GAO reports on US tsunami preparedness

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has published a new report ‘US Tsunami Preparedness: Federal and State Partners Collaborate To Reduce Potential Impacts, But Challenges Remain.’

Key findings from the report include:

* While the coastal areas of the five states bordering the Pacific Ocean and US territories in the Caribbean face the greatest tsunami hazard, reliable and comprehensive assessments of the potential impacts on people and infrastructure have not been completed for many of these areas.

* Because inundation maps are the foundation for evaluating potential tsunami impacts on communities, map production has been a high priority for NOAA and the threatened states. However, progress on this front has been slow.

* To effectively prepare for a tsunami, states and localities also need to assess the potential impacts of a tsunami on people and infrastructure. While FEMA has standardized computer software for comprehensively estimating the likely human, structural, and economic damages from natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, no such tool exists for tsunamis. For this and other reasons, California and Alaska have not specifically assessed potential tsunami losses, while the other at-risk areas have produced limited tsunami damage assessments. Consequently, emergency managers in the at-risk states and US territories do not have comprehensive information on how many and what types of structures would be exposed and damaged, how many people could be injured or killed, or the extent of potential short and long-term economic impacts of a tsunami. GAO recommends that NOAA work with FEMA and USGS to create standardized tsunami loss estimation software.

* Although NWS’s warning centers can quickly detect potential tsunamis
and issue warnings, the effectiveness of these warnings is hampered by
false alarms and limitations in the federal systems that transmit warnings
to the local level. GAO recommends that NOAA take specific steps, such
as reexamining its rules for when a warning will be issued and to which areas, to reduce false alarms.

* Efforts are under way to significantly expand federal tsunami detection
and related activities as well as the NTHMP; however, the future direction
of these efforts is uncertain because NOAA has not established long-range strategic plans to guide them.

Read the report at
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06519.pdf

•Date: 7th June 2006• Region: US • Type: Article •Topic: Emergency planning
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