 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It's one o'clock on a Monday afternoon, so you must be watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Marc, and today I've got my old friend, Gerard Friar, here. Gerard is an affiliate faculty member at UH Manoa, and Gerard, you've also recently stepped down. You were a scientist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, if that's correct. Right. That makes a lot of sense, because we're talking about tsunamis in Hawaii today, so what better expert to have on the show than Gerard? And basically, can you tell us what, in fact, is a tsunami, Gerard? Yeah, a tsunami is a series of very long waves generated by a deformation of the sea floor or the sea surface. So when an earthquake changes the shape of the ocean bottom, that will generate waves. Or when meteorite impacts the earth, a big one, that will generate waves or a landslide can generate waves. And regular viewers of Think Tech would have seen the interview with Brett Butler, who was on here about a couple of months ago, talking about the orphan tsunami of 1586. But basically, they are giant waves which in and day are coastline, is that correct? Yes. However, it's important to realize that they're not like ordinary waves. You might hear that those tsunamis, we think it's going to be five feet high or something. Ordinary waves, the biggest waves on the North Shore, for example, at the longest they have a period from one wave to the next of about 23, 25 seconds, whereas a tsunami from one wave to the next is 10 minutes to 30 minutes. So instead of a sharp, peaky wave, it's a big, broad thing that contains a huge amount of water. And residents have been in Hawaii for many years, would have seen you on TV during some of the more recent tsunami events. This is obviously something which everybody in Hawaii as well as around the Pacific Rim, presumably has to be really aware of. Yes. Every resident of Hawaii, and I would hope every visitor to Hawaii, one of the first things they do when they move to a new place is to bring up the tsunami evacuation map and find out where they are relative to the evacuation zone. One would hope so, but if you're in vacation in Hawaii, who looked at the phone book? Or look online. I mean, it would be nice. We're still working with the hotels, but it would be nice if they would have a handout and just tell people, we're getting there. This is one of the risks of being in Hawaii. Yes. The state actually has a nice little handout. They give people that talks about hazards of the ocean, and it's buried in there. It might be a little bit higher visibility, but we do owe it to our visitors to explain to them. And of course, most visitors don't really have a historical perspective. We're familiar with some of the small tsunamis which we have had over the last 20 years, but in the past, there's been much larger ones here. Certainly, and as you will discover in talking to me, as anybody discovers talking to me, I have this obsession with the tsunami of April 1st, 1946, which was the biggest tsunami in our recent history, and which has an inordinate effect on our current evacuation. Which is a great segue. I think you brought along some illustrations, the first of which is of the 1946 tsunami. So if we could pull out the slide. This is a wonderful image. We've got North America on the right-hand side. We've got, I guess, Japan on the top left. No, not quite. That's Kamachatka. What is it we're seeing here, Dr. Okay, so this is a calculation run using Dailin Wang's tsunami modeling code. What I did here was to create the earthquake of 1946 and then run the tsunami, see it as it crossed the ocean, and save the maximum value. So this is a map of all the maximum heights of the tsunami as it crosses the ocean. It shows you where the energy goes. And colors, low energy would be dark blue, high energy would be red. Right. The white is one meter high, and this is on the deep ocean. So one meter high for a tsunami is huge. The amplification on a fairly uniform coast is about a factor of five. So something that's one meter high on a straight coast is going to turn out to be like five meters high, which is what is that, 18, 19 feet. Very significant. A very significant tsunami. And remember, it's like 15 minutes from one wave to the next. So you're raising sea level by 15 feet, holding it there for several minutes. So if people are watching this live, they will know that Hurricane Armour has just gone through Florida, and they're talking about a three foot or one meter storm surge. Here in the 1946 tsunami, it might have been five times higher. Yes. But the maximum in 1946 was on the North Shore of Malakai. And it was, what was it, 54 feet. 54 feet. Yes, on the North Shore of Malakai. But in Hilo and in Wailua on Oahu, it reached 30 feet. And this is, you raise sea level and hold it there, so a tremendous amount of flight. And the point to that picture, if we can just go back to the picture real quick, you see the Hawaiian islands down in the southern part of the picture. Just missed it. Yeah. The biggest waves did not, they wouldn't. It wasn't aimed at us. And in fact, if you go down that beam and you go down into the southern hemisphere, you find the Marquesas Islands are right in the middle of the beam. And back in the year 2000, I went down there with Amilo Kaur from Northwestern University and Costa Sinalakis from University of Southern California. And we surveyed by talking to old people, we figured out where the tsunami went. And we got really good evidence that it was as big in the Marquesas, even though it's twice as far away. And in fact, the maximum was more than in Hawaii, it got up to 65 feet in one narrow little valley. Wow. Very disconcerting. Now, this tsunami was caused by a giant earthquake. Yes. Any illusions? Do we know what the magnitude of the quake was? We now do. For years and years, it wasn't until 2008, but finally it was figured out that it was the magnitude 86, 87, something like that. And since we're talking about these images, can we go to image number two, which is that is the tsunami of 1957, and so that's also from the illusions. That was a little bit smaller than the one in 1946. And you see the Hawaiian Islands sitting out there sort of in the lower right. And again, you see that this tsunami missed the main Hawaiian Islands. So these tsunamis, the 46 and 57, were the tsunamis which basically dominated the old evacuation maps, which were last updated in 2010. And then the following year, Japan happened, 2011. And in 2011, I calculated image number three, which is this is sticking an earthquake in the gap between 1946 and 1957. And now the tsunami is pointed right at Hawaii. And this one has not occurred. This one has not occurred. So we don't want to get people worried or... Right. It has not occurred, but I was worried about what does this mean for our evacuation zones. And it turns out that the waves are almost twice as large. So you go from 30 feet in hilo to 60 feet in hilo. And then Rhett Butler, who you've interviewed recently, he said, hey, you're talking about a magnitude 8687 here. One of the lessons from the Japan earthquake is that you can have a big earthquake anywhere. We used to think that Japan, the maximum size earthquake it could get was 8.4. Well, that was wrong. It had a nine. And so the lesson from recent earthquakes is that you can have a giant earthquake in any subduction. And these numbers you're telling us 8.4 to 9 only sounds like 0.6, but that's many magnitudes in energy. From magnitude 8 to magnitude 9 is a factor of 32 in energy release. So he said quite legitimately, well, what if you had a Japan earthquake in exactly the right spot in the Aleutians? Wrong spot. The wrong spot, yes. And of course, we have this tsunami deposit on Kauai, which is very difficult to explain without an earthquake, a big earthquake in exactly that spot. All of these tsunamis are caused by earthquakes. How often do large earthquakes take place along this part of the Aleutian arc, which is to our north? Every couple of hundred years. There's been a couple of hundred years. So should we be turning to the Hawaiian knowledge in terms of what happened before Western contact or what happened in the 19th century to see if there was one? Yes, the trouble with delving into local myth is, you know, the point to myth is it's the way that ancestors warn you about hazards. The difficulty is that the timing is lost. And the other problem that happens is if there have been several events like this, they tend to get concatenated, they tend to run together. And so to differentiate between different events or things, you know, and of course they have no idea where it's coming from. They haven't felt an earthquake, and then suddenly the tsunami hits them. Yes, it will be embedded in myth, but unless the context is retained somehow, it's very difficult to distinguish. You make a good point. We can suffer tsunamis that are generated from Chile, for example, and places elsewhere from the Aleutian. So trying to correlate a particular event with a geographic location is presuming virtually impossible unless you've got modern technology. That's right. That's right. And the point to talking about these different events is that, you know, that's where the new evacuation maps, the post-2011. I was going to ask you that. So what does a resident of Hawaii do, and what do you do? You say you have new evacuation maps. Maybe we can see one of those just so that people know. We certainly can. And can we bring up image, I guess it's now four, the Waikiki image? Yeah, there it is. So these are the new maps, and the red is the original evacuation zone. That's the old 2010 zone, and then the yellow is the additional area that has to be evacuated if it's a big earthquake in the right place. And running along the top of the screen, is that H-1 freeway? That is H-1 freeway. So this is Waikiki, and you see basically the area to be evacuated doubles in size. The tsunami can come in all the way to Moeile Unile, all the way back to the freeway. And now this is a very extreme tsunami, coming from exactly the right spot. But so now we have this two-stage warning. If it's just a tsunami warning, that means the red area. Why do we go to two zones? Because if you just evacuate the red area, that's like you're moving about 75,000 people. If it's the red plus the yellow, statewide it's something like 300,000, which is you're moving so many people that there is hazard involved in the evacuations. So traffic jams, traffic jams, where do you house them? In our evacuation in 2012, there was one death as a consequence of traffic accident. We don't want that to happen if we don't. So that's why we've got two zones. And we're still adjusting to this extreme. And this kind of information is now online. It's available in phone books or in hotels and things like this. Because certainly the tourist industry, you know, that this is a major tourist attraction and they don't. So anyway, these maps are really interesting, but we're coming up to a break now. So I hope when we return, you can show us some more of the maps and give us a better understanding of how people should react to a tsunami alert. Let me just remind the viewers, you're watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Marx. And my guest today is Dr. Gerard Friar, who's an affiliate faculty member at UH Manoa. And we'll be back in about a minute. So see you then. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to navigate the journey. Spend the time with us as we look through and discover all of the ins and outs of this journey through life. We're on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. and I would love to have you with us. Come navigate the journey. Aloha. And welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and my guest today is Dr. Gerard Fryer, who's an affiliate faculty member at UH Manoa. Now Gerard, you mentioned quite a bit about these tsunamis in the first part of the show. You've got a picture, I think, of what the effects might be. So if we go to the first slide, I just want to sort of draw attention for our viewers. What we're seeing here looks terrible. Yes. This is the Japan tsunami, and this is the town of Miyako, and what you see there is the tsunami coming over a seawall which was designed to stop the tsunami from entering the town. And can you just tell our viewers what's the scale of this? What are some of those objects in there? Well, I think you can see a few vehicles in the water. They are minivans. Minivans, yes. And so the wall that the tsunami is coming over is about 15, 20 feet high or something like that. And at first, right after the Japan tsunami, I would tell people, if I showed them this picture, that we won't have a tsunami like this in Hawaii. But now, looking at the numbers, I realize that if we have what we're calling the GATT, the Great Aleutian Tsunami, it actually will be more or less like this. So substitute the Alawai Canal or...? Not the Alawai Canal, but certainly on the North Shore. On the North Shore or something like that? Yeah. Yeah. Very disconcerting. Yes. That's why we went... This is a low probability, high impact event, but the probability is high enough. We think the repeat time of something like a thousand years, so what does that mean? Like a tenth of a percent chance per year or something like that. The probability is high enough that it is necessary to have some policy about what to do if it hits you. Then in your experience, how do you convey to the general public, when we hear a tsunami warning or a tsunami alert, how serious should they take it? Is there a public perception problem that you're facing? Well right now in Hawaii, I would say there's not. The reason is that we had three warnings in quick succession, 2010, 2011, and 2012. So now everyone is trained, they know what to do, and 2011, that was a warning that was truly necessary because the maximum run up, the height that the water got on dry land was 14 feet up at Makale'i'ia, and that tsunami did something like 40 million dollars worth of damage in Hawaii, and that's just insured losses, the uninsured losses were... And that's the Japanese... That's the Japanese tsunami. Then in 2010 and 2012, those should, in retrospect, those should have been advisories rather than warnings. An advisory means get off the beach, stay out of the water, but you don't have to evacuate. If either of those events happened again, they would be advisories, they would not be warnings. And yet in 2012, we had on TV news people going down to Waikiki Beach to watch the waves come in and things like that. Yes. How do we educate the public, particularly the tourists, that this is a serious issue? If it's going to be really bad, we know it. That is the big change that has happened, say, over the last 15 years, that 15 years ago, tsunami warning was very ad hoc and you never quite knew what you were getting. The warning system is improving more and more. What you don't know is the number of warnings you have not had, which you would have had years ago. So the warning system is getting better and better and better and everyone in the warning... And that's because we understand the earthquake strength or depth? Yes. We understand the earthquake strength and depth, but that's a consequence of new technology, new seismometers put out there. We also have direct measurements of the tsunami in a lot of instances. So we can actually work out a tremendous amount about the tsunami, information that just was not possible 15 years ago. And you're using the Royal Wee, this is predominantly the Pacific tsunami warning centre. Yes, I should say, my former colleagues at the Pacific tsunami warning centre, and of course the other nice thing about it is that all of them, because we have had so many earthquakes in the last decade, not just the three that I mentioned, but there have been lots of others which were locally damaging. So everyone in the warning centre has had experience. Even this past weekend with the 8.1 from Mexico? That's a very good example. The 8.1 in Mexico, the forecast for Hilo and Cajalui was 0.16 metres, so about six inches. What happened? They saw about six inches. So the system... We've seen worse with the King's side. Yeah, that's right. The point is that the system is really good. So if it's a bad one, then we're going to make a big deal about it. Hey, folks, this truly is the bad one. And I hope that people will take it seriously. And all these serious discussions, if I may just sort of take the conversation in a slightly different direction, some of the Hawaii viewers will recognise your face, because you were the face of the Pacific tsunami warning centre. What was it like going live on TV, middle of the night? You've got all these reporters asking you these fine questions. You don't want to alarm people. But I thought it was great. You always presented the fact and what you didn't know, as well as what you did know. Was it the same for you as it appeared on TV for us? I was just worried about getting the story right. And I can give you one little episode. I think it was 2010, the Chile tsunami. Remember that none of us at that time had had experience of a big ocean crossing tsunami. And we weren't actually sure how well all of our systems worked. But it seemed to me that that was going to be borderline. It was sort of just big enough to warrant a warning. And so I tried to... No, this was 2012. That's right, it was 2012. But again, that was another borderline one. And I was worried that sometime a few years from now, there's going to be a really big one and I'm going to find myself on TV. And I want to have credibility. So I don't want to say, this is a bad tsunami, you've got to evacuate. I wanted to get across some of the feeling that maybe... You can't cry wolf too often. People might be at risk in the first place. Which is sort of the academic in me that was trying to get out. But at that time I was a government employee. And that was really a mistake. The governor, I think it was Neil Abercrombie, said, who is that guy? Get him off. Because I was sort of backpedaling on the warning. And once we had decided to give a warning, everyone had to be on the same page. So the emergency managers, the specific tsunami warning center, the newscasters, everyone on the same page. And of course in Hawaii we have this all or nothing warning. It's a warning for anywhere, it's a warning for everywhere. But having a scientist giving this kind of information in real time to the general public, we saw it again with Harkin Harvey and Irma, for example, where this is really important stuff for the community to be aware of what's going on. So we really appreciate what you're doing. Well, thank you and you may see me on television anyway. Because now my role as far as the state is concerned, I am a divisor to Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. And so if there is a warning for an event, I will now go to the Emergency Operations Center and provide them with advice. And so I may find a camera stuck in my face. So you may see me again. Some of our viewers may pick up the fact that your accent probably means you're not from Hawaii. Why don't you get into this field? Well, I'm not from Hawaii, but it wasn't until I'd already got my PhD and I was well on my career as a scientist that I got interested in tsunamis. And it was mainly the tsunami warnings of 1986 and especially 1994 that got me interested in tsunamis. And as a consequence of that, I, a friend of mine, Ted Jordan, who's now unfortunately passed away, he said, you would have talked to a couple of survivors, I know, from the tsunami of 1946. So I talked to these two delightful elderly women and about the tsunami of 1946. And one of them, Helen Sakaguchi, she said, could you explain to me why my little boy died? And at that time I couldn't because it was an enigma. The tsunami didn't quite make sense. And so she said, and so I said, no, I can't. And she said, well, you find out. Well, she was an elderly woman, right? And so now she's passed away. So now there's this woman's sort of dying command hanging over me. Well, you've certainly lived up to her wishes. I haven't quite. There's still just a little bit of work to do to solve that problem. To service you and the Pacific Sonami Warning Center do for all of the residents, not only of Hawaii, but around the Pacific Rim is really great. So I want to thank you for that. We're coming to the end of the show, Druard. So thank you once again for being on the program. Let me just remind the viewers, you've been watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark and I guess today has been Dr. Druard Fryer, who's an affiliate faculty member at UH Manoa. Hopefully you'll join us again next week when we'll have another interesting guest. And so until then, goodbye for now.