The Tsunami Countdown (5 page)

“Is the buoy active? This might be a good test for them. At their location, they should be getting a wave reading just about
the same time Johnston Island does.”

“I’ll call NOAA and have them radio the ship to be ready.”

“What do you need from me?”

The buzzer for the front gate sounded.

“You need to handle the tour group,” Reggie said, pointing toward the reception area.

“Looks like it’s showtime. Come find me when we get the tide readings from Christmas Island.”

Kai pressed the button to open the gate, then quickly assembled his presentation materials. It looked like it was going to
be a busy day after all.

9:23 a.m
.

H
arold Franklin seethed quietly as the catamaran cruised through the water three miles west of Christmas Island. He had been
looking forward to this vacation for months, primarily because of the island’s world-renowned bonefishing. Standing in the
surf, casting a line, and hauling in some bonefish—that was why he was here. Not to sit on some boat with seven other people
he didn’t know. Besides, he hated snorkeling. “How long are we going to be out here?” Harold said.

His wife, Gina, who was sunning on the canvas stretched between the catamaran’s hulls and nursing a piña colada, narrowed
her eyes at him. “Listen, buddy, I let you plan this trip because you said we could spend some time doing things other than
fishing. I’m not sitting in the hotel room every day by myself while you’re down at the beach. I should have talked you into
going to Hawaii. At least there they have shopping and a decent cup of coffee.”

“But come on. Snorkeling? Do you really need me here for this?”

“At the hotel, they said this is the best reef in the area. And I don’t know anyone else here, so I don’t want to hear another
word about it. You’ll get to fish plenty this week.”

“If we’re going snorkeling, then I wish we’d get it over with.”

“The captain said he got a report of some whales out here. Don’t you want to see them?”

“Whales live underwater. We won’t see anything.” It had taken Harold and Gina six hours to get from Sacramento to Honolulu,
then another three hours on the one weekly flight that traveled the thirteen hundred miles due south to Christmas Island.
He didn’t come all that way to watch a bump in the ocean. Harold looked up at the azure sky.

“At least it’s not raining,” he said. Just as they had set sail, they had heard a huge boom, like a gigantic thunderclap.
But there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, so the cruise left as scheduled.

“Have a drink,” Gina said. “Get comfortable like everyone else.”

Harold put his hand on her shoulder and stood up, looking back toward Christmas Island.

“What’s the matter?” Gina said.

“I don’t know. Something’s going on with the birds.”

The island was small and sparsely populated, its 3,200 residents surviving primarily as subsistence farmers and on whatever
tourist dollars they could bring in. But it was so expensive and inconvenient that few tourists—mostly Americans like Harold
and Gina—vacationed there. The island, an expanse of crushed coral sand only twelve feet above sea level at its highest point,
provided a home for hundreds of bird species and colorful underwater life.

Because Harold was an avid hunter as well as a fisherman, the birds had caught his attention. It seemed like every bird on
the island, thousands of them, had suddenly taken flight.

“What do you make of that?” Harold said to no one in particular.

By this time everyone on board was looking at the island, including the dive master and captain. Both of them were Americans
who had moved to Christmas Island to start their small dive business. Captain Pete and Dive Master Dave, they called themselves,
which Harold had thought a bit corny. Pete cut the motor to a crawl.

“Hey, Pete,” Dave said, “you see any smoke?”

“Nope,” Pete said. “Looks like they got spooked by something, though.”

“What about an earthquake?” Harold said. He knew from his lifetime in California that dogs and other animals could detect
natural disasters before people could.

“Nope,” Pete said again. “This isn’t an earthquake zone. No volcanoes, either.”

Harold pulled out the binoculars he kept in his bag.

“We better radio in and see what’s going on,” Dave said.

As Pete called in to the shop, Harold got a closer look at the island. From this distance, even with the binoculars, the birds
looked like a swarm of bees circling the island. But something else grabbed his attention.

“That’s weird,” he said.

“What?” said Gina.

“The beach is getting bigger.”

“What do you mean the beach is getting bigger?” Gina said, her voice rising in volume. Dave must have heard her.

“What about the beach?” Dave said to Harold.

Harold described what he could see. The beach, which had extended about a hundred yards from the ocean to the trees only a
minute before, was growing by what seemed like the same amount every few seconds. After another moment he could see exposed
reef around the entire island. Several beachgoers ran down to the newly uncovered sand, while others simply stood and watched.

“Oh, no!” said Dave. He ran over to Pete, who had just reached the dive base on the radio and asked what was happening there.
Before they could reply, Dave yanked the transmitter out of Pete’s hand.

“Get the boat as far away from the island as fast as you can! Right now!” he yelled at Pete. Confused and not used to taking
orders on his own boat, Pete nevertheless saw the alarm in Dave’s eyes and told everyone to hang on. He gunned the engine
until they were doing twenty knots.

Dave clicked on the transmitter. “Base, this is
Seabiscuit
, do you read?”

A woman on the other end answered. Harold remembered her as Tasha, the girl who had checked them in for the dive. Before they’d
left on the trip, Dave and Tasha’s canoodling in the shop had been practically pornographic.

“I read you,
Seabiscuit
,” she said. “I just looked out the window. The tide is going way out.”

“Tasha, that’s not the tide! A tsunami is coming! Get out of there!”

“Oh my God! What should I do?”

“Get to the highest point you can.”

“What about you?”

“We’re okay. We’re in deep water. Tsunamis only get big in shallow water.”

Tasha’s panicked voice came back. “But there’s nowhere to go!”

Harold knew she was right. Not only was the highest point on the island only twelve feet above sea level, there was only a
smattering of two-story buildings on the island, and none near the dive shop.

“Then climb a tree!”

“It’s too late!” Harold said and pointed.

Gina screamed. “Look!”

Even faster than it had rushed out, the water began pouring back toward the beach. The small figures Harold could see with
the binoculars ran back toward the island. Some of them were caught by the incoming wave even before they reached the trees.

But the image between him and the island grew more terrifying. The water rose until it completely obscured even the tallest
tree. Harold realized it would be only seconds before the mammoth wave covered the island.

A hiss of static issued from the radio. Tasha was gone.

Harold, wide-eyed, could only shake his head and mutter to himself.

“I guess we should have gone to Hawaii.”

9:31 a.m
.

T
he Pacific Tsunami Warning Center was tiny, so the walking portion of the Japanese school tour went quickly. Kai took them
into the conference room where the children could sit. The sixth graders had been listening quietly, the teacher translating
while Kai spoke. Kai knew the Japanese language of his father’s ancestry about as well as he knew the Italian language of
his mother’s, which meant that he could order sushi or rigatoni and that was about it. Japan had always been particularly
susceptible to tsunamis, and the videos from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand showing the tsunami carrying away people,
buildings, and cars had only added to the students’ curiosity. Kai capitalized on their interest by telling stories about
tsunamis that had hit Hawaii in the past.

“Do you remember me telling you about the tsunami that struck Hilo in 1946?” he said.

A couple of kids nodded. Kai always started the tour off by telling them how the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center was founded.
On April 1, 1946, an earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale was generated in the Aleutian Islands. No one in Hawaii
knew that it had happened, except for a few seismologists. Five hours later, the first of a series of waves hit the northern
shore of the Big Island. Hilo, on the northeast side of the island, was the only large city facing that direction. Even when
people got word that a tsunami had struck, many thought it was an April Fool’s Day prank. But it wasn’t a joke. More than
150 Hawaiians perished that day.

Kai went on with the story: “One of the common misconceptions about tsunamis is that they consist of one huge wave. In fact,
tsunamis typically come in a series of waves created by the earthquake-displaced water rebounding up and down, with the third
or fourth wave in the series usually the biggest. The waves alternate with troughs that are just as low as the waves are high,
which is why the water recedes from the beach before every wave. The energy of each wave extends to the bottom of the ocean,
accounting for the long periods between waves. Because people aren’t aware of these tsunami behaviors, they often put themselves
in unnecessary danger.

“There was a school in a town called Laupahoehoe to the northwest of Hilo,” he added. “In fact, the kids at the
school were just about your age, and they saw an actual tsunami.”

That brought a gasp from the kids.

“I’ll even show you a couple of pictures from the event.” Kai clicked on the conference room projector, which was linked to
his laptop. The first photo showed the schoolhouse as it had looked before the tsunami, perched only one hundred feet from
the shore on a beautiful beach with swaying palm trees. Several smaller houses surrounded it.

“This is where the kids went to school. Imagine being able to go to the beach for recess!” The children murmured at that thought.

“When the second wave of the tsunami arrived at nine a.m., the kids were already in class. None of them had even seen the
first small wave. A few of them who could see out the window noticed the receding water, and the rest of the children jumped
up and ran out to see what was going on, with a schoolteacher following them. Some of them even ran into the bay to look at
the exposed seafloor.

“As they were playing around, the water started to come back in. It just seemed like a fast-rising tide at first, so they
weren’t too worried as they ran back toward the schoolhouse. But the next thing they saw was a massive wave rushing across
the bay at forty miles an hour.” Kai saw some quizzical looks and realized that he was accustomed
to giving tours to Americans. Japan used kilometers. “That’s about seventy kilometers per hour.” He pointed at a girl sitting
near him. “How fast do you think you can run?”

The girl shrugged and spoke unexpectedly good English. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think you could run seventy kilometers per hour?”

Her face turned crimson. She shook her head.

“You’re right,” Kai said. “Actually, the fastest man in the world can only run about forty kilometers per hour, and even then
he can only keep it up for a hundred meters.” He winked at the girl. “Next time you’re on the sidewalk, try to outrun a car
that’s passing next to you on the road. If you can’t outrun that car, you can’t outrun a tsunami, either. Now, where was I?”

A boy courteously raised his hand. Kai nodded, and the boy spoke in a measured voice. “The wave approached.” Apparently their
English was much better than Kai’s Japanese.

“Right. Well, despite what you may have seen in the movies, a tsunami is seldom a big curling wave like the ones you see on
the Banzai Pipeline, the popular surfing spot on the North Shore. Instead, a tsunami is usually a churning mass of white foam
that we call a bore.” Kai clicked to the next slide. It showed a wave approaching the beach that was the height of the trees.
“This is a picture
from Phuket, Thailand, during the Asian tsunami. As you can see, it looks a lot like the waves you see in a river rapid. This
bore smashes everything in its path and carries the wreckage along with it, so that you have not only the water coming at
you but also boats, trees, cars, pieces of buildings, and anything else it has scooped up.

“Now, I’ve heard some kids come through here and say that if we ever got a real tsunami coming this way, they’d like to try
to surf that big mama.” Some of the kids laughed and nodded. “Oh, you think you would too? Let me show you video of a relatively
small tsunami coming into shore in a bay in Alaska.”

Kai clicked on the icon, and the screen showed a cove with several fishing boats and a tiny village perched on the shore to
the left. The jittery camera was held by an amateur videographer standing on a cliff. From the right, a white froth about
fifteen feet high rushed toward the shore. The man holding the camera yelled something incomprehensible just as the wave smacked
into a boat, immediately capsizing it. Other boats got caught in the onslaught as the wave swept the wreckage toward the shore.
No one was on the boats, but small figures on the shore could be seen scrambling for higher ground. They all rushed to the
peak of a small hill just as the wave crashed along the shore, washing over and through the buildings. One of the buildings
collapsed.

“That is the kind of wave the kids at Laupahoehoe Elementary School saw rushing toward them. Except the wave that day was
twice the height of the one you just saw. It swept toward them at seventy kilometers per hour, ten meters high, and all they
could do was run. Some made it to high ground because they were still in the school when they saw the wave coming in.” Kai
put on his most serious face. “But sixteen children and five schoolteachers died that day. They never even found three of
the children. They died because they didn’t understand what was about to happen until it was too late. And that’s why most
of the 250,000 people in Southeast Asia died. They didn’t know the signs of a coming tsunami, and they didn’t have any warning.”

A boy near Kai raised his hand. “But we have a warning system, don’t we?”

“Yes, we do. Where do you live in Japan?”

“Tokyo.”

“Well, if an earthquake happens in Alaska, or even as far away as Chile, we would have at least three hours, and usually a
lot longer, to warn everyone in Japan about a possible tsunami. But you could have an earthquake right off the coast of Japan,
and people would have only a few minutes to get to high ground before the tsunami hit. That’s why it’s important for you to
know the warning signs yourself.”

Kai had gone over the warning signs earlier in the tour, but kids often weren’t paying attention at that point, so he had
come up with a technique to make the warning signs more memorable. He closed the laptop and looked at each of the children
in turn.

“Now I have a little quiz for you, and I’ve got prizes for the person who can yell out the answer first. When you hear the
tsunami warning siren at the beach and you can’t get to a TV or radio to find out what’s going on, what do you do?”

A girl to Kai’s right blurted out an answer. “You go to high ground!”

“That’s correct,” he said. He turned and called out, “Bilbo, bring the prize!”

Bilbo trotted out from the room behind him with a little bag dangling from his mouth. Kai pointed at the girl and the dog
walked over and dropped the bag in front of her. The girl squealed with delight and gave Bilbo a pat before he walked back
over to Kai. They had practiced that routine all year, and Bilbo was getting good at it.

“Very good,” Kai said. “And remember to get an adult to help you whenever you can. Next question: When you feel an earthquake
and you’re at the beach, what do you do?”

Another girl at the back screamed out before the others, “Get to high ground!”

“Exactly. Bilbo?”

While Bilbo took the next bag to the student, a voice that was definitely not a child’s whispered in Kai’s ear.

“I can’t believe you are still doing that cheesy trick with the dog,” Brad said. “You are such a nerd.”

“Excuse me,” Kai said to the teacher, pushing Brad back into the reception area. “What are you doing here?”

“The guys from Ma‘alea chickened out. Since I have the morning free now, I thought I’d come by and see what’s up.”

“I’m not done yet. Can you just stay out of the way for a little while?”

“No problem.”

When Kai returned, the teacher, a pretty, petite woman in her thirties, raised her hand. “Excuse me, Dr. Tanaka.” Out of the
corner of his eye, Kai saw Brad still leaning on the door frame, smiling at her.

“Yes, Ms. Yamaguchi.”

“How high is ‘high ground’?”

“That’s a very good question,” Kai said. “We develop inundation maps that show us where the water would reach on dry land,
usually about thirty feet above sea level. You can find them in all the phone books.” Kai held up the tsunami evacuation route
sign he kept around for the tour. The blue pictograph depicted a series of small stylized white waves followed by a final
large wave. “And you
should see this sign all over Hawaii and something very close to it in Japan. It will tell you where to go. Any other questions?”

Nobody raised a hand, so Kai continued. “Now the last question: If you’re at the beach and you see the water receding very
quickly from the beach, what do you do?”

This time all the kids yelled the answer simultaneously: “Get to high ground!”

“Well, since you all answered, you all deserve a prize.” Kai thrust some bags into Brad’s hands. “Here, make yourself useful.”

As they were handing out the gift bags, Reggie walked into the room. He had an odd look on his face, as if he had uncomfortable
news to deliver.

“You done?” he said.

“Yes. In fact, I’ve probably already kept them longer than they planned.” Kai said his good-byes to the teacher and kids.
“Brad, would you show Ms. Yamaguchi the way out?”

“My pleasure,” Brad said, leading her to the door.

Kai turned to Reggie. “What’s going on? You look like you just swallowed a bug.”

“It’s Christmas Island. We were expecting a telemetry report from the tide gauge five minutes ago. It never came.”

“That’s funny. Didn’t we just get a reading from it an hour ago?”

“Sure did. Everything was fine.”

“Did you check the equipment on our end?” Kai asked, a sudden chill creeping up his spine. He didn’t like where this was going.

“Just finished. It’s not us. That leaves two possibilities. Either the tide gauge is malfunctioning …”

Kai completed Reggie’s sentence. “Or it’s not there anymore.”