Tsunami! (Revised) (Latitude 20 Books)
by Walter Dudley
Book Summary Information
Author: Walter DudleyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1998-10-01
ISBN: 0824819691
Number of pages: 380
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Book Reviews of Tsunami! (Revised) (Latitude 20 Books)
Book Review: Still the best place to start on tsunami
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the review I wrote in 1988 of the first edition of "Tsunami!" The second edition is about twice as long, reflecting additional research:
For a good, simple, workable idea, tsunami prediction has had a tough career.
First, the idea was scoffed at. Thomas Jaggar, the founder of the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, had the idea that seismographic indications of big earthquakes could give hours of warning that a destructive "tidal wave" was on its way to Hawaii. He made successful predictions as early as 1923, but the technique was ignored for a long time.
The disastrous 1946 waves, which killed more than 100 people in Hawaii, led to a revival of Jaggar's idea.
Most of "Tsunami!" is devoted to retelling the experiences of people who lived through the big waves of the past generation in Hawaii. Many died, many lived but lost everything. There were also many exciting escapes.
Unfortunately, although tsunami prediction works, it has had and still has problems with consumer acceptance. There would be fewer stories of exciting escapes if more people would take the warnings seriously. But to some, the declaration of a tsunami watch is a signal to head for the shore -- to watch.
These funseekers contributed to the death toll of 61 when waves hit Hilo in 1960.
The biggest part of the tsunami warning problem is that the system turns in too many false alarms. Any earthquake that shifts the sea floor in a big way may set off a cycle of huge waves. But not every big undersea quake does. (Landslides and exploding volcanoes also can initiate the misnamed "tidal" waves, but they are minor causes.)
Tide gauges were added to the system to help sort out which quakes set off big waves. Still, with waves traveling up to 500 miles an hour, Hawaii has at best about six hours notice of a tsunami coming from the Aleutian islands.
Co-author Walter Dudley, a tsunami researcher at the University of Hawaii-Hilo, says that the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center policy is to sound the alarm in doubtful cases. There seems to be no alternative, but too many false positives erode public confidence. (Since this book was published in 1988, the center's response time has improved considerably, but there has not been a big, Pacific-wide tsunami since then to provide a real-world test. In 2006, when a big undersea quake shook Hawaii, so close that any tsunami would have started reaching local shores within five minutes, the center was able, accurately, to predict "no tsunami" very quickly.)
Under the circumstances, tsunami experts are faced with a constant struggle to keep the public educated about the danger (especially the public in Hilo, almost always the place in Hawaii that gets hit the hardest).
Just now (as of 2006), they have an extra burden. In almost 200 years of record-keeping there have been about 96 tsunami in Hawaii, about one every other year. But there hasn't been a big foreign tsunami for more than 40 years. (The last killer tsunami in Hawaii, at Halape, Big Island, was in 1975, but it was unusual in being caused by a local earthquake at Kilauea.)
Although the Boxing Day tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004 and was videotaped gave people worldwide a close look at what the waves can do, few in Hawaii have any good sense of what a big one would do here in the 21st century. Areas of Hawaii that were uninhabited the last time the waves struck are built up now. Scientists fear that the 159 deaths caused by the 1946 waves could be exceeded next time.
"Tsunami!" is packed with useful information. Dudley tells what tsunami are and how the warning system came into being. Co-author Min Lee collected the accounts from survivors of the 1946, 1952, 1957, 1960 and 1975 waves.
Anyone living in Hawaii would be better off for knowing what's in this book. But if you live near the shore, and if the tsunami zone map in your telephone book includes your house, don't consider reading this book as an option. Make it an obligation.
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