Editorial: Alert system could be improved

The magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Chile reminded us that we live in an inter-connected world. It also showed that, no matter how well prepared we are for a potential danger or emergency, no response can ever be perfect.

The temblor happened thousands of miles away in the Southern Hemisphere, but its ripple effect jolted locals in Newport Beach and other coastal California communities out of their Saturday comfort zone, putting city and county officials on edge.

Officials were responding to reports that an oceanic surge was rolling our way. The temblor was recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey at 10:34 p.m. PST on Feb. 26. Because the quake occurred offshore, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a tsunami advisory for California, and a tsunami warning — which is a different alert, warning of more severe potential dangers from a tsunami — for Hawaii and American territories in the Pacific. NOAA forecast that the tsunami waves would reach Newport at 12:12 p.m. Saturday, more than 13 hours after the quake. A swell of small waves reached local shores at around that hour.

It’s important to note, however, that the two sets of alerts were issued by different centers within NOAA, which have separate coverage zones: the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center, which covers California, and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which covers Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam and other U.S. territories. It is easy to confuse the two centers, so it’s understandable if officials, under pressure of figuring out how to handle a potentially dangerous situation with limited time, might have been relying on information from the wrong source.

Last week, Newport Beach officials posted a statement on the city’s website — which was reproduced in Wednesday’s Daily Pilot as a piece by City Manager Dave Kiff — explaining the city’s response to the tsunami advisory and conceding that at least one mistake was made.

The city’s statement mentioned that Newport Beach’s Public Works, Police, Fire and General Services departments, its Lifeguard Division and the city manager’s office “tracked the situation using NOAA’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.” If indeed they were relying on information from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, that’s where they could have erred by mistaking it with the other system covering the West Coast and Alaska. Yet Kiff later said in an interview that he had been monitoring the tsunami advisory via the West Coast center’s website.

The city’s statement was an official answer to public inquiries about why the city had activated the AlertOC system notifying residents by telephone about the tsunami alert after the predicted swell had reached local shores. Kiff and city officials were good enough to state that the city had received two sets of information, and that the latter report of a larger swell predicted to come after the first one hit at 12:12 p.m. turned out be incorrect. City officials, who were monitoring the situation, decided that the first swell wasn’t big enough to justify activating the telephonic alert system then, as Kiff noted in his piece. That turned out to be a correct assumption, and they also correctly decided not to take their chances with the predicted second swell by activating AlertOC as an extra precaution ahead of time.

“… The safety of the community is a top priority, and we will continue to use an abundance of caution when making this type of decision,” Kiff wrote in his Pilot letter. “We do have some lessons to be learned here, but I think we acted correctly based on what we knew and when we knew it.”

However, neither the city’s official statement nor Kiff’s letter mentioned that only 30% of those AlertOC automated calls dialed out to homes and businesses in Newport Beach went through initially because the system was overloaded.

Perhaps it was a good thing that the system failed to work in a non-event rather than the real deal. That said, we call on the city and the county to move swiftly to fix and improve the AlertOC, and to be clear on their sources of information for monitoring tsunamis alerts. And while we commend Kiff and other city officials for calling attention to mistakes made and doing all they could under challenging circumstances to safeguard the residents of Newport Beach, we will take them at their word and expect them to reflect on lessons learned.