I was curious to see how well the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center worked in the aftermath of the Chilean eathquake yesterday. As you might recall the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami killed 230,000 people. Many of whom would not have died if the Indian Ocean had an effective tsunami warning system.
I went to the website site of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in to check what time the bulletins went out after the tsunami. The Chilean earthquake happened at 6:34 UTC. The first tsunami warning went out from the warning center at 6:46 UTC. That means they will issue a warning 12 minutes after the initial earthquake. Actually issuing the warning 12 minutes after the earthquake seems like a pretty good response to me. Here is a link to their initial warning.
As the day progressed the warning area was expanded, until four hours later when it actually when it was expanded to a Pacific wide warning.
I was curious when I noticed that the Pacific wide alert went out at 12:45 AM Honolulu time. I talked to friends of mine in Hawaii and emergency sirens didn't go off till 6 AM that morning. I did some investigation and apparently there was nothing sinister involved. The Hawaii civil defense people were on the job, but didn't see any reason to get people out of bed when the tsunami wouldn't be hitting Hawaii until 11 AM.
It seems kind of silly for anyone to worry about an earthquake that happened 6600 miles away but 61 people were killed in Hilo, Hawaii by the tsunami from the 1960 Chilean earthquake. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center was actually created as a response to a 1946 tsunami that hit Hilo killing 160 people.
Another interesting aspect to the Chilean earthquake is that the earthquake was hundreds of times more powerful than the earthquake that happened earlier this year in Haiti with the death toll was hundreds of times less . There are actually several news articles analyzing this.
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