Expert preaches tsunami safety.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

The wake-up call came almost a year ago, but by most estimates Northwesterners are still dozing.

When a huge earthquake snapped the ocean floor off Sumatra and sent tsunamis barreling across the ocean on the day after Christmas, people living along the Oregon and Washington coast were looking at their own future. One day - it could be any day - something very similar will happen very close to our own shores. It remains to be seen if people here will fare any better.

Patrick Corcoran is afraid they won't. Corcoran coordinates the coastal storms program for Oregon State University's Sea Grant Extension Service. He fears that people either are ignoring the danger or simply find the prospect so overwhelming they don't know where to start.

But being ready for even a powerful tsunami isn't that hard, he said.

"In some ways, it's a complex topic to understand," Corcoran said. "But the important thing as far as residents and visitors to the coast are concerned is that you don't need a degree in geomorphology to understand what you need to do to be safe."

You don't need a degree to see the danger, either. It comes most of all from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a 600-mile-long gash in the Earth's crust that runs from just off the Northern California coast to Vancouver Island.

The zone has produced 23 major earthquakes in the past 10,000 years, the last in 1700. Some experts say there is a 10 percent to 14 percent chance it could release a massive earthquake and tsunami in the next 50 years. A tsunami spawned by a subduction zone quake could reach Oregon's beaches in 15 minutes.

Surviving something like that, Corcoran said, can be boiled down to three things. First, know the difference between a distant event and a local event. Second, know where to go in each situation. Third, have a communication plan to reconnect with separated family members.

Master those three steps, and your chances of surviving earthquake-spawned tsunamis go way up, Corcoran said. These steps should not replace but be added to the more general guidelines for disaster preparedness, such as having a grab bag or emergency supply kit on hand.

Also, you can't just learn the game plan once and forget about it, as it's all too easy to do when it comes to an event that may or may not happen in your lifetime.

`The good news is they (tsunamis) happen infrequently. The bad news is because they do, we are not reminded how vulnerable we are,' Corcoran said. "Unfortunately, human beings were hard-wired to deal with short-term disasters, like lions jumping out in front of you on the path. What we have now is an understanding that these long-term events are equally as dangerous, but we're sort of predisposed not to worry about them."

Corcoran has spent the past several months working with coastal communities to get the preparedness message out. He said signage and siren warning systems in evacuation zones have improved and education efforts have been stepped up, but too many people haven't given enough thought to how they will react when "the big one" comes.

Step one, he said, is knowing how much reaction time you have, and that's where knowing the difference between a local event and a distant one comes in.

A distant event is a seafloor earthquake that happens a long way off, say, Alaska or Hawaii, giving people here perhaps hours to react. You'll know it's happened because you'll hear the warning - a siren or emergency broadcast, for example.

In a local event - such as a quake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone - you'll feel it before you hear it.

"If you hear about it, it's a distant event," Corcoran said. "If you felt it and it's the big one, you will know. That's a different scenario. You need to get as high as you can as fast as you can if you're in an inundation zone."

It's important to remember the distinction, because people are tempted to react to a tsunami warning siren the way they might to a smoke alarm: rush around in a panic. But a siren means you have several hours to gather family members and get to safety; if the earth shakes it means you might have less than 30 minutes to get at least a hundred feet above sea level.

A communication plan is also simple. It should include a meeting place that is likely to survive the disaster and a phone number outside the area, such as a relative's, where family members can report in once communications are restored.

And as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita showed, people shouldn't count on government aid in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, Corcoran said. While local emergency managers will be doing all they can, the damage from a Cascadia earthquake and tsunami could be so vast that people will need to survive on their own for days at least and possibly longer.

"We tend to think that when our house is on fire the entire fire department comes and puts out the fire. But in the case of the big one, it's like everybody's house is on fire at the same time," Corcoran said. "We need to understand that in that case, we as individuals will be on our own for a few to several days. And I don't think people have that yet."

SURVIVING THE WAVE

Tsunami preparedness information: www.oregongeology.com/sub/links/linksTsunami.HTM; www.tsunami.noaa.gov