| “We recognized, and Japan demonstrated, that people need more and more information at their fingertips. | |
| Jonathan Allan, Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries | |
The need for timely and accurate coastal hazard information for the U.S. West Coast was powerfully demonstrated on March 10, 2011, when a magnitude-9 earthquake struck off the coast of Sendai, Japan. Tsunami waves triggered by the earthquake not only devastated Japan, but caused millions in damage to coastal areas in Oregon and California.
Oregon residents and others eager for tsunami information overloaded an existing online portal providing information on tsunami zones in the state. While coastal managers were able to meet the demand for information that day, it underscored the process they were engaged in to create a new tsunami portal for Oregon and Washington.
The new regional tsunami portal, released in November 2011, displays coastal evacuation zones and allows users to search by street address to determine if they’re in an inundation zone. The portal can also be accessed by free smartphone apps for the iPhone and Android.
“The portal and smartphone apps work seamlessly,” says Jonathan Allan, a geomorphologist in the coastal field office of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, and one of the partners who helped develop the portal for the Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems (NANOOS), part of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System funded through NOAA.
“The smartphones have a huge advantage in that they’re using cellphone GPS data, so users traveling up and down the coast can immediately tell if they’re in an inundation zone or not, and can prepare their procedures for evacuating,” Allan says.
Learning from Catastrophe
The earthquake that triggered the catastrophic tsunami that killed 15,846 in Japan was the fourth largest on record. The tsunami inundation wave height reached 19.5 meters (over 63 feet) on the Sendai Plain in Japan, traveling as much as 5 kilometers (about 3 miles) inland.
The tsunami traveled eastward across the Pacific Ocean, eventually impacting coastal communities in Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast.
Predictions and warnings from both NOAA’s Pacific, and West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Centers meant coastal communities in Washington and Oregon were on guard by the time the tsunami arrived some 9.5 hours after the quake. Harbors along the Oregon and California coasts reported damage to their docks and boats that amounted to millions of dollars.
Heavy user traffic on the Oregon tsunami portal site temporarily crippled the NANOOS GeoServer, Allan says. A short-term fix was implemented to deal with the problem on the day of the tsunami, but it was a wake-up call.
“That event serves as a reminder of the U.S. West Coast’s vulnerability to an earthquake within the Cascadia subduction zone” that stretches from Northern California along the coasts of Oregon and Washington, says Jan Newton, director of NANOOS and a principal oceanographer at the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington. “It highlighted the need to have even better hazard information available to the public to plan for such events.”
Newton cautions that “planning ahead is absolutely critical” because in the event of a local earthquake, a catastrophic tsunami would hit the Pacific Northwest coast within minutes, not hours.
First Draft
Because of the extreme risk of tsunamis to the region, in 2009 the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries took a tsunami Web hazard template from the NOAA Pacific Services Center and, working with NANOOS, modified, updated, and operationalized it to include a synthesized tsunami evacuation GIS layer for the Oregon coast.
Oregon’s first tsunami portal went live in June 2009, and “it worked fairly well,” Allan says. Efforts were already underway to upgrade and expand the site to Washington when the March 2011 tsunami struck.
Beginning in January of that year, the NANOOS working group that Allan chairs had begun identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the original portal and creating a guidance document that included integrating Washington tsunami evacuation zones and bringing the portal more in line with the overall goals of an “integrated” product with the NANOOS visualization system (NVS) framework, which would add new functions.
In February 2011, the portal’s GIS layer was updated to include new maps for distant and local tsunami inundation for the southern Oregon coast.
The need for the mobile applications, which were already being created in parallel with the portal’s upgrades, was underscored by the March tsunami event, Allan says. “We recognized, and Japan demonstrated, that people need more and more information at their fingertips. This is another mechanism for getting information to the public.”
New and Improved
With its release, the new Pacific Northwest Tsunami Evacuation Zones NVS portal and accompanying smartphone apps display Oregon and Washington coastal evacuation zones for distant and local earthquakes and tsunamis, and contain a situational awareness feature linked directly to NOAA’s West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center. This enables statements, advisories, watches, or warnings to be displayed both verbally and graphically on the tsunami portal as they occur.
During a tsunami event, having access to ongoing conditions is important to both emergency managers and the public, Newton says.
NANOOS developed the portal and launched it in partnership with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries and Washington State Department of Natural Resources, the agencies responsible for the original development of the evacuation zones. NOAA’s National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program provided funding for the tsunami inundation models used to map the evacuation zones.
“This was very much a strong collaborative effort that’s generated an outstanding response,” Allan says. On the day the regional portal was announced, about 1,500 users clicked on the site.
“NANOOS is all about bringing together data and making it accessible to the public in a way that really resonates with people and is useful,” Newton says. “This was a particularly successful and relevant application of what we do.”
She adds, “I think what we accomplished here is an outstanding product that could definitely be a model for others.”
For more information on the Pacific Northwest Tsunami Evacuation Zones NVS portal, contact Jan Newton at (206) 543-9152 or newton@apl.washington.edu, or Jonathan Allan at (541) 574-6658 or jonathan.allan@dogami.state.or.us. To view the portal, go to http://nvs.nanoos.org/tsunami. The mobile app for iPhone and Android phones can be found by searching for TsunamiEvac-NW. Other smartphone users can log on to the site from their browsers.
