COMPARISON OF 1994 AND 2001 TSUNAMI WATCH/TSUNAMI AWARENESS

摘要

The ability of a number of West Coast county and community emergency managers to understand and use tsunami warning and watch messages significantly improved between 1994 and 2001. A tsunami message event, a "warning", occurred in 1994 that allowed a baseline measurement to be taken of some local emergency managers' understanding of the tsunami warning process. The conclusions and recommendations coming out of the study in 1994 were used to develop a national program to improve this local understanding of the process. In June 2001 a second tsunami message event, a "watch", occurred that made it easy to repeat the original 1994 survey to measure any change in the local emergency managers' understanding of this process. Some of these findings were backed-up by another survey that had just been completed in May 2001 through interviews of these emergency managers. Because the second tsunami message event occurred in June 2001, the May 2001 survey could not ask the original 1994 questions and so was designed to indirectly measure any changes in the understanding of tsunami event messages in addition to its main purpose. This purpose was to try to assess the effect of the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program (NTHMP) in local communities after 5 years. Responses indicate a significant improvement in the understanding of the tsunami watch/warning message process by local emergency managers. The NTHMP and partnership is a model for other hazardous events that require a warning process, building an information exchange network, and development of a public education process. This paper will be limited to discussion of the warning process improvement and related issues.