Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [89]
For Stephanie Fritts in Pacific County, Washington, the second alarm came eight years after the first. She was working as a volunteer on the ambulance squad on October 4, 1994, when another subduction earthquake (a magnitude 8.2 in the Kuril Islands north of Japan) ripped the seabed of the North Pacific. The Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska, quickly issued a standby alert to emergency officials in Hawaii and to the entire west coast of North America. When the notification hit the desk of Stephanie’s boss, Sheriff Jerry Benning, jaws clenched and sparks began to fly.
Sheriff Benning was notified that if a wave was generated, it would take six or seven hours to reach the Washington shore. There were still no deep-ocean warning buoys, so there was still no way of knowing how big the wave might be—or even that a wave had been generated for sure—until it passed some place like Hawaii on its way toward North America. Benning clearly did not like having to second-guess the scientists.
Emergency officials all along the west coast monitored the situation nervously for the first several hours. Fritts recalls hearing Sheriff Benning and the county commissioners make a telephone call to some distant island across the Pacific. They were told there had been “no significant sea level change,” so they weighed the options, thought about what had happened last time, and decided not to issue an evacuation order.
When officials at the State Capitol in Olympia were informed of the Pacific County decision, they nearly blew a fuse. Two hours before the tsunami was due to arrive, they contacted county headquarters in South Bend and threatened that if they didn’t issue an evacuation order immediately, the state would. But by that time it was already too late. The 1986 experience had convinced the sheriff and his team that a full evacuation would take at least four or five hours. Evacuations are dangerous. People get hurt. People could die if there was panic.
The Pacific County Emergency Management Council convened an emergency meeting. They were furious that the state government would make what they considered a rash decision at such a late hour. They rang Olympia and told state officials that according to their reading of state law, the authority to evacuate belongs to local government. It was Sheriff Benning’s call.
Benning resolutely stood his ground—no evacuation order. Meantime thousands of people had heard about the distant quake and possible tsunami on the radio. Confusion and anxiety spread as the wave got closer and closer. Finally, when the tsunami did arrive, it turned out to be only five and a half inches (14 cm) higher than the normal tide.
In early 1996, a year following the second tsunami fiasco, Stephanie Fritts got hired full time to run the Pacific County Emergency Management Agency, a job she still holds today. Her primary day-to-day responsibility is the 911 call dispatch center, but she’s also in charge of emergency planning. On day one at work, the Emergency Management Council informed her, “Your number one task is to fix this!”—meaning the tsunami problem. They wanted her to come up with a strategy for dealing with potential killer waves, a rational evacuation plan. At the same time they wanted her to do some digging and find a way to solve the false alarm problem.
Fritts knew next to nothing about tsunamis, so she pulled out a phone book and started contacting people who were already working on the issue. She helped to organize a series of public meetings and invited earthquake program manager Chris Jonientz-Trisler from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to drive out to the coast from her office in Seattle and share what she knew about tsunamis. Complaints about the false or overstated warnings came up at every meeting.
Scores of people, including mayors and local officials, stood up in community halls expressing anger and frustration about the warning system. They wanted answers that nobody really had. The technology available at the