Tsunami scare holds lessons for coast.

Byline: Winston Ross The Register-Guard

FLORENCE - Oregon emergency managers spent Wednesday analyzing their response to the previous night's tsunami warning, looking for flaws in their plans.

Two problems were immediately clear: Conflicting bulletins confused some emergency managers - one said there was no warning in effect, the other issued an alert. And coastal communities reacted to the warning differently. Some evacuated their residents. Others didn't, waiting for word of an actual tsunami from the National Weather Service.

The thing to do, said state earthquake and tsunami program coordinator Jay Wilson, was to clear out low-lying areas as soon as the warning came.

"If we waited for how long it took scientists to basically scale down the size of the earthquake, it would have been too late," Wilson said.

In fact, if a tsunami had been generated from Tuesday's quake, it would have hit shore before it struck buoys in the ocean that scientists rely on to detect tsunamis, said geophysicist Bruce Turner, directing the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center, which issued the alert after a magnitude 7 earthquake struck off the coast of Northern California on Tuesday night.

"Travel time to the buoys was about 48 minutes," Turner said of the "what if" estimates from last night's readings. "Travel time to the coast was 30 minutes. The buoys didn't help us as much as we would have liked."

But Turner didn't go so far as to question the decisions of local emergency managers. "We only put out the warning," he said.

After that, it's a city-by-city or county-by-county decision.

Yachats Rural Fire Protection Chief Frankie Petrick evacuated Yachats as soon as the tsunami warning came. Since Yachats already had sponsored two evacuation drills, about half the residents had bags packed, and knew to walk to high ground. Others drove their cars, which Petrick discouraged as it clogs roads for emergency vehicles.

But Florence officials told callers to stand by and listen for more information on the radio, Siuslaw Valley Fire Protection District Chief John Buchanan said. He consulted with the Florence city manager and port manager and decided to wait.

"We don't evacuate in the warning stage," Buchanan said.

Buchanan said the department was analyzing any failures from Tuesday night. Several department volunteers went to the main fire station, but they're supposed to head to their closest station for deployment, he said. There was also no evacuation in Reedsport or other spots along the Douglas County coastline, Douglas County sheriff's deputy Dwes Hutson said. The county has no siren or telephone warning system along the coast - but commissioners reiterated at their meeting Wednesday morning that they want to see a list of options for putting some system in place, Hutson said.

Douglas County has only one deputy assigned to the coast, and that officer ended up in a traffic jam near the Winchester Bay lighthouse, where onlookers had gathered to scan the ocean. "Our deputy got tied up with 60 cars crowding a road that is supposed to be an evacuation route," Hutson said.

Things went smoother in Coos County, where sirens sounded and people were evacuated from low-lying state parks and the Charleston area, said Desiree Garcia, coordinator for the county's emergency management program.

The biggest challenge was an influx of 911 calls from people wanting to know if they lived in inundation areas and where to go to reach higher ground. The spate of calls - about 200 in 45 minutes - forced the county to double the number of emergency call takers, from three to six, Garcia said.

Farther north in Tillamook County, evacuations went well with few problems and no auto accidents, emergency management employee Joanne Spencer said.

"Eighty percent of everyone who should have moved out did," she said. "We do have a few areas where people could not hear any of the sirens. That's a problem, and we knew it."

There was also some confusion Tuesday night about the emergency bulletins themselves. Lincoln County Emergency Manager Jim Hawley got two phone calls from the state's emergency management office. The first said no warning was in effect, so Hawley broadcast that information across the radio. Five minutes later, "they changed it to a warning," he said.

The problem: Two National Weather Service centers issued two different bulletins.

The first came from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. That bulletin excluded Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California from its alert, because the center is designed to notify other parts of the Pacific Basin of tsunami threats. The Alaska center, which handles North America's West Coast, issued the bulletin that actually applied to the West Coast, where a warning was in effect.

But for those who read the Hawaii bulletin quickly, it was easy to focus on phrases such as "No destructive Pacific-wide tsunami threat exists," and "there is no tsunami warning or watch in effect."

In Coos County, officials got three alerts - saying there was, then wasn't, then was a warning, Garcia said. "It was a little confusing. But the staff immediately began to verify the information."

Turner said he is "open to ideas" on how to improve the communication, adding that the Alaska center has been flooded with e-mails blaming it for issuing a false alarm.

Overall, Wilson called Oregon communities' reaction a "good response," but he said he's fielded many questions about why there aren't more sirens on the coast, and why some that do exist weren't sounded. He'll be gathering lessons from the experience, he said. "It's good for us to test these things," Wilson said.

Reporter Jeff Wright contributed to this report.