As grateful as we are that yesterday’s tsunami turned out to be a “nothing hamburger” as my husband put it, I was shocked at how little prepared some agencies, institutions and businesses seemed to be, despite being given hours of warning. Social media posts showed lines of cars in Hawaii and Guam stuck in traffic trying to get out of harm’s way, and crowds of travelers stuck at Hawaii airports with no local staff in sight because the state sent workers home.  

I had scheduled an interview yesterday with Landon Aydlett, National Weather Service Guam’s Warning Coordination Meteorologist, but he had his hands full communicating and coordinating with agencies throughout the Pacific. We were able to connect the day after, and in our interview he answered key questions like, “What if this had happened in the middle of the night when people were sleeping - what would be the plan to get people to safety?” 

The transcript below has been edited for clarity.

Therese: So it's the calm after the chaos, and it looks like Guam and much of the Pacific was spared. What's it look like now - I was looking at news reports, and it looks like in South America some cities were evacuated.

Landon: Yeah, that's correct and I haven't not been following too much beyond our region, but that tsunami wave did push through our region yesterday afternoon, and through the evening hours, across all of Micronesia, including Hawaii where there were more impacts than what we had in the Micronesia region. That wave continued southward to American Samoa, and also the western coastlines of South America and North America. 

So this was a basinwide tsunami event. It was fortunately a nonevent for us here in the Mariana Islands in Micronesia, where we had the waves but no impacts. But that's not the same for folks across eastern Russia, also parts of Alaska and Hawaii.

Therese: Yes, I heard that parts of Hawaii had some of the bigger waves - I don't know if you were following what was going on, but there were people still on the shore waiting to see if something would happen. There was even somebody kayaking in one of the bays!

Landon: Yeah, that's always a problem to be concerned about, especially on the emergency management and warning communication side, is despite the warnings, people are still going to take actions that are against what we're asking people to do. 

So whether it's a tropical cyclone threatening a coastline, people are going to be out there surfing in the waves - they never miss an opportunity. But we ask people to avoid doing those things because it puts first responders in danger when they have to go and rescue people. 

We had that situation in Saipan last week with a tropical storm nearby. Someone went surfing and they couldn't get back into the reef. And we had to send responders out there, and they tried several times to get them back to shore on multiple occasions, but the waves were so large they couldn't get back in. So eventually they made it back in. 

So we ask people to heed the warnings, heed the communications from the National Weather Service, the Tsunami Warning Center and the emergency managers to stay safe and to keep those first responders that may have to help you stay safe as well.

Therese: So in this case, this time, we had hours to prepare, and there was still quite a bit of chaos. People here were stuck in traffic for hours, and I saw that was the case too on Guam. What if this had happened in the middle of the night? Are there plans for something like this if it were to happen when it's not the daytime and people do have access to transportation and can move quickly?

Landon: That's a phenomenal question. It's a very loaded question. The tsunami process is one of those things that can take place during the day or overnight, and unlike tropical cyclones, the tsunami warning process is very compressed with its timeline. It could be anywhere from minutes from a possible tsunami, if that earthquake is very close to shore, such as for us in Guam the Marianas Trench. 

A potential earthquake or potential tsunami from an earthquake in the trench could arrive to Guam shores within 10 or 15 minutes. So this is where public education is key to our success and safety, that people know exactly how to respond and what to do, even if it's at one o'clock in the morning. 

For us, this was a regional earthquake scenario. It was well up there in Russia. We did not feel the quake all the way down here, but that tsunami arrived within several hours, so we were looking at about a five-hour timeframe. So that's enough time to spin up communications in coordination with the Guam Homeland and CNMI Homeland Security offices, but not much more time than that. So we had to immediately snap into gear, stop all of our regularly scheduled work and plans, and go into a tsunami operations mode to communicate, to get that information to the community (on) what to expect, when to expect it, and how much to expect. 

And so for us, we were under a tsunami advisory, we were not expecting widespread inundation, we were not expecting destruction, but we were anticipating small waves and strong currents in the waters. And so that deviates from a tsunami warning, where you do expect a destructive tsunami wave, possibly extensive inundation to coastal areas requiring full-scale evacuation. 

The common rule of thumb is when there is a tsunami warning and evacuations are in order, evacuate on foot, avoid sitting in traffic for hours. We had people in traffic on Marine Corps Drive on Guam about the time that the waves were supposed to start coming through the region. That's not where you want to be, especially if it is going to be a large tsunami. So evacuate on foot. 

Most of our islands have a very small coastal plain, and then it goes up in elevation, so most people can get to reasonable safety, to elevation, on foot. SoTo leave your car behind, get out there on foot. But yesterday was not a warning scenario. We were not calling for widespread evacuations. It was merely get out of the water, get off the beaches. 

Therese: OK, so worst-case scenario. It happens at night and you have to evacuate. Obviously the common sense action is to get to higher ground. Are buildings safe? Could you go to the top of your roof and you'd be OK? What's the general consensus on that? 

Landon: Yeah, that really depends on the tsunami source, the tsunami that's forecast. For us, the communications are key. We have to get that information out to the community, assuming it's not a Marianas Trench scenario, if we had several hours to work with, our Guam police, our police department, first responders, emergency services, the mayors offices, they're going to be going around. They're going to get spun up immediately with Guam Homeland Security. They can get spun up to start going around the villages and neighborhoods. They know the vulnerable populations. They know the hazard areas for tsunami wave, they're going to be going door to door with bull horns and knocking on doors to wake people up and get them evacuated. So again, time is of the essence in these scenarios, especially overnight. 

As far as where to go, our buildings are reinforced concrete, so we are reasonably safe from earthquakes. But as far as the water impacts, if you're right there on the coast and you live just a couple feet above water level, yeah, you want to get out of there, and probably your rooftop is not high enough for safety, especially if we're looking at a significant tsunami threat, such as from southeastern Japan or from the Marianas Trench.

The Tsunami Warning Center map for the Pacific at 4:41 pm July 29 HST

Therese: Okay, so this time around people had time to be watching tsunami.gov, and seeing that map, and seeing all those little dots and understanding a warning versus an advisory versus a watch, but a multitude of those markers were purple and it was said threat. So where did that fall in with the levels of tsunami alerts? 

Landon: Yeah, that's part of the internal communications and the warning process with the Tsunami Warning Center. The global tsunami warning process changed significantly in 2014 following the 2004 Indonesia tsunami event, and then also the 2011 Japan tsunami event. 

PTWC used to issue those watches and warnings for all coastlines around the Pacific, around the globe. After 2011 that was modified so that PTWC no longer issued watches and warnings for the international locations, but they would provide those international threat messages. Those threat messages would go to the tsunami warning focal points around all the different international nations. They would then analyze, interpret the data, and then set their own watches, warnings, advisories based off their protocol. For us in the territories and Hawaii and the states, we get domestic bulletins from PTWC and the National Tsunami Warning Center in Alaska. They set the watches warnings advisories for states and territories. So there's a little bit of confusion in who gets what information.

We ask that all national players understand what that information is that they're receiving and how to interpret it. 

That was a problem for us yesterday with the Compact states in Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau, they were getting those international bulletins. And so there was a little bit of apprehension. What does this mean? How do we do this? 

And so it's been several years of training, education process in collaboration with the PTWC to make sure that the national leaders across the region understand that information and what to do. So there was a lot of liaise going on with my office in Micronesia yesterday, as well as getting basic information to the public. I understand there were some communications blackouts with people not receiving information across Micronesia: What? What's going on? What's happening? What do we expect? 

So we had to really work with our partners across Micronesia to make sure that they were receiving that information but also properly interpreting it and not getting mixed up with national news headlines. Because I think a lot of the panic in the region came from people sharing social media posts from national and international news sources saying “tsunami warnings in effect for these locations.” We were not in a tsunami warning. We were an advisory, but people were sharing that and saying, this wave in Russia that's coming here. That's not necessarily true, because our impacts from tsunamis can be very different from other locations.

Therese: You had said in our previous messages that this was kind of the first time that you had been dealing with something at this level. Can you talk about that, and what challenges you were dealing with?

Landon: Yeah, definitely. This is the first earthquake scenario that I've had to deal with in my current capacity as the Warning Coordination Meteorologist. The last one I had to deal with was in 2011, I was a junior forecaster here, very new to the region.

Comparatively, that was a very easy event, because back then, we only had the watches of warnings. Now we have the tsunami advisories, which is a low grade warning, meaning that we're not expecting widespread destruction, but smaller impacts. So that was really a first for our region.

Additionally, we have a lot of new staff. They've never dealt with the earthquake tsunami situation, but we do training. We have our standards and procedures that we ask that all forecasters be very familiar with, because time is going to be of the essence. We have a lot of new decisionmakers, a number of new politicians, military leaders, that have never dealt with the situation. So it's a lot of communications, a lot of coordination, a lot of spinup in the early process, and then we're in constant communication, constant coordination throughout the event to make sure that we're all on the same page and putting all that information. 

So outside of these events, we do do routine training with Guam and CNMI Homeland Security offices. We do a number of tsunami awareness courses and tabletop exercises about every one to two years to make sure that everybody new to their roles and positions and government agencies, they know the process, know the terminology, because we're going to be the torch bearers carrying that information to the community. 

And like the whisper exercise you do in school, somebody tells somebody a secret, and then you whisper it to the next person, and you see how that message changes. And that's where we are in these situations, that information gets misinterpreted, miscommunicated, and then you have rumors and panic and speculation. 

So that's where public communication is so important, and really doing these Facebook live broadcasts to relay that information, but also squash any fears and panic that was going around.

Therese: So going forward, what do you think you'll be doing differently, if anything?

Landon: Well, I was already talking to the Homeland Security Advisor this morning on Guam, and I've been talking to several people in the region. I really would like to do a hot wash, because some things did work well in this event yesterday, there are some other things that could work better.

I think Guam and the CNMI, we did relatively well. I think there's a couple of problem areas on the communication standpoint that I do want to take a closer look at and discuss across multiple agencies. 

There's bigger problems to deal with with Micronesia and the compacts, it's really about the lack of communication and the timeliness of communications. So I've got a long document, I'm jotting down notes, but I really want to have a hot wash with our regional partners to discuss yesterday's event while it's fresh in our minds, and find out the things that worked well, the collaboration, coordination and the stakeholder engagement, but then also the weaknesses where we can do better. And so we're going to be working that with the National Weather Service in the region, PTWC in Hawaii, and then also our government, state stakeholders and our partners.

Therese: Last question, if a citizen wanted to take it upon themselves to learn more and be better prepared for tsunamis, where would you direct them to?

Landon: Definitely reach out to us. We're always happy to engage the public in the community through education, outreach and other endeavors, whatever is possible.

Because I think education and outreach is the foundation of a weather-ready and a tsunami-ready community, and so the more people can be educated and equipped with the tools, capabilities and the knowledge of these events, I think the better prepared we can be as a whole community. And these things are whole communities. It affects everybody. And so if we can have the whole community engaged, all different sectors, the special needs population, people from other islands and cultures, the stronger we will be for preparedness in the future.