Politics could sink revamped tsunami warning system

WASHINGTON -- Driven by the suffering and destruction from the Indian Ocean tsunami and the potential for a similar calamity in the United States, the White House and Congress have moved quickly to offer plans for significantly beefing up an early-warning system to detect killer waves.

Yet despite bright science and good intentions, the long-term success of a more robust tsunami warning system could hinge more on politics and the competition for scarce dollars than on technical wizardry.

President Bush and the House and Senate have proposed plans for updating the warning system. Bush wants to spend $37.5 million to add 32 deep-sea buoys and 38 tide gauges around the United States and its territories. The proposal also calls for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to expand its education and outreach program for the most vulnerable communities and provide money to update inundation maps so people will have a clearer idea of what coastal areas are most at risk.

According to White House science officials, the system would "provide the U.S. nearly 100 percent detection capability for the coasts, allowing an alert within minutes and, in some cases, within seconds of a tsunami's formation."

The initiative would also improve the communication network between federal, state and local officials to improve chances that warnings are received and understood.

But while lawmakers praised the Bush administration's approach, they worry that money will not be there to maintain and monitor the system long into the future. NOAA's budget is chronically vulnerable and the agency's leaders -- along with lawmakers -- say it is difficult to protect funding for an event that might happen hundreds of years in the future.

To drive home the point, John Orcutt, deputy director for research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego told the House Science Committee that "The El Niño monitoring array has funding problems even though an El Niño occurs every three to seven years and everyone on the planet is aware of its effects."

Another concern, according to lawmakers, is that NOAA would have to cut money for some other program to pay for the tsunami system. The budget Bush is presenting today essentially freezes spending not related to defense or homeland security, meaning that an increase in one area must come at the expense of another.

"It's no secret that we are in a terrible budget situation," said Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn.

"Is the tsunami warning system going to come at the expense of improved flood forecasting models? Will funding for research to improve tornado and hurricane forecasting be cut? As we design and deploy this tsunami warning system," Gordon said, "we must provide sustainable funding to ensure its continued operation. But we should not sacrifice other equally important NOAA programs and operations in an effort to develop a temporary response to yesterday's crisis."

The White House estimates it will cost $24.5 million a year to operate the upgraded tsunami warning system. That money has been earmarked for the next two years but not beyond.

Supporters say the investment is worth it, especially in the Pacific Northwest, an area considered especially vulnerable to tsunamis. The reason is the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a near-identical twin to a geological fault that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami lies between 50 to 150 miles off the Washington and Oregon coast.

"Nature is the real weapon of mass destruction," said Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., who is drafting a tsunami protection bill. "For less than we spend in one day in Iraq, we can have a system to prevent a cataclysmic event" that could kill tens of thousands of people.

Inslee and Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., chairman of the Science panel, support a bill authorizing $40 million a year to deploy at least 40 high-tech buoys in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, as well as coordinate and forecast international warnings about tsunamis.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., has already co-sponsored similar legislation in the Senate.

"As we sadly learned, seconds matter in tsunami warnings," Cantwell said. "Since a Cascadia-generated tsunami would allow for only 10 to 20 minutes of warning, our coastal communities need an emergency response plan."

No one disputes the need for a better system. NOAA currently operates six tsunami warning buoys in the Pacific -- three off the coast of Alaska, two off the western U.S. coast and one in the eastern Pacific. The buoys, which are tethered deep in the ocean, can measure tsunamis and transmit the data in near real time to monitoring stations in Hawaii and Alaska.

"These instruments accurately calculate the size of the tsunami by measuring the pressure it exerts on the deep ocean floor as the wave passes over," said NOAA assistant administrator David Johnson. Tsunamis as small as one-quarter of an inch have been measured, Johnson said.

But three of the six buoys are out of service, Johnson said. Bad weather and technical complications have thwarted some efforts to repair them. Johnson acknowledged that budget constraints also played a role.

Even when all the buoys are working, gaps remain. To save money, the two monitoring stations that receive the data aren't staffed 24 hours a day. Bush has proposed increasing the budget to allow round-the-clock staffing, but NOAA officials say that money is only confirmed for the next two years.

Experts also point out that even the most sophisticated technology isn't enough to protect everybody from tsunamis, especially those living in areas like the Puget Sound. The offshore Cascadia fault zone is so close that experts say a tsunami would crash into the Northwest coast within 30 minutes, rendering the technology useless.

The best protection, they say, involves technology and education. People must know the warning signs and how to respond.

Orcutt used an experience in Sri Lanka to illustrate the point. Shortly before the tsunami struck, people flocked to the beach to watch the ocean's dramatic and unusual retreat. That, of course, is a telltale sign of an approaching tsunami, but few people understood the phenomenon.

Chris Chapman did. A British seismologist on vacation in Sri Lanka, he immediately persuaded a hotel manager to use a bullhorn to clear the beach and move people to the highest floors of the hotel. Sri Lankan officials later said Chapman's action saved dozens of lives.

"For tsunami warnings to be effective, they must be generated and transmitted to the affected coastline within a few minutes of detection, local emergency responders must be prepared, the population must be informed, and the entire system must be executed without delay," Charles Groat, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, told the House Science Committee.

Boehlert is worried that money for education and other "soft" protections, such as inundation maps and emergency response plans, will not get the support they need.

He's also concerned that in the glare of the Indian Ocean disaster, the United States will address the tsunami threat incompletely while believing it has solved the problem.

"The devastating events of December 26 are a wake-up call to all of us that we need to do more to prepare for tsunamis," Boehlert said. "But it can't be the kind of wake-up call that leaves us panicked and disoriented. It cannot be a wake-up call that leads us to race to work, only to find later that we're wearing mismatched socks and have forgotten our belts.

"Shiny new technologies cannot blind us to the need for a comprehensive approach," he said.

P-I Washington correspondent Charles Pope can be reached at 202-263-6461 or charliepope@seattlepi.com

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