Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [129]
PART 3
SHOCKWAVES
CHAPTER 21
Facing Reality: Cascadia Equals Sumatra
Vasily Titov’s flight to Chicago was canceled at the last minute, so he was destined to spend Christmas alone in Seattle without his wife. She had taken an earlier flight and was already back east visiting relatives when unexplained airline woes at Sea-Tac Airport ruined Titov’s holiday in December 2004. “It was a sad moment for me that I had to spend Christmas day and Christmas night by myself,” Titov said, quietly mocking himself. “I had nothing better to do than go to the office and play with my model,” his computer model of a large tsunami. Late that afternoon he took the scenic route along Sand Point Way to NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory on Seattle’s Lake Washington and fired up the hard drive.
As the evening dragged on he tinkered with numerical codes he had developed to simulate the behavior of the massive waves that had smashed across Okushiri Island off the coast of Japan back in 1993 and was only half listening to CNN in the background. Suddenly a news bulletin caught his attention. There had been a seismic shock in the Indian Ocean. “The earthquake was small at first,” Titov recalled. “But it got bigger in front of my eyes.” Later reports said the magnitude could be 8 or even higher.
Then came news that a tsunami had been generated off the coast of Sumatra and that people had been killed as far away as India. Titov was now riveted to the screen. “I saw the first reports of the deaths from the tsunami—the reports from CNN that fifteen people died in India. In India,” he repeated, astonished. “It was thousands of kilometers away from the source. So that definitely gave me some idea that it’s a huge event.” By now it was late night in North America—Christmas night—and December 26 in Sumatra and India. Titov relaunched his model and started looking for data from the Indian Ocean that might allow him to re-create the tsunami while it was still happening.
Titov’s boss, Eddie Bernard, remembered the first call in the wee hours of the morning. “I was in bed and the phone rang and ABC News said, ‘Could you tell us about the tsunami?’ And I said, ‘Uh, I’ll have to go check my internet and email messages and I’ll get back to you.’” By the time Bernard joined Titov at the lab, the picture had changed radically for the worse.
“Vasily went to work on the model and Shirley, my wife, and I answered the phones,” said Bernard. “The telephone calls were coming in, many more phone calls than we could ever address,” Bernard confessed. “I mean I was doing interviews in Australia, radio stations in India—all over the world—London. And we were trying to provide some graphical information to the broadcast media at the same time we were trying to educate people about what was actually happening. Because, you see, in the Indian Ocean they had never seen or experienced anything like this and many people didn’t even know what the word tsunami meant.”
Titov, meantime, was hoping the codes he’d used for Japan and the North Pacific would work just as well for the coast of Sumatra, where the tsunami had been generated. Fortunately some research had been done relatively recently on the offshore subduction zones in that area and bathymetric grids were available for much of the Indian Ocean. There was very little information, however, about how big the first wave had been.
“The only data we had available was a tide gauge record on Cocos Island,” Eddie Bernard explained, “which is south of the source in the Indian Ocean.” Titov used the reading from the Cocos Island gauge as a proxy for a deep-ocean gauge, estimated the tsunami height, and punched the number into his computer as a starting point for the model to begin running a simulation. “Vasily was able to take that