# Tsunami Disaster Planning



## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Background
Following the Boxing Day tsunami that devastated parts of SE Asia and across the Indian Ocean, has your city reviewed its tsunami risk? Is it vulnerable to tsunamis?

South China Morning Post
February 27, 2005
*Revealed: HK's killer wave disaster plan 'Doomsday scenario' emergency strategy to evacuate danger zones in two hours*
Simon Parry










A tsunami disaster plan aimed at saving as many lives as possible if a giant wave struck Hong Kong has been drawn up by the government as part of a review of contingencies for natural calamities, the Sunday Morning Post has learned.

Police and five government departments have prepared guidelines for a "doomsday scenario" in which a tsunami like the devastating Indian Ocean one of December 26 engulfs the city.

Working on the assumption that there could be less than two hours' warning, they have looked into how to clear MTR stations and road tunnels, contain public panic and get as many people as possible to a safe height above sea level before the huge wave struck.

Secretary for Security Ambrose Lee Siu-kwong will on Saturday launch a year -long public information drive - "Safer living - reducing natural disaster campaign" - to promote the guidelines, along with contingencies for other catastrophes such as earthquakes and floods. 

The campaign - the biggest disaster awareness project of its kind in Hong Kong - involves police, the Red Cross, the Security Bureau, the Observatory and the Civil Engineering, Drainage Services and Information Services departments.

Television and newspaper campaigns, public service announcements and lectures are expected to be organised throughout the year to hammer home information on what to do if a tsunami approaches the city or if another type of natural disaster strikes.

The initiative follows criticism of the government from geologists at the University of Hong Kong, who told the South China Morning Post last month there was no coherent action plan to deal with the approach of a tsunami.

A group of senior police officers met the geologists the next week and have now drawn up a disaster plan based on the approach of a tsunami triggered by an underwater earthquake off the northern Philippines.

Such an earthquake would theoretically be picked up by the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, giving Hong Kong advance warning of the approach of the wave.

"We might have only two hours' warning or maybe less," said Superintendent Joseph Yam Chiu-fan, assistant district commander for Kowloon City, who met the academics and worked on the police plan.

"From our research, based on what happened in Phuket, anywhere above 15 metres from sea level will be safe. We would need to evacuate all the tunnels and the MTR and cross-harbour tunnels and keep people away from the beaches and seafront."

Under the plan, the Observatory and the media would be used to alert people to an approaching tsunami, while police would take charge of evacuation procedures and public order, as well as identifying victims in a worst-case scenario.

Superintendent Yam said a tsunami was only likely to strike every 200 years but said: "We cannot eliminate the risk. It is important to know how to warn the public and to have a contingency plan in place."

A spokesman for the Civil Engineering Department, which is co-ordinating next week's launch, said the campaign would cover "not only tsunami but a number of different types of disasters".

He denied the campaign was a direct response to the tsunami, saying the government had been planning a disaster management campaign before then.

Andrew Malone, of the University of Hong Kong's Earth Sciences Department and former head of the government's Geotechnical Department said: "It is good to see that there is such a well co-ordinated response. It is a very positive step and I am confident that it will be competently managed."

Fellow academic Jason Ali, who held talks with police, said the disaster plan was based on the assumption that not everybody could be saved if a tsunami struck but its impact could be reduced.

He said the government's response had been "fantastic". "We raised the level of awareness and they responded accordingly."

A spokesman for the Security Bureau said: "The plan will build on the established contingency plans and systems and set out the arrangements for future responses to catastrophic events outside the SAR."

But retired academic Leung Chik-wing, former head of geography at the university, said warning systems might not detect a "tsunami" if it was triggered by a typhoon.

Fifteen thousand people died when a nine-metre-high wave swept across Hong Kong in 1937. Mr Leung said the risk of a repeat catastrophe had been heightened by reclamation and inadequate sea defences.

Separately, Disney is understood to be taking the possibility of a tsunami into account as it draws up safety guidelines for its Hong Kong theme park, which opens in September.

Disney representatives have contacted tsunami experts and theme park spokeswoman Esther Wong confirmed the guidelines for the Penny's Bay theme park were being updated.


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*Singapore not completely immune from tsunamis: expert *
19 September 2008
Agence France Presse

Singapore, one of Asia's wealthiest cities, is not completely immune from a tsunami and should prepare for the possibility, an expert on coastal areas warned Friday.

The island-state can be hit by a tsunami generated from three locations and the waves could damage key coastal infrastructure without being too high, said Professor Wong Poh Poh of the National University of Singapore geography department.

"It's not that we are totally immune. No, we are not immune," Wong said.

He was speaking at a news conference to launch a report, by the aid and development organisation World Vision, on the impact of climate change on poor people.

To cause damage, waves hitting Singapore need not be as huge as the ones that devastated Indonesia's Aceh in December 2004, killing 168,000 people, Wong said.

Aceh was struck by a wave about 10 metres (33 feet) high.

"We don't need 10 metres. The problem with Singapore is... we have a lot of infrastructure on the coast. All you need is a very low wave to just come in and hit certain areas," he said.

"Changi Airport will be very vulnerable," he said, adding the man-made island of Jurong which houses a sprawling petrochemical complex is also at risk, and urged the government to commission a study on tsunamis.


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## the spliff fairy (Oct 21, 2002)

man tsunami striking HK would be catastrophic, the worlds most crowded place in such a small 'wipe-outable' area. In areas of Indonesia all buildings and road surfaces were wiped out, right down to the bedrock, and many cities looked like Hiroshima as remarked upon by the reporters.

*If you think about it 1 sq. metre of water weighs one tonne.* Static it weighs down harmlessly onto the land, or as a splash it will harmlessly bounce off backward. However in a surge the tsunami's power is truly unleashed. A surge as identified as when the one tonne of water has nowhere to bounce backwards on and is propelled forward by the endless push of water behind it. Only after this disaster did historians discover how a 'wave' only 15 feet high (in truth it is a neverending surge) wiped out the entire Minoan civilisation. 

In short its not the height of the water/ wave, but the motion of it propelled by the force behind. A 15 ft wave caused by a 6.7 earthquake may do damage on coastal defences, a 15ft wave from a 9.0 earthquake will flood deep inland for hours, and wipe out entire cities to the bedrock.

A video from one of the Indonesia cities shows the surge from a house that miraculously survived among thousands that disappeared - the family crying because they think theyre house is next. If you look at the water you'll see there's little chance of survival not from the depth, but from the force of the flow that carries whole houses away. At 0:50 after the event you'll see the whole town has disappeared:






The Cyclone in Burma that struck at night killed over 200,000 due to similar sea surges that obliterated many rural villages. Imagine all that water against your flimsy cottage - in total pitch black.


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## Imperfect Ending (Apr 7, 2003)

One good thing about HK, the hills rises up dramatically unlike the flatlands of Aceh


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## barsa22 (Feb 13, 2008)

Here in Chile, most major cities have evacuation programs and safe areas to go for tsunamis. There are also alarms to prevent people staying at home.


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*INTERVIEW-Japan needs better tsunami infrastructure - expert*
28 March 2011

SENDAI, Japan, March 28 (Reuters) - More infrastructure spending by Japan could have lessened the impact of this month's deadly tsunami but the government has become too reliant on low-cost measures such as handing out warning maps, a prominent tsunami researcher said.

*Japan should invoke Western-style urban planning to keep houses and hospitals further from the coast as it rebuilds from the crippling disaster, said Fumihiko Imamura, a professor at Tohoku University's Disaster Control Research Centre.*

Japan's cash-strapped government has moved away in recent years from costly projects such as increasing the height of sea walls to budget measures like producing maps that show which areas are at lower sea levels, he said.

"We cooperate with the government on tsunami countermeasures, but there has been less financing and sometimes there isn't enough for the construction of structural measures," Imamura said in an interview on Sunday.

"Now, the government's focus has shifted to non-structural measures, because they are cheaper."

Imamura, a scientist who has been studying tsunami for nearly 30 years, uses computer models based on historical data to predict the speed and size of the deadly waves caused by earthquakes.

The tsunami that savaged Japan's northeast coast on March 11 was one of the largest in recorded history and far bigger than anything anticipated by scientists because they did not expect such a massive earthquake, he said.

The disaster killed more than 10,000 in the world's third-biggest economy and nearly 17,500 are missing.

The waves were so big that they destroyed several of the tidal gauges used to measure wave size. The tsunami itself lasted as long as two days, as its waves reached as far as Chile before being reflected back to Japan, he said.

As one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries, Japan is at the forefront of developing measures to lessen the impact of the waves, but more needs to be done.

*The government should plant more pine and mangrove trees along the coast to slow down a tsunami, and build more evacuation centres that can withstand the waves, Imamura said.*

He also believes that Japan should better plan for disasters when rebuilding ravaged towns.

*One of the world's most densely populated countries, even Japan's rural towns and villages often seem cramped, with a handful of houses crimped together near the coast.*

*"We are living very close to the coast. The fishing industry needs to be near the coast, but living areas and other facilities need to be farther in," Imamura said.*

"We need land-use planning."


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## jessetait (May 26, 2011)

There is no way people can prevent Tsunami,even if you know how to swim.Scientists are worried about some huge mountain in the Canaries that may fall into the sea.It'll produce a Tsunami of up to 20m high on the east coast of the US.


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## Ocean Railroader (Jun 18, 2011)

I think some of the Cities in the US should plan for something like this in that there is a fairly good chance that we are over due for a comet strike into one of the Earth's oceans which would create a wave hundreds of feet high. Even a comet or a meteor less then a few hundred feet across could set of a large wave.

A example of a type of plan that should be in place would be say the US state of Virginia. NASA reports that a large comet a quarter of a mile wide is going to hit off the east coast in less then two days. What the state should do is have every highway that leads from the coast line to the Blue Ridge Mountains change over to only flow west. They should also set up evacuation routes that should lead to places in the state that are at least 800 to 900 feet above sea level and should order people to even head though West Virginia by changing the West Virginia turnpike's east west lanes to west only to avoid over crowding in the eastern mountainous region of Virginia to do the massive floods of people leaving the doomed cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach.


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## the spliff fairy (Oct 21, 2002)

the East Coast of the US and Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and Western Europe are in danger from a mega-tsunami triggered if an underwater cliff collapses off from one of the Canary Islands volcano. Only a matter of time apparently?

http://rense.com/general56/tsu.htm


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## -Corey- (Jul 8, 2005)

There are Tsunami Evacuation signs in San Diego along the coast (the only one in Southern California), but I don't know if they actually have sirens... like in Oregon or Washington.









San Diego County Tsunami Inundation Areas


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## castermaild55 (Sep 8, 2005)

*The Kamaishi Miracle*


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