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Three Years after the Indian Ocean Tsunami:
Are You Safe?

Video with Dr. Eddie Bernard, Director, NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory
December 11, 2007

On December 26, 2004, there was a catastrophic earthquake magnitude 9 that generated the world’s most devastating tsunami in recorded history. It occurred about seven o’clock in the morning local time and by noon about 237,000 people were killed. It was a phenomenal event that will go down in history and will not ever be forgotten.

There were several reasons that so many people died. First of all, there was not an awareness of the tsunami threat and the Indian Ocean had no tsunami warning system because the last destructive tsunami that they had had was in 1945. So that was the context in which this whole thing was unfolding and it was that point in time that we realized that we had a golden opportunity to educate the public about tsunami awareness. It didn’t take much because the visuals that were coming in from Thailand in particular, and India, all you had to do was just remind people that this can happen to them when they are on the beach. And then there’s three safety rules to follow, if the earth shakes, if the water recedes, or if you hear a loud roar, bingo, we tried to get that simple message out as quickly as we could.

We, at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory have been working for the last 30 years to try and forecast a tsunami—that’s been our whole objective: how could we forecast a tsunami, tell you how big it’s going to be in advance, and tell you what to expect when it arrives. And to that extent, the first thing we had to do was to build an instrument that could detect a tsunami in the open ocean. Then you have to relay that information back to warning centers so that we can inject it in a numerical model to do the forecast. And that’s the birth of the DART buoy. And I’m happy to report that following the 2004 event, there was a large investment made in these two technologies that we’ve been working on for years and now in the experimental mode, we’re forecasting tsunamis in advance.

Well, I think nature’s too complicated to for us to say “we’ve gotcha covered,� but I think that at this stage of the game, we’ve gone from a very crude forecasting system before 2004 to that by the year 2008, our warning centers will be able to do, very accurately, the small tsunamis up to the large tsunamis.