Saturday and Sunday, April 3 & 4
Troy, Nick, and I spent the morning working very hard to pull our report together. Pancho and Sebastian joined us after lunch to prepare for the exit briefing with ITIC and UNESCOstaff. We identified factors that effected impacts and made a number of recommendations. In a nutshell, the factors that reduced impacts were:

• Public Awareness (drills, education programs, previous experience, signs, culture)
• Time of day, day of the week (earthquake)
• An educated public
• Engineered structures
• Availability of high ground (with a few exceptions)
• Altruism/heroism
• Resilient organizations like Radio Bio Bio.
• A developed country with technical, scientific, and engineering capacity.
• Availability of tsunami inundation maps for a number of areas.

Factors that exacerbated impacts

• A very large earthquake, damaged infrastructure (particularly roads and communication) and large near-source tsunami.
• Time of day, day of week, and time of year – this reduced earthquake impacts (people at home sleeping) but increased the tsunami exposure (people camping) and difficulties in evacuating (night).
• Inability of the normal response personnel (police, fire) to respond in urbanized areas like Concepción.
• Vulnerable campgrounds with no tsunami information.
• Lack of security delayed response for several days in some areas.
• Planning for tsunamis was lower priority than planning for earthquakes in urban areas.
• Variable education/outreach/signage/drills efforts. Extensive programs in some communities, few in others.
• Signage doesn’t connect the earthquake and the tsunami. Signs point out tsunami hazard zones, or tsunami evacuation routes but don’t mention that the ground shaking is the natural warning.
• Barriers to evacuation – no way to get off the island in Constitución.
• Worries about impacting tourism caused some resistance among business owners to tsunami education efforts.
• Ignorance or false expectations: Some expected to see the water drawdown first, or expected to hear a siren or receive an official notification.
• Largest surges in some areas came very late (as much as 4 hours), people re-entered hazard zone, and in some cases, had to re-evacuate one or two more times.
• Few people had personal plans – people left without shoes, and had no pre-arranged meeting places.

Based on what we saw and learned, we’ve made a preliminary list of important lessons for the United States, and the Cascadia region in particular.

1. School curriculum. No question that Chilean coastal communities have gone much farter than California is school programs teaching tsunami safety. Institutionalizing earthquake/tsunami education programs in schools would go a long way towards producing an aware population. 
2. Seminars/Workshops. Classes and workshops were frequently identified as the source of preparedness information. Even if only a small percentage of the population attended, the information was spread informally. 
3. Physical barriers to evacuation. All regions of the U.S. Should be carefully reviewed for cases where coastal residents or visitors cannot reach high ground soon enough to avoid tsunami inundation. See the blog description Day 8. 
4. NOAA Weather Radio (NWR). The lessons learned from Radio Bio Bio have some relevance to the role that NWR can play after an event has occurred. The two screaming messages from Radio Bio Bio’s experience are that silence should be avoided at all costs, and that the silence should be filled with meaningful information. While the NWS already recognizes the importance of keeping NWR functioning, some thought needs to be given to what would be broadcast in the hours and days following an event. Without advanced planning, NWR may simply default to providing the weather forecast when there is more urgent information that could be provided. Examples of information that could be provided by NWR includes: which radio stations are providing information, where to find medications, which roads are impassable, where meeting places have been designated, information about the recent event, and where food and water is being disturbed.
5. Coastal Campgrounds. The message from the event in Chile is tragically clear: Special care must be given to the education of visitors to tsunami hazard areas in the U.S. This education must be aggressive and must use active methods whenever possible. An example of an aggressive method would be to place tsunami signs above urinals and on stall doors in bathrooms – making them difficult to ignore. An example of a active method, where applicable, would be to train park staff to provide verbal and written education information to campers when they check in. Additional recommendations will be developed in the coming weeks.
6. Connecting earthquakes and tsunamis, and the natural warning. The majority of locals we talked to knew that the strong earthquake indicated a tsunami would occur, and to therefore evacuate immediately. Evidence indicates that visitors to the coast did not make this connection. In the case where they were warned, by the police, for example, they survived. In the cases where there was no opportunity to warn visitors, there were significant fatalities. The message for the U.S. Is clear: for regions where a significant near-field tsunami threat exists, education that focuses on people responding based on a felt earthquake is of the highest importance.
7. Set nature of tsunamis. The Chilean event, as well as historic North Coast tsunamis (2006, 1964), continue to suggest that people are not understanding that tsunamis last for a long time. Our messaging is not working, and our group concludes that the problem is that we are not addressing the temporal non-homogeneous nature of tsunami wave arrival times. People are lulled into a false sense of security when an hour or two passes with no additional waves. We must address this in our educational messaging and in the wording of our warning products. Interestingly, this is aspect of tsunamis is very similar to that of sneaker waves that claim many lives on the West Coast each year. There may be an opportunity, and benefits, to cross utilization of phrases and wording.
8. Drills. In coastal communities where drills had taken place before this event, many interviewees mentioned that the drills enabled them to remain calm during the earthquake and to evacuate effectively. In contrast, some community members in Constitución evacuated so hastily that they didn’t even put shoes on. This actually slowed their evacuation because they had to walk through debris and broken glass. Giving people calmness an the resultant clarity of mind needed to make decisions in a stressful situation is a recognized benefit of drills. While drills are already a best practice for Tsunami Ready communities in the U.S., their actual use is limited. Drills should be conducted more aggressively, especially for schools and other public facilities in the tsunami hazard zone.

After the briefing it was time to pack up and leave. We were advised that the concessions in the airport had not reopened because of the earthquake damage, and the only place open to eat was possibly the worst Chinese restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. But no harm done, The food, accommodations, and company on this trip has been outstanding. In the airport I ran into Bret Luzinda who I had worked with on a reconnaissance study of the January 9 offshore Eureka earthquake. He was returning with a group of engineers from the Applied Technology Council who were looking at design, code and tagging issues. It’s a fairly small group of people who do post event assessment and I often run into people I know coming and going. We faced the usual trials on the homeward trip – delays and missed connections – that set us back a few hours. A rude shock to go from warm, dry, early fall conditions to a full blown winter storm complete with snow in Laytonville. We heard about the Baja earthquake near Healdsburg. No – the number of earthquakes is not increasing, but exposure and vulnerability is and this year we had the bad luck of a magnitude 7 (Haiti) located in nearly the worst possible place. But I’ve had enough to last me quite awhile.