Daniel Eungard gets a handful of tsunami alerts each month because of his job running the tsunami hazards program for the Washington Geological Survey. Most of them are nothing.
“Every time my phone dings with an alert noise, I look at it, take a look at the alert, and usually it's a quick swipe it away and go on with my day,” he said.
But when he got the initial alert Tuesday afternoon about the earthquake that had just struck off the coast of Russia — one of the strongest quakes ever recorded at magnitude 8.8 — he looked at the preliminary data and knew this time was different.
“I realized — I had just logged off for the day — and I'm logging back on and I'm going to be working for the next 12 to 18 hours,” Eungard recalled.
He said Wednesday that Washingtonians are fortunate the quake didn’t direct its energy towards the Pacific Northwest. The resulting tsunami was small.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has removed the Tsunami Advisory for Oregon and Washington it issued Tuesday.
But Eungard alongside weather forecasting and emergency response officials said the quake is a warning to people along the Pacific coast and the lower Columbia River about our own looming megaquakes — and the need for the region to prepare for it.
“It's a wake up call, hopefully, to people everywhere in our coastal communities to help them recognize, if they haven't previously heard, that there's a tsunami risk in Oregon and Washington.”
Shipment delays
The quake sent a 20-foot tsunami to parts of coastal Russia, damaging infrastructure, causing power outages and knocking out mobile phone service.
The impacts, however, were modest on the Washington and Oregon coasts and up the Columbia River.
“The first impact was around midnight last night when it came in,” said Capt. Dan Jordan Wednesday. He’s a ship pilot and administrator at the Columbia River Bar Pilots, which steers commercial ships in and out of the river’s dangerous mouth.
The bar pilots had one ship scheduled to enter the river around midnight but held it for three hours, Jordan said. “We delayed that one until earlier in the morning to see how the first arrival of the tsunami would be, but it (the ship) still came in before sunrise,” he added.
The tsunami swell ended up being 1-2 feet when it hit the coast and mouth of the river, said Colby Neuman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s local office in Portland.
While that caused a day of strange currents and unusual tides, the impacts weren't felt on the coast or Columbia like they will be when the region is eventually hit by tsunamis caused by quakes on the Cascadia and Aleutian subduction zones.
Puget Island, Longview floods
Unlike Tuesday’s quake off the coast of Russia, a tsunami from an earthquake in the Aleutian subduction zone near Alaska is aimed straight at the Pacific Northwest, said Eungard.
“The potential for an event on the Alaska Aleutian subduction zone is very high,” he added, “and the potential of that event reaching a high magnitude and directing its energy towards us is also very high.”
Models show that when a quake happens there or closer to home on the Cascadia subduction zone — if it’s on the stronger end of the spectrum like a magnitude 9 — it will cause immense damage and disruption on the coast and up the Columbia River, Eungard said.
For Wahkiakum's Puget Island, he said such a tsunami would go over the dikes, leaving the land submerged in water contained by the very structures built to protect the area.
Communities as far up river as Longview will be hit with flooding, and even the Vancouver area may see some mild impacts.
The situation would be worse if the tsunami was caused by the Cascadia subduction zone, said Neuman of the National Weather Service Portland. That’s because there will be less warning time and the region will have to also deal with the impacts of the earthquake, which research shows will include collapsed bridges.
He added people in tsunami danger zones need to understand that because cell towers may go down, the earthquake itself is all the warning they should need to immediately evacuate to higher ground.
“The modeling shows, you have less than 20 minutes to get to higher ground,” he said. “And that includes the four or five minutes of shaking.”
That means people on most of the Long Beach Peninsula, for instance, wouldn't make it to the 50-foot elevation the state recommends they reach within that remaining 15-minute window — and that’s with no traffic and functioning roads.
“I hesitate to be too dark about it, but it will be something that we just have not experienced in this country's history for natural disasters,” he said, speaking about the broader regional impacts of a large Cascadia quake. “There will be loss of life, and it will be a logistical nightmare for rescues and resources.”
A good practice run
When he heard about Tuesday's quake, Neuman’s first thought was, “I needed to get into work to help.”
Upon arrival that evening, he quickly took over creating a forecast for firefighters battling a wildfire in the Cascades so colleagues could work to understand the local impacts of the Russian quake and its tsunami.
“It’s an all hands on deck, because we still have our normal things that we do on a daily basis,” he said. “And then we're doing these conference calls and trying to communicate information to emergency managers and answering phone questions.”
Neuman said the good news is everything went smoothly. Staff received timely and accurate information from weather buoys — despite Trump administration cuts at the NOAA office that runs many of them — and communicated that information to the people who needed to know it.
“The various agencies that monitor (conditions) did a fairly good job of keeping people informed,” said Jordan of the Bar Pilots, pointing to NWS. “And the Coast Guard made a number of radio calls during the night.”
Lt. Cmdr. Jacqueline Hunnicutt, emergency management division chief at the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Columbia River, said the event should serve as a reminder that the Pacific Northwest has large earthquakes in its future and preparedness is crucial.
“It's not an ‘if this is going to happen,’ it's a ‘when it's going to happen,’” she said. “And the best thing we can do is to prepare ourselves, our families and friends.”
Eungard, the tsunami hazards program lead, echoed Hunnicutt. And, like Neuman, he spent the day following the tsunami and working to get emergency responders the most accurate information about its local impacts.
“Because of the relatively low risk that this event provided, it was a good opportunity, if nothing else, as an active practice.” Eungard said. “Now, the next event, we may not be so lucky.”
