Public Warning: Watch Out When Nature Does the Wave

You toss and turn at night contemplating the Big One. By day, you worry about the suffocating haze eating away at your lungs. On the way home, you fret furiously about errant bullets from feuding gangs.

About time for a soothing day at the beach, right?

Forget it. The National Weather Service says there’s plenty to worry about there too.

The culprit: huge killer waves, known as tsunamis, that can travel as fast as a jumbo jet and can assault the coast with a wall of water taller than the Watts Towers.

“It is only a matter of time before a tsunami affects us,” said Constantine Pashos, a warning preparedness meteorologist for the weather service. “It is time to alert the public to the dangers.”

Never mind that it has been 27 years since the last tsunami of any significance hit the California coast, and more than five years since there has even been the threat of a major tsunami here. The National Weather Service has declared this to be Tsunami Awareness Week in California, and weather officials are determined to forever change your perception of the big blue sea.

“From a psychological perspective, people shouldn’t really worry about it,” Pashos advised, “but people should be aware that something like this can happen. It is not something we can predict. But it could happen.”

Tsunamis are created by massive underwater earthquakes or landslides and through the years are said to have killed 100,000 people worldwide. That ranks them among Earth’s top natural disasters, but the mega-waves have never enjoyed top billing in a state best known for its land-bound underground rumblings.

“We know all about the San Andreas Fault,” said Andreas Goette, a German tourist sunbathing on Santa Monica Beach the other day. “But I never heard of this tsunami.”

Not that knowledge of tsunamis has made much difference to Californians.

State emergency officials were a bit red-faced when thousands of people defied official advisories in May, 1986, and rushed toward the shore after the National Weather Service issued a tsunami warning, the most recent in the state.

Fire Department switchboards were jammed with calls from people inquiring on behalf of concerned relatives on the East Coast, but most locals were more intrigued than frightened by the prospect of witnessing a “Hawaii Five-O”-style assault on the home front.

As it turned out, that tsunami was so weakened by winds and storms that it stood just a few inches tall when it reached the California coast. Pashos warned that curious beach-goers may not be so lucky next time.

Thus the most important message of Tsunami Awareness Week: Never go to the beach to watch a tsunami. When you can see the waves, you are too close to escape.

In 1964, 11 people died in Crescent City, Calif., when some residents returned to town after the first of several waves had struck. Tsunamis typically involve a succession of waves that swell with large, destructive force when they reach shallow waters. The series of waves can be separated by a few feet or hundreds of miles.

The tallest tsunami on record hit the coast of Java, in the South Pacific, with a 135-foot wall of water, according to National Weather Service statistics. The Crescent City tsunami in 1964 measured 14 feet, while the tallest recorded tsunami in Southern California reached 10 feet in 1812 near Santa Barbara.

Pashos said there was no particular reason that weather officials selected this week as Tsunami Awareness Week--perhaps, he speculated, because summer is over and winter (along with Winter Weather Awareness Week) has yet to begin. It may have simply been an act of kindness: Early next year the weather service hopes to launch Flash Flood Awareness Week, and too many disaster awareness weeks at one time could create undue anxiety.

Weather officials at first hoped that Gov. Pete Wilson would help their cause by giving Tsunami Awareness Week official state recognition, but the unusual nature of the request as well as other pressing business in Sacramento sunk the proposal.

“To be perfectly honest, at first blush, we asked the question: What is that again?” said Dave Caffrey, Wilson’s deputy chief of staff for administration. “I don’t think it has ever been done before.”

Lt. Daniel W. Cromp, a Los Angeles County lifeguard for 35 years who has witnessed two tsunamis and countless false alarms, said beach-goers should not worry about being swept away by the killer waves. Weather officials, he said, are simply “keeping their business running” by drawing attention to the phenomenon.

“With the past history of reports of tsunamis and what has actually happened, I wouldn’t rush to clear the beach if the National Weather Service said there is a possibility of one,” Cromp said. “I would monitor it, and if the water started to rise, I would tell people to move back toward the parking lot. That way they would just get their tires and feet wet.”

Even so, Glorria Morrison, emergency services coordinator for Huntington Beach, said Orange County has a sophisticated warning system that would provide several hours’ advance notice of an impending tsunami of any size.

Plans for evacuating coastal areas also have been prepared. If a severe tsunami were expected to hit Huntington Beach, for example, city officials would evacuate thousands of residents from low-lying areas.

“We always let people know to get off the beach and get to higher ground, get inland and get away from the Santa Ana River,” she said. She emphasized that the chances of that happening are minuscule.