And then, given that information,
we issue this warning to the various participants
in the warning system in the Pacific.
Equipped with state-of-the-art satellite technology,
seismic sensors, and a vast network of wave monitors,
the warning center can track any major earthquake on the planet
and determine whether a tsunami is on its way.
Scientists know that an undersea earthquake,
or a volcanic eruption
anything that causes the sea floor to shift suddenly
can displace huge volumes of water.
When this disruption reaches the surface,
a series of waves spreads out.
They can move as fast as 600 miles per hour.
Unlike a normal wave caused by wind or tides,
the energy of a tsunami is evenly distributed
all the way to the ocean bottom.
In deep water, there's barely a ripple at the surface
But as a tsunami wave approaches land, the seafloor rises.
The energy is compressed
and the waves can be pushed up as high as 100 feet or more.
It's always a number of thousands of people
that could possibly live or die, depending on our decision.
Here in the Hawaiian Islands,
for example, every few years, we have...
That's interesting.
We've got an earthquake to deal with.
It looks like it's a small local quake
in the central part of Alaska.
The center detects two or three quakes every week.
Most like this one
present no threat of tsunami.
But even when a tsunami alert is issued,
not everyone will take it seriously.
When you go from one tsunami to the next tsunami,
people don't even know what they are.
So it's hard for them to even consider them a threat.
First of all, you have to convince them
that there is such a thing,
and secondly, that it can cause destruction.
Even in Hawaii, with its tragic history of tsunamis,
people can forget the lessons of the past.
In 1960,
12 years after the warning center was established,
a massive earthquake off the coast of Chile
generates a tsunami that fans out across the Pacific.
Hawaii lies directly in its path.
Early on the evening of May 22,
the warning center issues its prediction
...a tsunami will hit Hilo sometime around midnight.
But with midnight long past, and only small waves washing ashore,
many ignore the alert, and return to the downtown bayfront.
A few even gather at the Suisan Fish Market
to watch the waves come in.
The 35-foot wall of water strikes like a bomb.
Once again Hilo is brought to its knees,
with $30 million in damage and 61 dead.
This wave will change Hilo forever.
Today, as you look at downtown Hilo,
you see the highway along the bayfront,
which used to be the railway before the tsunamis.
You see a big expanse of green parkland
soccer fields and places where people picnic
and play ball.
All of that was homes and businesses...
very, very heavily populated before the tsunamis.
If you go there today, you can see the old roads which go in,
driveways, all leading to nothing.
They see that area and they think
what wonderful urban planning we have in Hilo
to have all that parkland.
That's planning thanks to Mother Nature
and at great expense to the city of Hilo,
both in terms of property and loss of life.
Tsunamis have been rare events.
There has not been a destructive Pacific-wide tsunami
in over 30 years.
But if you look at the number of tsunami events
over the last century
there's been on the average one destructive tsunami
every seven years
so in many ways you would say that
we're long overdue for the next tsunami
Walter Dudley is not the only scientist
who's worried about the next one.
In the Seattle office of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration,
Dr. Eddie Bernard
is spearheading efforts to alert the public
to the dangers of tsunamis.
Most certainly they're killers.
If you look at the history of the United States since World War I I,
more people have died from tsunamis
than from earthquakes in our country.
It's one of the few natural disasters
that has such broad impact.
Most natural disasters are very localized.
An earthquake, although it may be several hundreds of miles,
doesn't affect anything outside of that hundreds-of-miles area
But if you add up the dimensions of the Pacific Rim shorelines,
it's on the order of 100,000 miles.
So one earthquake, properly placed,
can affect the coastlines thousands of miles away.
In Japan, however,
the greatest tsunami threat comes from earthquakes generated
not thousands of miles away, but much closer to home.
This island nation lies on top of one
of the most seismically active regions on earth.
The Japanese know that
the sea's bounty is often matched by its wrath.
In 1896, an offshore quake sent 100-foot waves
crashing into villages on the Sanriku Coast.
The next morning,
local fishermen returning to shore were stunned.
A few miles out at sea,
they had not even noticed
the tsunami passing under their boats.
Now they found their homes destroyed,
their families decimated.
More than 22,000 had drowned.
Four decades later, it happened again.
1,500 vessels were swept ashore by the wall of water
and many in their crews drowned.
Government aid is being rushed, but it will be a long time
before this stricken region can be restored in the land
of the rising sun.
The Japanese are no strangers to tsunamis.
Iller waves,
like the ones recorded in the news footage,
visit their shores with frightening regularity.
But even the Japanese can be taken by surprise.
In 1993, a quake off the coast of Okushiri Island
generates tsunami waves that reach shore
in less than 10 minutes
It's the middle of the night,
and most do not have time to evacuate.
One of the lucky ones is television cameraman Hiroshi Nakamura
who records his own escape on video.
There was a straight road from our hotel to the hills.
We reached the crossroads as we were driving to the hills.
Usually, we would turn to the left,
but the driver saw something like white waves ahead on his left side
The disaster I saw from the hill was just like a war movie.
The devastation was something that made a strong impression on me.
The fact that the whole town vanished
is something I haven't forgotten.
Nearly 200 died that night in Okushiri.
On the southern tip of the island,
where there were hundreds of homes, only rubble remained.
Dr. Eddie Bernard arrived in Okushiri two days later
with a special tsunami task force.
Well, my emotional reaction was...
it was like being at ground zero of the atomic bomb or something...
You just couldn't believe the destruction.
The power of these waves was far more than I had expected.
Although I had been studying this phenomenon for 25 years...
I'd never seen the power of a devastating tsunami...
and what it actually could do.
You just look at some of the structures
that were ripped apart
and saw how things were destroyed entirely.
Then you start to appreciate the forces at work here.
Looking at a photograph of a young girl
who wasn't too much older than my daughter at that time,
really brought home the fact
that most of the people who died in this event
were young children or the elderly.
What we actually could see were the remnants of people's lives.
Then you realize that...
these 500 homes had destroyed the lives of hundreds of families.
And, of course, death was part of that process.
And so...
you had to be very respectful of what we were actually looking at.
Although it was scientifically important,
we didn't want to be disrespectful for those people who had passed away
And it motivated me as a research scientist to realize that
the real reason for studying tsunamis in the research mode
is to save a few lives.
And that's the bottom line.
Today Okushiri is slowly recovering from its tragedy.
The people are rebuilding their homes
and repairing their lives.
But because space is at a premium here,
most new homes must be built where the old ones stood...
making them just as vulnerable to the next tsunami.
There is no one spot, however, that will probably never be rebuilt.
The devastated southern tip of the island
will likely remain an empty zone,
a reminder of what was taken by the sea
Two hundred miles to the south is another town
that has long suffered the ravages of tsunamis.
Over the past century,
Taro has seen 3,000 of its citizens swept away.
The people of this town have learned to carry on in the face of tragedy,
to live with the continual threat of disaster.
The last great wave struck here in 1933
It left Taro in ruins, and wiped out nearly a quarter of its population.
A year later, the survivors fought back.
They built a wall
to keep the sea in check the next time it rose.
Today, the wall dominates the town,
a reinforced concrete battlement 34 feet high
and in some spots, 80 feet thick.
For the people of Taro,
it's become a familiar and reassuring part of the landscape
In the summer, the seawall gets warmed up
and I cannot sleep because the heat reflects off of it.
At that time I wish there were no seawall,
but I never forget its reason for existing.
If there were no wall, I wouldn't want to live here.
Taro is also protected by its own tsunami warning center.
Besides the usual satellite technology
there are video cameras,
permitting technicians to monitor the harbor 24 hours a day,
looking for changes in sea levels and awaiting the inevitable.
And if alarms are sounded, Taro is ready.
Crack teams of gatekeepers carry out regular drills,
closing the wall's six doors against the sea.
Each of the massive steel doors must be sealed in under four minutes.
They've never been tested against a major tsunami.
The seawall certainly offers the people of Taro
a measure of comfort, but that may not be enough.
It's 34-foot height should stop most waves.
But the infamous tsunami of 1896 had waves over 90 feet high.
There's just no way to know how big the next one will be.
Back on the wave-ravaged island of Okushiri,
they're building their own wall.
When it's completed,
it will surround nearly a quarter of the island,
providing at least partial protection against the next tsunami.
But the people of Okushiri haven't put all their faith
in reinforced concrete.
In a ceremony held every June, they pay homage to the dead,
including hundreds of tsunami victims,
enshrining their memories in stone.
As darkness falls, a bonfire is lit to serve as a beacon,
guiding home those who were lost to the waves.
Paper lanterns symbolize the souls of the victims,
released once again to the sea.
It is an act of remembrance and perhaps a prayer for deliverance.
The threat of tsunami is not as distant as most of us think.
Half a world away from the fishing villages of Japan
lies the Northwest Coast of the United States.
The town of Crescent City, California,
shares a tragic legacy with Taro and Okushiri.
People here can still recall their own encounter with a deadly wave
March 27, 1964.
Good Friday.
A violent earthquake off the coast of Alaska
generates an enormous tsunami.
The Pacific Coast of North America, from Vancouver to San Diego,
lies in its path.
At 11 that night,
Crescent City Civil Defense Chief, Bill Parker,
receives urgent news.
My first experience with a tsunami was a teletype
that came into my office
And it said that there was a probability of a tsunami
and it gave an estimated time of arrival in Zulu time.
Well, we didn't even know what a tsunami was,
let alone know how to spell it.
And we certainly didn't know
how to convert Zulu time to our time.
And we were really devastated as to what the threat was and what to do.
On March 27,
we received this teletype telling us there was a good possibility
that Crescent City would have a tsunami.
And we were really frightened.
But not everyone in Crescent City was frightened.
Many were intrigued by the novelty
and went down to the waterfront to watch the waves come in.
Among them was Ray Magnuson.
I parked the car down by the entrance to the dock
and I met my wife there and started walking down the road.
As I went down the road, I could hear a roar.
Some guys said,
"Hey look, hey look, it's coming over the jetty."
Well, I assumed it was a tidal wave coming over the jetty,
which was not too good a thing to be hearing,
since I was not very far above sea level.
I waited and watched and watched,
and pretty soon up the road, you could see water coming.
Then there was a cafe on the right hand side
of the road looking down, and the cafe slid across the road.
I thought at that time, I said,
"I better get out of here."
So I turned and started walking.
The water was chasing me, still behind me,
and I got back to the car.
Anyway, the water kept coming and kept coming,
and as you know, Volkswagens float.
Well, sure enough, ours began to float
You could hear the explosions up in town.
Then, as things began to be destroyed
you could hear things break a big hunk of lumber
stopped in front of the car
and it made a breakwater, and the car just floated there.
Water went out and we drove away.
We had no idea of the extent of the damage.
And we were all dumfounded.
When we looked out, we could not believe it.
I gave a report to the director of emergency services
of the state of California.
He was giving a report to the governor,
and I told him I think that Crescent City is gone.
The final toll: 11 people killed; more than $7 million in damage.
And now we all knew:
A tsunami could happen anywhere, not just far away,
but right here at home.
Three decades later,
the people of Crescent City are better prepared.
But unlike the Japanese, they have no seawalls,
no computerized warning system, no video cameras guarding the town.
If a tsunami struck here tomorrow,
this town could be devastated once again.
Was the Crescent City disaster a unique event?
Or could another tsunami strike the Pacific Northwest?
Giant waves are part of the oral traditions
of many native American tribes who lived along these shores.
The Tolowa people spoke of one such event.
The grandmother told the two children
to go right away as fast as they could.
The two children ran as fast as they could,
upstream away from the harbor.
Halfway there, they looked back.
They could see the water come.
They could hear the people cry.
They could hear the cries rise and fade away.
When they reached the top of the mountain,
the boy made a fire and they sat around it.
When the sun came up, everything was gone.
They went back to where their house had been.
There wasn't anything there.
Everything was swept clean.
It's only a legend,
but it may be based upon a terrifying reality.
Just off shore and several thousand feet down
lies the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
It's a 900-mile crack in the earth's crust,
capable of producing powerful earthquakes.
A tsunami generated here could reach the coast in less than 20 minutes.
Near the mouth of the Copalis River in southern Washington...
geologist Brian Atwater seeks evidence of just such an event...
evidence that would correspond to some of the ancient stories.
The first indication of a catastrophe:
A dreary grove called the Ghost Forest
These trees were flourishing some three centuries ago,
when an earthquake caused the river banks to sink,
and what had been high ground became a salt marsh,
poisoning the trees.
The same earthquake
almost certainly generated a tsunami here.
Atwater believes he's found more clues in the banks of the river
telltale signs embedded in the soil itself
revealing that this region was indeed flooded by a tsunami.
Got a big piece of burned wood in here.
I assume it's a campfire.
We might have a fire pit coming out of this here.
We got a three-layer cake here.
We go back 300 years or a little more to a time
when this site was a forest.
It had sitka spruce, it had western red cedar,
and it had native people who were cooking,
using rocks like this.
The brown layer records a campsite and the forest floor.
The gray later represents the tsunami
generated by an earthquake 300 years ago.
The tsunami comes in, dumps the sand on the campsite.
Then the mud builds up on top of the tsunami deposit,
because the land had dropped during the earthquake.
But this wasn't the only great wave to strike the coast of Washington.
Atwater and other scientists have found more evidence of earthquakes
and tsunami in the distant past.
There was a tsunami about 1,000 years ago
generated in Puget Sound
by an earthquake probably as large as the obe earthquake,
on a fault that goes right under downtown Seattle
During an earthquake, land was moved upward 20 feet.
The floor of Puget Sound probably moved upward as well.
If the floor moves up,
the surface of Puget Sound up here moves up.
Temporarily, it's 20 feet higher than it wants to be.
Gravity takes over and you get a big wave.
So that's what happened 1,000 years ago in Puget Sound.
And it could happen again.
Scientists believe there's a one in ten chance
of a major tsunami striking the Pacific Northwest
in the next 50 years.
Here in Washington,
there are many places where people do not yet have
enough information from public official
about what they should do in the event of one of these.
They do not yet have posted the kind of tsunami warning signs
that one sees in Oregon now that help to direct a person,
just sort of put it in the mind, everyday as you drive past it.
You see this on the outer banks in North Carolina:
"Hurricane Evacuation Route".
These kinds of signs need to be up on this coast
so in the event of one of these kinds of tsunamis,
people think, "Oh, yeah, I remember about that sign.
It said, 'Go up that road."'
And there might be high ground, far enough up that road,
far enough away that
you could survive the effects of a tsunami.
Brian Atwater isn't trying to scare people.
He just hopes to raise public awareness.
And the message is finally getting across:
Government officials have begun developing new strategies
to save lives when the next tsunami strikes.
The state of Oregon has recently drawn a line in the sand,
establishing a 300-miles-long inundation zone along their coast.
Because of the risk,
no new schools or hospitals can be constructed close to shore
without special permission.
One town that lies within the zone is Cannon Beach.
It's a quiet little resort town
whose population swells to as much as 20,000 in the summer.
Cannon Beach is more prepared for a tsunami than most towns,
conducting regular tests of its warning system.
Test, test, test.
But they don't want to frighten the residents or the tourists,
so the shrill siren is replaced
with something a little bit friendlier.
The folks in Cannon Beach have maintained their sense of humor,
but they do take tsunami seriously.
They know they have a lot to lose,
especially here at Cannon Beach Elementary,
only 400 feet from the ocean.
We're going to add "re" to the beginning of the word.
So what would be the new word if you add "re" to the first word?
Brian B.?
Regain?
Regain is right.
And how do you spell regain, Nathan?
"R-E-G-A-l-N"
Right.
These kids are well aware of the tsunami threat.
And they know what to do when the alarm bell rings.
Let's exit calmly, class.
They have only a few minutes to get to higher ground.
You guys did it this time in 13 minutes and 30 seconds.
Great job. Great job.
You hustled all the way up.
I saw people encouraging one another.
You not only focussed on
keeping yourself and your partner straight,
but you also and safe
but you also were encouraging people all the way.
I really, really appreciate that.
Great job. Give yourselves one more hand.
Alright. Great.
Plans are in the works to relocate the school,
but until then evacuation drills will continue.
It's the only way to prevent a catastrophe.
The last tsunami hit Cannon Beach 30 years ago.
And in the school playground,
there's chilling evidence of its power:
The steel swing set bears scars inflicted by trees,
uprooted and hurled about by the waves.
Fortunately, that tsunami struck at night,
when the schoolyard was empty.
The next one could happen anytime.
Cannon Beach is well aware of the dangers of tsunami.
But there are other towns at risk along the Pacific Coast...
and many of them are simply unprepared
For the state of Washington,
there's a resort area called Long Beach
It's a low-lying sand barrier.
And during the summer months,
sometimes there's as many as 40 or 50,000 people
that are out there in recreational activities.
That would be by far the worst case scenario,
because there's only one way out of that,
and that poses a very gruesome picture.
Probably the people couldn't evacuate in time.
And anything that's not reinforced concrete would be wiped out.
And it becomes timber in the water, then causing more damage,
because now it's incorporated as part of the wave.
Automobiles become floating objects
and they'd be propelled all over the place.
So as the wave sweeps back and forth,
it would probably just bulldoze
and leave probably six or eight inches of sand.
So when it's all over, it'll be nice smooth sandy beach
without any of man's structures on it anymore.
Warning systems and evacuation procedures are
well-established here in Hawaii.
But they're only effective if people trust them.
Leave the area.
This is an update on the civil defense tsunami alert.
At this time, you are advised to stay in your room
until further notice.
Roads out of Waikiki are now closed.
In 1994, a tsunami warning was issued here
and beaches were evacuated throughout the islands.
Three hundred thousand people responded
But this tsunami alert may have done more harm than good.
Well, in 1994,
there was a large earthquake in the northwest Pacific Ocean.
It was big enough to have generated a Pacific-wide tsunami.
The early indications were that there was significant run-up
of the water in the tidal stations closest to the earthquake.
So the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center declared a tsunami warning.
They accurately predicted the arrival time of the waves,
but they are incapable of predicting
how large the waves are actually going to be.
When tsunamis occur as rarely as they do
and with as little money as is available for research,
we as yet just don't know
how to predict how large the waves will be.
So in Hawaii the waves came ashore six inches high.
And unfortunately
most of the public interprets that as a false alarm,
when in fact it's just our lack of understanding.
It could've been a potentially devastating tsunami.
The problem with over-warning people is
of course, they lose confidence in the system.
They say, "Oh, it's just another false alarm,"
and we don't bother.
Or the flip side of this is they become so cavalier about it
they will actually go to the beach to see what it is.
So I think it's incumbent upon us as scientists
to try to find a more accurate way...
of forecasting the effects of these.
Now the technology finally exists to do just that.
In a government warehouse near Dr. Bernard's office,
you can see the future of tsunami forecasting.
A 20-foot signal buoy, coupled with advanced wave sensors,
could put an end to false alarms and help save lives.
Anchored in the middle of the ocean as part of a Pacific-wide network,
the system will make it possible to predict the height of tsunami waves
as well as when and where they'll strike.
Undersea gauges will take the precise measure of each passing wave
and transmit the data to the buoy floating above.
A satellite will complete the link to the tsunami warning center.
The new system could eliminate false alarms
and build public confidence in the tsunami warning system.
But there are certain types of tsunamis
that can strike so suddenly
and with such force that even the most sophisticated system
would be unable to provide a warning.
Here in the Hawaiian Islands,
where all of the land is built by volcanic eruptions,
the islands grow up from the sea floor,
and then periodically the sides slide back
down onto the ocean floor.
They've created magnificent cliffs
along the sides of all of the islands in the chain.
But when those chunks of the islands
slide off onto the Pacific Ocean floor
as huge landslides and debris flows...
they have the potential to generate giant destructive tsunamis
And there's evidence that they have created waves
as high as 1,000 feet on some of the islands in the past.
These landslide waves may be part of Hawaii's future
as well as its past.
Here on the Big Island, a huge crack in the earth is opening up
It's 60 miles long.
And it's growing wider every year.
Some scientists think
it's gradually detaching one side of the island from the other.
The great crack is one of these fault zones.
At one time, it may have actually had magma in it.
But now, it's probably serving more like a hinge,
where part of the island is beginning to slide down
and may someday slip away toward the ocean floor.
A thousand-foot tsunami on the coast of Hawaii would be catastrophic.
But a giant tsunami could happen anywhere,
even without earthquakes, volcanoes, or landslides.
A few scientists are beginning
to examine another possible cause extremely remote,
but terrifying.
Recently, the effects of a meteor impact have been studied.
Depending on the size of the meteor,
you could have some very destructive waves
generated by the splash from a meteor in the ocean.
You could have a wave formed hundreds of feet high.
It is probably the surprise no one's prepared for.
A giant tsunami generated by a meteor
may only happen once every few thousands years.
But it doesn't take a giant tsunami to devastate a community.
At the memorial park near Hilo,
where the Laupahoehoe school once stood
today's students gather with survivors
on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy.
People ask me, "If we have another tsunami..."
And I say, "No, it's not if we have a tsunami.
It's when the next tsunami strikes."
Because there will definitely be another one.
It might not be this year or next, or even this decade.
But it could be tomorrow as well.
In Hawaii, they know what a tsunami can do.
The rest of us would be wise to listen to their lament
and learn from their experience.