SAN FRANCISCO — For generations, the possibility of another devastating earthquake has lingered in the minds of Californians, who are remarkably familiar with seismological terms and regularly prepare for the next “Big One.”
But on Thursday, they were met with something that felt a little more far-fetched: a tsunami warning along a vast stretch of the Northern California coast. It brought fear and confusion to hundreds of miles of coastline, from the San Francisco Bay Area to Oregon — and even more than a dozen miles inland, in some cases.
The tsunami warning was spawned by an earthquake in the Pacific Ocean and was canceled a little more than an hour after it was issued. But the sudden and dire warnings, which urged people to move immediately to higher ground, stirred a panic. Many headed for the hills.
Jon Ward, an architect who was renting a beachfront home on Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco, said he was initially skeptical of the tsunami warning that blared on his cellphone. But then he reconsidered, and called his wife, who was on a walk, to tell her to hurry back.
They drove into the Marin Hills toward Mount Tamalpais and planned to park at the first car turnout. One problem: turnout after turnout was packed with vehicles.
“Everybody else had the same idea,” said Ward, 66. Once they found a space, they watched as other evacuees lined up at turnouts along Highway 1 until the tsunami warning was canceled.
Californians regularly prepare for earthquakes. Students are taught to stop, take cover under a desk and hold onto it. Families prepare “go bags” with items that can help them survive if they lose electricity and other utilities for days.
But Thursday’s tsunami warning turned out to be a stress test of the region’s ability to quickly flee disastrous waves.
The National Weather Service’s San Francisco Bay Area office said that the National Tsunami Warning Center issued its warning — the most dire level of alert — five minutes after the earthquake struck at 10:44 a.m. Thursday. More than 5 million people received it.
The earthquake registered 7.0 in magnitude. But it occurred offshore more than 200 miles north of San Francisco, so it did not have the devastating effects that a quake of the same strength would have had if its epicenter were beneath the densely populated Bay Area region, where 7.7 million people live.
There, it wasn’t just residents who were confused about what to do. City officials also reacted with varying degrees of alarm. The city of Berkeley ordered people in low-lying areas to evacuate immediately. Other cities urged people to stay away from the water and move to higher ground but did not issue evacuation orders. In San Francisco, officials told people to “move at least one block inland.”
San Francisco has 119 emergency sirens placed around the city, but they were silent as residents frantically wondered how seriously to take the tsunami alert — a message that said “You are in danger” — that they had just received on their phones.
The last time the sirens sounded at all was during an emergency test almost exactly five years ago. On Dec. 10, 2019, they went silent for an upgrade that was intended to make them less vulnerable to malfeasance after hackers took over sirens in Dallas in 2017 and blared noise for nearly two hours in the middle of the night, prompting thousands of people to call 911, with many wondering if they were under attack.
That upgrade was expected to cost $3 million, but the cost has grown considerably since then. When workers began to upgrade the devices, they found that the equipment was decrepit and needed to be rebuilt. The estimated cost of the project is now $20 million, not including the sirens’ annual operating costs, and it comes just as the city faces a budget deficit that could top $1 billion. The decision of whether to rebuild the sirens will be made by the incoming mayor, Daniel Lurie.
In a city coping with more immediate crises, rebuilding the sirens has not been a top priority. Officials have argued there are better ways to alert people in an emergency, including a text message system that can target people by ZIP codes, social media messages and sending city workers out with loudspeakers.
The city’s head of the Department of Emergency Management, Mary Ellen Carroll, said in an interview Friday that San Francisco would not have used the sirens Thursday even if they had been functional. Pacifica, a beach town to the south that has functional sirens, did not sound theirs. Pacifica’s city administrator said that emergency management officials monitored available data after receiving the tsunami alert and did not think sounding the sirens was warranted.
Carroll agreed that the sirens would have served no useful purpose.
“There was already mass chaos going on,” she said. “People were already notified. Everyone has a phone and people were notified all the way to Pleasanton.”
Indeed, residents received tsunami alerts in suburbs as landlocked as Pleasanton and Moraga, 15 or more miles from the nearest shoreline and buffered by hills towering more than 1,500 feet.
Carroll said that city officials believed that Thursday’s event called for a more targeted response than the sirens, especially since people throughout the city had already received the cellphone alert about the tsunami. Instead, the city sent police officers, firefighters and park rangers to the waterfront to warn people to leave. They also closed the Great Highway, which runs along the coast, and turned back buses that were headed that way.
Carroll said that her department was trying to figure out whether there was a solution more modern than the sirens, which were built during the Cold War, well before the existence of cellphones or social media platforms.
Because tsunamis can move extremely fast — as quickly as 500 mph in deeper water — the National Tsunami Warning Center issued its alert before officials could analyze buoy data and live cameras to determine if a tsunami had actually been set off.
Thursday’s tsunami warning was the first time the Wireless Emergency Alert system was used to broadcast a warning in California, said Lori Dengler, an emeritus professor of geology at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. She said this warning was tricky because the earthquake was less than 40 miles off the coast, so experts did not have time to closely study the quake’s effects before deciding whether to issue an alert.
Dengler also said that Thursday’s earthquake was just strong enough to qualify for the highest level of alert. An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9, rather than a 7.0, would have prompted only an advisory, and the wireless emergency alert system would not have been deployed.
In Eureka, the largest city along California’s North Coast near the epicenter, people said they were startled by the sudden tsunami alert. John Ziepseerder, a 55-year-old truck driver, was downtown within view of the water when he felt the ground moving. Then, he got the tsunami warning on his phone, and police officers began instructing people to head to higher ground.
Ziepseerder rushed about five blocks east to a friend’s house, passing others downtown who were frightened.
“It was chaos,” Ziepseerder said. “Everyone was just flipping out.”
Tourists who were visiting the quaint downtown shops appeared to be the most startled, he said, but he tried to stay calm by thinking of the powerful earthquakes he had previously experienced in Eureka, which did not result in any flooding.
Ziepseerder said he understood that officials needed to err on the safe side, in case something catastrophic had occurred. He is largely resigned to the possibility of a deadly earthquake rocking the state, he said, and he spends little time thinking about how to prepare.
“A lot of people who’ve been in California their whole lives — earthquakes don’t bother us,” he added. “We’re used to it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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