Virgin Islanders and other Caribbean residents tend to be inured to natural disasters, what with looking out for hurricanes and living with earthquakes. That complacency could be deadly when it comes to tsunamis, according to local experts.
The very infrequency of the phenomenon is one of its greatest dangers, leading people not to expect it and not to be prepared, according to Jacqueline J. Heyliger, Assistant Director of the V.I. Territorial Emergency Management Agency. Heyliger said her agency had forgone offering hurricane preparedness training this year in lieu of providing a tsumani workshop.
To prepare residents, VITEMA held free and open-to-the-public workshops at Carambola Beach Resort on St. Croix on Wednesday and on St. Thomas on Friday at Marriott Frenchman’s Reef Hotel and Resort.
When discussions turn to tsunamis, Virgin Islanders’ response is often “What, me worry?” Attendees sharing their opinions before Friday’s Tsunami conference commenced wondered why such an infrequent phenomenon was a big enough deal for VITEMA to take a whole day to discuss.
Overheard Friday:
“It’s just one wave, how much damage could that do?”
“That is so infrequent we don’t need to worry about it. It hasn’t happened here in over 100 years.”
“They aren’t prevalent in the Caribbean. We are not in harm’s way. Our harbor is protected by St. Croix.”
“We’ll have plenty of time to react.”
Attendees soon learned they shared many misconceptions.
First, tsunami does not just mean one wave. It’s a Japanese word for a series of waves, which can grow up to 100 feet and higher as the series goes on, according to Christa von Hillebrandt-Andrade. Von Hillebrandt manages the Caribbean Tsunami Warning Program for the National Weather Service and presented the workshop attendees with some layman-level seismic and geophysical science behind tsunami generation and detection.
The wave series can go on for as many as 10 hours and can be just a few feet high or much higher. Splashes from tsunami waves have been recorded as high as 90 feet, von Hillebrandt-Andrade said.
Waves can travel in the open ocean averaging speeds of 450 mph, according to the workshop pamphlet. One wave traveling inland at 150 mph, can do as much damage as a Category 5 hurricane, according to von Hillebrandt-Andrade.
While the last recorded tsunami in the Virgin Islands was in 1867, with a total of 30 fatalities, that number bears little relation to today’s population of residents and visitors.
Not only was the population smaller in 1867, but also most of the population did not live along the coastal areas of the islands. They lived inland and upland, out of way of the harm of a tsunami, according to Roy Watlington, retired UVI physics professor and principal investigator for the Caribbean Regional Association.
Today, Watlington said, people spend a lot more time next to the water. Homeowners vie to live on the ocean or right next to it. Vacationers come here to stay in our hotels right on the beach, and people work right on the waterfront in shops, offices and restaurant catering to even more vacationers who are just in the territory for the day, and leaving this evening on a cruise ship, Watlington told the audience.
In a catastrophic scenario, Charlotte Amalie could have seven or more cruise ships in the harbor, meaning 30,000 day visitors plus their cruise ships’ staff added to a full booking of overnight guests, plus all the personnel staffing shops, restaurants, excursion employees and 2000 taxi drivers. Add a tsunami and St. Thomas’ potential number of fatalities is staggering.
While many in this hemisphere associate tsunamis with Asia and the Pacific, the Caribbean is historically one of the most tsunami-prone areas in the world, according to Watlington and to von Hillebrant-Andrade.
Tsunamis can arrive with very little warning – or none, as happened in Indonesia and parts of Thailand five years ago. People there had little time to react and few understood what they were seeing or that they needed to do anything until they saw the waves towering over them, according to Paul Whitmore, director of the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center for the National Weather Service.
Whitmore offered the audience a contrasting look at a community prepared for a tsunami.
Whitmore told the story of last year’s tsunami in American Samoa, which, like the Virgin Islands, had not had a tsunami in over 100 years. Between June and September of 2009 the territory undertook a tsunami outreach campaign which reached all of the schools.
On Tuesday, Sept. 29, every child in every Samoan school understood the need to move to higher ground immediately when they felt the 8.0 magnitude earthquake. Some who didn’t hear the official word to evacuate still recognized the natural alerts and knew how to react.
Some older residents who waited for the official call to evacuate were not so lucky, Whitmore said.
“That preparedness saved hundreds if not thousands of lives,” Whitmore told the audience.
People who live in and visit the Virgin Islands should be aware of the natural signs of an impending tsunami, but can also receive official alerts via cell phones, email or a landline available through a new VITEMA system. Also VITEMA, through its media partners, provides alerts via radio and television broadcast.
The NWS and a number of other agencies receive seismic, wave height, satellite weather and other information, and can process the data and send out alerts in minutes.
However, there is currently no siren system to address the needs of people like cruise ship visitors who are without access to official alerts. Sirens can alert people in coastal areas to evacuate to higher ground.
VITEMA is bringing sirens to the territory, hopefully by year’s end, according to VITEMA director Mark Walters.
VITEMA has also just unveiled its free V.I. Alert system on Monday, which provides a means for signing up for alerts via email, cell phone, landline, fax, text messaging, and even through PlayStation and Wii systems. Users can receive tsunami, earthquake, hurricane and other disaster and danger alerts through the system.
To sign up for the free alerts, click on users.vialert.gov/ and go through the setup wizard to customize alerts received as well as the hours that they wish to receive them.
Walters said that it may soon become possible to notify people geographically, based upon which cell tower is in closest proximity to them. Towers in coastal areas would send the alert to cell phones within their signal footprint.
Region-wide, next March 23, Caribbean nations will conduct a tsunami exercise, but Walters said he has not yet determined the territory’s level of participation.
For more information about tsunamis, go to the VITEMA website.
