The tsunami alert on Wednesday night was instructive in a number of ways.
I first picked up the news of an earthquake on twitter and then followed the subsequent tsunami alerts for a number of hours. Being concerned about family & friends living on the coast, I gave them a call (to a fair bit of derision I might add, the State of Origin was on!) and watched as steadily the tsunami warning system and the mainstream media started going awry.
The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre issued Lord Howe Island with a land alert at 9:07pm advising people to move to higher ground. The advisory said the next update would occur at 10:07pm. Apparently low lying areas on Lord Howe were evacuated. Marine alerts were also issued for Norfolk Island, NSW, Vic and Tassie shortly after. All warnings said they would be updated in one hour from the time of the alert.
Meanwhile, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii (part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US) had issued alerts earlier for New Zealand and were the first to cancel all tsunami warnings at 10:47 UTC (8:47pm EST).
Mainstream media had started picking up on the alerts, with Channel 7 the first I believe to break into its programming for a news break. Newpapers like the Courier Mail got up and running and after the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre cancelled their warnings, the Courier Mail declared that all alerts had been lifted for Australia. That wasn’t the case.
At 10:07pm I watched for the scheduled update on the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre site for Lord Howe. Nothing happened. The scheduled times for updates for NSW, Norfolk Island, Vic and Tassie came and went. The national update due at 10:27pm didn’t appear.
The twitter folk started broadcasting that the Victorian warning had been updated, but it wasn’t on the main Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre page. I managed to find it eventually, buried on the Victorian Weather & Warnings home page. Other updates for NSW and Tasmania started to appear on their state home pages, but the main JATWC page still wasn’t updated.
Finally around 10:40pm, the JATWC site was updated, maintaining marine alerts for NSW, Vic, Tas and Norfolk Island and the land alert for Lord Howe. Reports started drifting in of a 30cm tsunami (?!) at Port Kembla and another report at Spring Bay in Tassie.
It became obvious that any danger had passed, given the time of the earthquake and that the warnings had said any tsunami would occur around 9:45pm. The alerts were lifted a couple of hours later.
The whole episode was instructive in a number of ways:
- The Australian Joint Tsunami Warning Centre failed to provide timely information. If there was a credible threat (particularly to Lord Howe which was on a land alert), updated information was late and ultimately inaccurate. Interviewed the next morning on ABC 666Canberra, a spokesman for the JATWC said that the warnings were indeed late and there had been no change to the alert status. However, if the alert status had changed they would have published an updated warning. This wasn’t evident on the alerts and so people were only aware the alerts were late. They had to assume the status hadn’t changed and were not aware that “no news means no change of status”.
- There appeared to be no integration or coordination with the warnings issued from the US Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre. The official interviewed by Alex Sloane on 666 appeared miffed that there were two different sets of warnings being issued, that people might pick up their information from different sources and that this might be confusing.
- Mainstream media had no more access to information than the web-connected community. That the media failed to analyse the information and provide accurate reporting of the event is an indictment on the fourth estate
- twitter served a very clear purpose as a vehicle to provide real time accurate updates and information. There is an excellent opportunity for emergency agencies to provide timely, focused and cost effective information using twitter.
The tsunami alert provided a stark confirmation of the way the web failed to provide accurate information during the Black Saturday bushfires earlier this year. As Robert Manne points out in July’s The Monthly magazine, on Black Saturday, the Country Fire Authority website in Victoria was not updated with accurate, timely information. CFA communications units on the ground failed to check if their urgent information releases had actually made it on to the site. People relying on information from emergency agencies using the internet as the focal point for communications were placed at greater risk because of the lack of timely, accurate information.
The situation with the tsunami alerts was reminiscent of this situation. People will increasingly use the internet as a key source of all available information. They will attempt to dissect, analyse, read and publish the information any way they can. The sooner governments acknowledges this fact, and make effective use of the communications tools available, the less likely a lack of timely, accurate information will place the community at greater risk during a natural disaster.
