Hawaiʻi’s alert system is warning of real danger as determined by experts and science even if it turns out to be less than worst-case scenario.
Hawaiʻi residents could be forgiven for thinking of their state as the false alarm capital of the world.
The words, “This is not a drill” come to mind.
But while Hawaiʻi’s 2018 warning of incoming ballistic missiles ranks as probably the most infamous false alarm of the 21st century, all those other alerts about flash floods, hurricanes and yes, the occasional tsunami, should elicit gratitude, not ridicule.
Like Tuesday, they usually amount to not much. And it’s easy to get to the point where we roll our eyes dismissively after those jarring alerts come out of our cellphones — and those of everyone else within earshot.
That would be a mistake, because these alerts are not false alarms. They’re messages from experts engaged in the imprecise science of predicting disasters that could kill us.
The fact that our cellphones and televisions start buzzing and beeping so often is not a sign of mismanagement, but evidence that we live in a particularly hazardous place where heavy rains create instant waterfalls, hurricanes drift by every storm season, and the sea can suddenly invade courtesy of earthquakes thousands of miles away.
Add in the threat of wildfire, and paradise can be precarious indeed.
We all do our own calculus when an alert goes off. Is it one to ignore? To take under advisement while maintaining our plans for the day?
Tuesday’s tsunami warning was hard to ignore because it had solid creds: The spawn of a massive earthquake. The specter of 10-foot waves. Air raid-style sirens. A precisely scheduled arrival time. Warnings to seek higher ground. Even, God forbid, tourism disruptions.
Still, for every person heading home early, lining up to buy gas or cutting short a beach outing, you can bet there were plenty of eye-rollers put off not by the chance of calamity but by the inconvenience of it all.
Some no doubt recalled the hubbub of 2011, when an even stronger quake wreaked havoc in Japan but resulted only in traffic jams and a lot of wasted time in Hawaiʻi.
And what about 2018 when Hurricane Lane was forecast to plow right into Honolulu Harbor, possibly as a Category 5? Everything was closed. Windows were boarded up. Then wind shear blew the storm off-course.
Please, can we just get back to normal?
The fact that Tuesday’s waves proved mercifully mild may further embolden the alert-skeptics among us. These are not dumb people. They comprehend that shit happens. But somehow they just can’t fathom that the sudden blaring beep on their phone might portend real danger.
Odds are, they instantly calculate, everything will be fine.
It’s probably just human nature, but this response dilutes the progress we’ve made as human beings, the scientific advancements that can provide hours of warning about tsunamis from distant quakes, and days of warning before windstorms.
Listen to interviews of survivors of the deadly Hilo tsunami of 1946 and you’ll hear the voices of people who would have dearly loved to have had advance warning of what was coming their way after a quake in the Aleutian Islands hours earlier.
That disaster, which killed 173 people, inspired the establishment of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in 1949.
It was far from perfect, and in 1960, after a series of warnings that seemed to confuse the populace, 61 people died in another Hilo tsunami, this one generated in Chile by the largest recorded quake in history.
After that, the nations of the Pacific decided to coordinate their efforts to improve the tsunami warning system.
As for hurricanes, global warming may not be increasing their frequency, but it’s clearly heightening their intensity. Sophisticated storm warnings have never been more crucial, especially for an archipelago of a million people in the middle of the Pacific.
All things worth considering the next time your phone beeps or that annoying alert crawls across the top of your TV screen.
Read more on Honolulu Civil Beat
