Saturday night’s tsunami warning issued for the Gulf of Alaska coast was downgraded and later canceled, but not before many people evacuated low-lying areas, causing traffic jams and widespread confusion.
On Saturday night, Roger and Carol Christianson were settling into their RV parked at the end of the Homer Spit when their cellphones buzzed violently: A tsunami warning.. Soon, the Michigan couple, touring Alaska with a group of other RVers, heard sirens sounding. That’s when they got nervous, said Christianson.They quickly uncoupled a car they were towing and joined a long line of cars inching down the Homer Spit to higher ground.
“We issue a warning right away — because we need to get anybody in the immediate area out of danger right away,” he said. Meanwhile, an alert from the Tsunami Warning Center can trigger an emergency response. Federal, state and local emergency management entities follow their own procedures for what happens when an initial tsunami warning alert is received, usually through a notification sent by the National Weather Service. Those responses — which could include sirens warning residents to evacuate or other actions — can vary, said Gridley.
The wireless emergency alerts are a bit of a blunt instrument, said Gridley. They are not “geo-fenced” to target only people in potential inundation zones, he said. It’s good that so many people can be reached so quickly, but the broad zones can cause people who don’t need the alerts to get them. “While Homer may have felt confident that the sirens need to be ignored, I have coastal communities around the other side of that bay that potentially were in harm’s way,” Ahlberg said. “Until I have clear that we are not in harm’s way then I will follow my standard operating procedure.”
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