National Geographic: Tsunami - Killer Wave Page #2

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Eyes open, mouth agape.

And just a terror looked-face

on them.

It was very unpleasant to look at.

Twenty-five miles northwest of Hilo,

the little peninsula

called Laupahoehoe

lies exposed to the full fury

of the tsunami.

Students have just arrived

in the Laupahoehoe schoolyard

and are waiting for classes

to start.

Among them are Bunji Fujimoto

and his two brothers.

That day remains vivid

in Bunji's memory.

I could see a wall of water

coming in from out in the ocean.

It compared to filling up

a cup of coffee.

You just keep pouring

and once it hits the brim,

it spills over,

and that's what happened back here,

up on the wall.

It didn't stop with the wall.

It just came over, spilled over.

And we could see we were in trouble.

We had to run. We started running.

When the water started coming over,

we started running up

to higher ground to my left,

where the school building was.

Fortunately, we made it in time.

A bunch of the other children

didn't make it,

the other students,

mostly students in this area.

My brother was down here

and we never found him.

We always wondered

what he would have turned out

to be like later on.

He was 14 years old and just

getting to his prime of life.

You can't do anything about it.

You can't do anything more than

just think and talk about it

Bunji's brother was among the 25

who died at Laupahoehoe,

mostly students and their teachers.

Almost all of the bayfront area

was nearly totally destroyed.

The businesses were ripped

right off their foundations.

Many of the structures were wooden

and they were totally collapsed.

The railway which was built

on wooden railway ties

the wooden ties were floated out

by the water

and the rails twisted into pretzels.

One hundred fifty-nine people died

that day

Over time, the city would rebuild.

But this tragedy

would mark a turning point.

Those who lived in the shadow

of the tsunamis

were determined to be better

prepared for the next killer wave.

Just two years later, in 1948,

the U.S. government established

the Pacific Tsunami warning center

in Honolulu.

Today, the center remains on alert

around the clock,

coordinating the efforts

of dozens of Pacific Rim countries.

We try to get a warning out

as quickly as possible,

and we have to go to our resources

to find out where the earthquake is

and what its magnitude is.

And then, given that information,

we issue this warning

to the various participants

in the warning system

in the Pacific.

Equipped with state-of-the-art

satellite technology,

seismic sensors, and a vast network

of wave monitors,

the warning center can track

any major earthquake on the planet

and determine whether a tsunami is

on its way.

Scientists know that

an undersea earthquake,

or a volcanic eruption

anything that causes the sea floor

to shift suddenly

can displace huge volumes of water.

When this disruption

reaches the surface,

a series of waves spreads out.

They can move

as fast as 600 miles per hour.

Unlike a normal wave

caused by wind or tides,

the energy of a tsunami

is evenly distributed

all the way

to the ocean bottom.

In deep water, there's barely

a ripple at the surface

But as a tsunami wave

approaches land, the seafloor rises.

The energy is compressed

and the waves can be pushed up

as high as 100 feet or more.

It's always a number of thousands

of people

that could possibly live or die,

depending on our decision.

Here in the Hawaiian Islands,

for example,

every few years, we have...

That's interesting.

We've got an earthquake

to deal with.

It looks like

it's a small local quake

in the central part of Alaska.

The center detects

two or three quakes every week.

Most like this one

present no threat of tsunami.

But even when a tsunami alert

is issued,

not everyone will take it seriously.

When you go from one tsunami

to the next tsunami,

people don't even know

what they are.

So it's hard for them

to even consider them a threat.

First of all, you have to

convince them

that there is such a thing,

and secondly,

that it can cause destruction.

Even in Hawaii,

with its tragic history of tsunamis,

people can forget the lessons

of the past.

In 1960,

the warning center was established,

a massive earthquake

off the coast of Chile

generates a tsunami

that fans out across the Pacific.

Hawaii lies directly in its path.

Early on the evening of May 22,

the warning center issues

its prediction

...a tsunami will hit Hilo

sometime around midnight.

But with midnight long past,

and only small waves washing ashore,

many ignore the alert,

and return to the downtown bayfront.

A few even gather

at the Suisan Fish Market

to watch the waves come in.

The 35-foot wall of water

strikes like a bomb.

Once again

Hilo is brought to its knees,

with $30 million in damage

and 61 dead.

This wave will change Hilo forever.

Today, as you look at downtown Hilo,

you see the highway

along the bayfront,

which used to be the railway

before the tsunamis.

You see a big expanse

of green parkland

soccer fields and places

where people picnic

and play ball.

All of that was homes

and businesses...

very, very heavily populated

before the tsunamis.

If you go there today, you can see

the old roads which go in,

driveways, all leading to nothing.

They see that area and they think

what wonderful urban planning

we have in Hilo

to have all that parkland.

That's planning thanks to

Mother Nature

and at great expense to

the city of Hilo,

both in terms of property

and loss of life.

Tsunamis have been rare events.

There has not been a destructive

Pacific-wide tsunami

in over 30 years.

But if you look at the number

of tsunami events

over the last century

there's been on the average

one destructive tsunami

every seven years

so in many ways you would say that

we're long overdue

for the next tsunami

Walter Dudley is not

the only scientist

who's worried about the next one.

In the Seattle office

of the National Oceanic

and Atmospheric Administration,

Dr. Eddie Bernard

is spearheading efforts to alert

the public

to the dangers of tsunamis.

Most certainly they're killers.

If you look at the history of the

United States since World War II,

more people have died from tsunamis

than from earthquakes

in our country.

It's one of

the few natural disasters

that has such broad impact.

Most natural disasters

are very localized.

An earthquake, although it may be

several hundreds of miles,

doesn't affect anything outside

of that hundreds-of-miles area

But if you add up the dimensions

of the Pacific Rim shorelines,

it's on the order of 100,000 miles.

So one earthquake, properly placed,

can affect the coastlines

thousands of miles away.

In Japan, however,

the greatest tsunami threat

comes from earthquakes generated

not thousands of miles away,

but much closer to home.

This island nation lies on

top of one

of the most seismically active

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