Yesterday morning served as quite the real-world test of multiple natural-disaster warning systems and local response processes. A few thoughts while it's fresh...

Early warning systems and online information

Many of us are familiar with what to do when warned about an earthquake — but few of us know what to do about a tsunami warning:

• My smartphone sitting on my desk flashed with a warning of the earthquake. (The alert originated from the USGS ShakeAlert early warning system and was distributed to my phone via Google's Android Earthquake Alerts System.) I was surprised to see the estimate of 6.0 magnitude, and decided that warranted crouching under my office desk. After a moment, when I hadn't felt any movement and realized by looking at earthquake.usgs.gov on my phone that the alert was for 200+ miles away, I got up and back to my normal routine. The information from ShakeAlert was momentarily startling, but it's relatively straightforward to understand: the earthquake was detected at a comparatively larger magnitude, therefore the alert was shared with phones over a wider extent of Northern California. While it turned out the earthquake didn't actually propagate in ways that were felt here, it was only a brief window of uncertainty, and it was straightforward to check soon after:

• The tsunami warning, on the other hand, was harder to interpret and triggered a cascading series of reactions and actions by local officials over the next hour and a half.
• People apparently started searching Google with questions like what is the speed of a tsunami. And that was indeed probably the main factor here. The National Weather Service Tsunami Warning Center decided to issue a full "warning" at 10:49 a.m. (5 minutes after the earthquake was detected by USGS) They skipped over an information statement, a watch, and an advisory — and immediately went to the highest possible level of tsunami message. The "warning" is also apparently the only level for which NWS broadcasts out messages via the Wireless Emergency Alert System. According to this overview, NWS is only able to target WEA alerts to cell phones on a county-by-county basis. So at 10:49 a.m., the warning was broadcast to entire counties from the Santa Cruz coast up to the Oregon coast (including people at the eastern reaches of those counties, such as Dublin or Livermore). The urgency looks more clear now that I'm reading the details and seeing that the text of the full tsunami "message" estimated that the people of Fort Bragg had 21 minutes remaining before a potential tsunami might reach their area:

• In contrast, the potential tsunami was estimated to reach San Francisco in 1 hour and 21 minutes from when the warning was issued.
• When I read the WEA alert on my phone, I had intuited some amount of this — that a potential tsunami would take a meaningfully long amount of time to reach San Francisco Bay — long enough there was no need to take any immediate steps other than watching for more updates. However, the alert itself didn't offer this level of granularity. The National Weather Service immediately deployed its full force because there was a decent chance that parts of the northern California coast were going to face an almost immediate threat, if the earthquake had in fact triggered a tsunami.

Alameda Unified and City of Alameda comms

• At 11:11 a.m., Alameda Unified blasted the following to the parents of ~10,000 students by email and SMS:

Families, We are aware of the tsunami warning and are in touch with City's Emergency Operations Team. Their direction for now is to stay in place as we gather more information. We are also in touch with all of the school sites. Please stay tuned for more information.

• At 11:33 a.m., Alameda Unified followed up via email (but not SMS) with:

Dear FAmilies, We are still gathering information on the tsunami warning and working closely with the City. In an abundance of caution, we are putting our school sites into a shelter in place so that we can communicate with everyone quickly if need be. We wil continue to follow all news and alerts.

• At 11:42 a.m., City of Alameda used AC Alert (the county-wide opt-in emergency messaging system) to send:

Tsunami warning in effect. Stay out of water and away from the shoreline, beaches, harbors, marinas, and piers. Move at least 1 block inland. Everyone else should remain in place.

• At 12:06 p.m., the City of Alameda sent via AC Alert:

Tsunami Warning is canceled for the coastal areas of California and Oregon – thank you for staying safe!

• At 12:36 p.m., Alameda Unified blasted via both email and SMS:

All Families, The Tsunami Warning was lifted several minutes ago, as was AUSD's Shelter in Place. Schools are returning to normal operations. 

Alameda Unified's email version added that:

We will have more information about today's incident in a few hours.

• At 2:17 p.m., Alameda Unified sent a long "debrief" letter from the superintendent via email listing the step-by-step decisions of the school district, in consultation with the City of Alameda.

During this time, we also received an email blast specifically from the principal at our kids' elementary school with a school-specific update. And at the end of the day, we also received an email directly from our kindergartener's teacher about the day's activities and how the youngest students had done (just fine!)

Flexible comms channels helps to reach different people with different amounts and frequencies of updates

AUSD is well equipped with flexible enough communication channels to be able to reach parents for the entire school district, an individual school, and an individual class. I didn't even realize until the superintendent's "debrief" email late in the day that Encinal Junior/High and Paden students were briefly moved off their campuses. My kids don't go to those schools, so I didn't need to know and they had ways to target all their communications appropriately. If only the National Weather Service had the same level of targeting for their original tsunami warning message!

Because AUSD is also able to blast a mixture of short SMS messages for time-critical updates, emails for intermediate updates, and long emails, they could give the would-be-worriers amongst us frequent updates by email and the promise of an eventual debrief. And they could reserve the SMS channel for just any critical messages, so they wouldn't overwhelm less-connected parents with unnecessary intermediate updates. In contrast, the City of Alameda doesn't seem to have such a wide range of outbound communication options.

While reading up on this topic, I've now learned that NWS posts intermediate update "message" documents to tsunami.gov But also now, after the fact, I've learned how confusing these updates can be: the reason why people on social media started posting about the warning being lifted at ~11:30, when it wasn't actually lifted until 11:54, is was due to naive readers confusing the "warning" issued for California and Oregon by the Alaska-based NWS tsunami warning center and an "information statement" from the Hawaii-based NWS tsunami warning center for Hawaii.

Dashboards of data vs. trust and communication

One other psychological factor I can't help but notice. Some of us — especially us parents — are both worry prone and overly wired. We've gotten used to doing our work on computer screens while simultaneously watching PM2.5 levels on AirNow and PurpleAir, following countless COVID dashboards, or turning to Twitter to post "earthquake!"

I definitely take some comfort in these wonky details (and also find it interesting)... but it can also be too easy to forget that data and dashboards and even the extremely sophisticated USGS ShakeAlerts sent directly to Android operating system tell a partial picture.

It does sound like the principals and teachers were having to handle quite a number of parents coming to campus to pick up their kids right after receiving that NWS phone blast. I even heard third-hand of summoning Uber drivers to pick up their kids from school. I almost wonder if the need to go to "shelter in place" across all campuses was just as much to keep track of parents coming to grab students as it was to actually be ready to shift any students off-site if actually advised by the city's emergency operations team.

And some Alamedans without kids probably found themselves also thinking about or making hasty decisions to leave Alameda Island for "higher ground" — as the NWS alert said — even though the City of Alameda alert eventually specified that "higher ground" effectively meant getting off the beach or, at most, walking one single block inland.

I won't judge anyone in a moment of uncertainly, especially when it concerns their families... but let me suggest that this is a moment to also think about this as an information and communications challenge:

• What's the ideal amount of information that the City of Alameda would have shared with us?
• How would that information have been paced during those ~2 hours?
• What education/marketing/outreach would have been helpful in advance to be primed with a bit of context and some rules-of-thumb?

Educating ourselves and each other

Turns out that last item has already started...

Here's a helpful presentation from a California Geological Survey staffer visiting Alameda and a slideset from the same time from the City of Alameda. And there are more videos from a series of events in 2019 under the tsunami section of AFD's disaster prepardness webpage. And there was a presentation to City Council in November of 2020.

While this fortunately wasn't a disaster, the geographer's definition of a natural disaster is still relevant: a natural disaster = a natural hazard + a community of affected people

The Alameda Unified community did an admirable job yesterday.

And for the broader community of Alameda, it's worth the City of Alameda considering what of yesterday can be used to inform the Tsunami Preparation Plan and Emergency Operations Plan, education, marketing, communication channels, and our ability to navigate uncertain moments and real risks together.