The emergency preparedness community is pretty good at handling the sort of problem that the tsunami poses to Hawaii and the West Coast today. There's plenty of lead time to warn people to get away from the coasts and onto high land. But as FEMA warns in this report on tsunami preparedness, there's a category of tsunamis, where the waves come on quick and fast, where those sorts of skills won't matter:
There are many communities along our nation’s west coast that are vulnerable to a tsunami triggered by an earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone, which could potentially generate a tsunami of 20 feet in elevation or more within 20 minutes. Given their location, it would be impossible to evacuate these communities in time, which could result in a significant loss of life.
One solution to this problem is to build vertical evacuation structures—buildings that are resistant to earthquakes and tall enough to protect evacuees from the waves. When I first read about these buildings, I imagined structures that would tower far above the land. But in fact, they don't need to be more than a few stories tall, and existing structures, like schools, government buildings, parking garages or stadiums, can double as safe harbors.
Not surprisingly, Japan is ahead of us on this count and has even managed to make some of these utilitarian structures somewhat visually pleasing:
In the United States, however, no community has adopted this relatively simple evacuation. In Oregon, a coastal town called Cannon Beach took the FEMA report to heart and started planning a city hall that would double as a vertical evacuation structure. But the cost of the new building was prohibitive to the town, and it looks like it's now focused on reinforcing a bridge along a main evacuation route.
Part of the problem for the town was that, after beginning to take action based on FEMA's recommendations, it ran into one of those weird divisions of government labor that don't always quite make sense:
[Former Cannon Beach mayor Jay] Raskin said he tried to obtain a FEMA grant for the project, but the agency lacks a funding stream that covers creating a new building; most building funds are for seismic retrofitting. “The federal agency that really does the most looking at tsunamis is the NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], and they don’t have things about creating capital improvements,” he said.
