Twenty years ago, a catastrophic tsunami devastated communities across the Indian Ocean, resulting in the deaths of more than 220,000 people.
Triggered by a massive earthquake off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia—potentially the third most powerful ever recorded—the tsunami event is considered to be one of the world’s worst natural disasters.
Now, a seismologist who was on duty at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii when the disaster struck has revealed to Newsweek the inside story of how events played out that fateful day, as his team scrambled to inform regions in the crosshairs of the wave—with relatively little success—in an attempt to save lives thousands of miles away.
The seismologist, Barry Hirshorn, tells of the almost impossible situation his team found itself in—namely, trying to respond to a powerful tsunami event occurring in a completely different ocean to the one it was set up to monitor.
“So at that point, the biggest problem was that we were—and still are—the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.” Hirshorn told Newsweek. “There’s a whole structure in place. I call it a three-legged stool because you need all three legs to be successful—to increase your odds of successfully helping the coastal populations at risk after a tsunami.”
“I consider those three legs… as being the warning center, which has to detect and give you some idea of what you’re dealing with, the civil defense people who have to mobilize based on your information… as well as the population that they have to warn and that we warn,” he said. “At the time, we had none of these. It was the wrong ocean.”
In 2004, there were essentially no tsunami warning centers dedicated to monitoring the Indian Ocean, largely because this region was not expected to be at significant risk of a major tsunami.
“You always assume that most of your gigantic tsunamis are going to be in the Pacific,” Hirshorn said. “But more than that, there were no contact points for people to receive a warning even if there had been a warning center [for the Indian Ocean].”
“We had no one to call, so to speak, no one to contact and we had essentially no data to look at the tsunami or the earthquake, except for very sparse data. And on top of that, the populations, for the most part, had essentially no training on what to do, because it had been so long since there were any major tsunamis there. So essentially, we were just flying blind.”
On the day that the tsunami struck—December 26, 2004—Hirshorn was on duty with another colleague named Stu Weinstein, as well as the center director. Around 3 p.m. Hawaii time, they received messages on a pager from two seismic stations very far apart in Australia informing of the earthquake event near Sumatra, an Indonesian island.
“This was a very late page. It was eight minutes after the earthquake, but the earthquake took nine minutes to rupture. So it was before the earthquake was over,” Hirshorn said. “[Stu] was seeing something huge coming in visually [on the screens], and he had already begun the analysis. He’s working on the location of the earthquake. And then I begin working on a first estimate of the magnitude—how big it was.”
Shortly after, the team sent out a “very quick” initial message with an underestimation of the magnitude of the earthquake to some nearby countries that were likely going to be first and worst affected by the wave, particularly Indonesia. At this point, they believed the earthquake was around a magnitude 8, with a strong possibility of producing a local tsunami. But while this message was sent before the wave first struck land, it was only directed to contacts in Pacific coastal regions, informing them that there was no danger for these areas.
“That message got delivered, but probably had very little, if any, effect. “If that had been a warning to the right place and they had been prepared, if there had been a system there, that would have probably been sufficient for many people to evacuate and [save] many lives.”
With the disaster just beginning to unfold, Hirshorn said his team had “no idea” of the scale of what was about to occur. Unbeknownst to them, the earthquake that they initially determined to be of magnitude 8—still extremely powerful and capable of massive destruction—eventually turned out to be a 9.2, an altogether different beast.
“It’s a logarithmic scale… so we’re talking about something that had maybe 50 times or more energy—was 50 times more devastating—than what we knew at the time,” Hirshorn said.
As the day wore on, the team began to receive more information from various sources about the earthquake and the tsunami, while news reports started to filter in, demonstrating some of the devastating impacts of the wave. The true nature of what was occurring began to materialize.
“It was obvious that it was just getting worse and worse… The worse it got, the more frustrating it was that we couldn’t get the message out to a wider group of people that would be affected. That was pretty upsetting, but we were just trying to [reach] as many people… that still hadn’t been affected yet as we could.”
“Eventually we did see what was happening in Phuket, [Thailand], which was insane—these gigantic waves,” he said.
Among the “most horrible” points—and one of the first real indications of the magnitude of the disaster—was when the team saw a news report describing how trains had been knocked over and people had drowned in Sri Lanka, more than 1,000 miles away from where the quake occurred.
“This is not a [magnitude] 8,” Hirshorn said, describing his thoughts at the time. “This is huge.”
Despite everything that was occurring, and the team’s frustrations, Hirshorn said he was trying to keep calm and concentrate sufficiently in order to perform his job as best he could given the circumstances.
“I’m not going to be much help to folks if I just sit there and melt down. There’s three of us who are handling all this information, trying to save anyone we can who’s still ahead of the wave.”
While many of their efforts were in vain, Hirshorn said they made some breakthroughs, which may have helped to save some lives. One was that the center director at the time managed to improvise what scientists call a “travel time curve,” which they had not previously produced for the Indian Ocean.
This enabled the team to track and predict the movement of the tsunami, while focusing efforts on trying to contact people who had not yet been affected. They also were able to get a message through to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which had contacts in the Indian Ocean.
Finally, the team got a “big break” when they received a call from the U.S. State Department around seven hours into the tsunami, just as the wave was beginning to hit Madagascar and the very northeastern tip of Africa. Hirshorn asked the department to contact its embassies in those regions, as well as local officials in the countries along the Indian Ocean coast.
“It looks like we probably were able to help some people in some countries on the African coast,”he said.
Since 2004, there have been “massive changes” in the field of tsunami monitoring and warning, Hirshorn said.
“It’s like a revolution, caused by this event and then sped up by the Japanese event in 2010,” he said. “Everything from many more seismometers, many more water level stations. Much better tsunami models, much more accurate and quicker assessments of the size of the earthquake and the tsunamigenic potential. Things that took hours now take minutes.”
Significantly, the Indian Ocean region now has dedicated tsunami warning centers, including ones in India and Australia, that were set up in the wake of the 2004 disaster. Taken together, these developments mean that if a major earthquake occurs in the region capable of producing a tsunami, coastal populations should receive warnings significantly faster, providing them with more time to act.
Barry Hirshorn is featured in NatGeo’s upcoming docuseries Tsunami: Race Against Time, which premieres across two nights, beginning November 24 at 9/8c on National Geographic; All episodes stream November 25 on Disney+ and Hulu.
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