Chile Earthquake - Tsunami Reconnaissance Day 1 Lori Dengler

Wednesday March 24
Made it as far as Petaluma on the first leg of our trip to Chile. In addition to me, the group includes Troy Nicolini, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist of the Eureka NWS office – an engineer by background, and the coordinator of today’s Live code tsunami warning communications test, and Nick Graehl, geology grad student whose thesis project is studying the tsunami hazard in Yaquina Bay near Newport, Oregon.

The first lesson I’ve learned is not to schedule a tsunami test at the same time as a post-tsunami survey expedition. Troy has been up to his ears with all of the details of a three county live Emergency Alert System (EAS) test, siren activations, civil air patrol flyovers and we’ve both been busy with a massive educational campaign. The big danger with a Live Code test is that someone might be confused and think a real tsunami is on its way. For the test, I was stationed in Crescent City and had to be at a briefing at 8 AM. We won’t know how successful the test was until all of the information comes in over the next few days, but I was impressed with what I saw of Del Norte County’s full scale evacuation drill. Definitely very noisy at 10:15 when the sirens went off. The best moment for me was when all of the students and staff from St. Josephs school showed up. Tsunami aware children can be real heroes in tsunami events. Tillie Smith, aged 10, saved 100 people in Thailand in 2004 when she recognized the unusual wave activity as a possible tsunami and alerted people to get off the beach, and in the Chile earthquake, 12 year old Martina Maturana, rang the village bell alerting most of the inhabitants of Robinson Crusoe Island. This is a story we hope to learn more about.

After the test, Troy was contacted by a number of reporters. The furthest was a woman from Chile who had heard about our test on the internet. So now we have a Chilean media person to meet with in Santiago.