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Millions of people along the coasts of the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii and Alaska rely on tsunami warnings to tell them that potentially dangerous waves are coming, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Scientists are worried budget cuts by the Trump administration will make the warnings less reliable. NPR's Katia Riddle reports.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: There was a time not that long ago in the United States when the federal government did not warn people about tsunamis in the aftermath of earthquakes. We learned the hard way - after a deadly wave traveled all the way across the Pacific - why we needed to invest in such a system.
MIKE WEST: It was started in 1946, after an earthquake from Alaska killed 150 people in Hawaii.
RIDDLE: Mike West is a seismologist. The earthquake he's describing about 60 years ago was 8.6 in magnitude. After it happened, the government created a warning system. Earthquakes are not generally foreseeable, but the deadly tsunamis that often result can be predicted. Today, there are two federal centers dedicated to issuing tsunami warnings, one in Hawaii and one in Alaska.
WEST: Their mission is very simple. It is to issue accurate and fast warnings about impending tsunamis.
RIDDLE: West directs an organization called the Alaska Earthquake Center. When there's an earthquake, he and his staff measure it and interpret seismic data from different geophysical monitoring stations all over Alaska. Then they feed real-time information to the federal government to help predict when and where exactly the tsunami will be. This year, he says, he was waiting on the payment of $300,000 in federal money. He didn't hear the funding was canceled until the last minute.
WEST: The day before it was supposed to start, got the email that, yeah, that's not going to happen this year.
RIDDLE: That means NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will no longer be able to use this up-to-the-minute local data to inform their tsunami warnings. This cut is one of many the agency has sustained under the Trump administration. West says he's now worried about the well-being of the whole system.
WEST: To me, the bigger thing going on here is just a slow erosion of all of NOAA's tsunami efforts.
RIDDLE: In an email, NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster blamed the Biden administration for terminating the grant. She stressed that NOAA will still be able to issue tsunami warnings informed by other sources and that they anticipate new delays will be only, quote, "30 to 60 seconds." Seismologist Mike West believes delays could be longer. He stresses that regardless, when people need to evacuate for a tsunami, they could have just minutes to get to higher ground.
WEST: There are plenty of Alaska communities that have, you know, 20 to 40 minutes.
RIDDLE: One such community is a town of 7,000 people called Homer. Kasey Aderhold lives there.
KASEY ADERHOLD: We're right above - kind of in the middle of where the 1964 earthquake ruptured.
RIDDLE: Aderhold is also a seismologist. She works at an organization called EarthScope. She worries that tsunami warnings will not only be less timely, but less accurate. People in her community complain when they are warned to evacuate unnecessarily. That already happens too often, she says, especially when it comes to schools.
ADERHOLD: In some of these cases, there were decisions made to evacuate areas that didn't need to be evacuated.
RIDDLE: Experts worry that if these warnings become even less accurate, people will not heed them when it really counts. It's not just Alaska that could suffer. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon says he is concerned for his constituents.
RON WYDEN: Tens of thousands of Oregonians live in tsunami zones. The Oregon coast also gets millions of visitors annually. So every second matters when a tsunami is going to strike.
RIDDLE: Wyden says he and his colleagues are fighting in Congress to restore this funding and improve the overall health of the agency. Hundreds of employees at NOAA were fired this year. Its budget for next year is uncertain. Wyden lays the blame for any resulting damage to NOAA's performance squarely at the feet of President Trump.
WYDEN: He wants to take a wrecking ball to tsunami early warning systems, and he is going to make families up and down throughout the west less safe.
RIDDLE: The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Alaska seismologist Mike West says he plans to continue speaking out about this. He worries that it will take another catastrophic disaster to remind people why we invented this system in the first place.
WEST: I feel liable.
RIDDLE: Sometimes he feels like he's living in the future, looking back on a day after a disaster when someone asks, why didn't anyone tell us that tsunami warnings weren't good enough?
WEST: I don't want to be the one responding to, well, how come you guys screwed this up so bad?
RIDDLE: When and if that question comes, Mike West wants to be able to say he did everything he could.
Katia Riddle, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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