Sunday marked the kickoff of Alaska Tsunami Preparedness Week. It’s an effort by the National Weather Service to remind us that coastal Alaska lives with the most serious tsunami risk in the United States.
For those who live in a tsunami zone, this week is meant to remind them to not be complacent about the danger. It’s also meant to warn inland residents to be prepared when they visit coastal communities.
“All of us move around the state and like to go to the shores and experience vacations and see the ocean. And it’s good, as we go into tsunami preparedness week, that we keep in mind that our best defense is to know before we go," said Aviva Braun, Warning Coordination Meteorologist with National Weather Service in Anchorage. “Know the threats for where you’re going. Be prepared if you hear that siren and understand what you need to do when you hear of those warnings and react appropriately. Because sometimes we just don’t think when we are scared, but if we train ourselves beforehand, we’re much better equipped for it.”
Of Kenai Peninsula communities, those in Kachemak Bay and Resurrection Bay are most at risk of a tsunami. Those towns are also equipped with sirens, signage about evacuation routes and alerting systems to let you know when you’re in danger and what to do about it. You can, of course, tune to your local radio station for emergency alerts and updates. And cellphones, these days, get automatic notifications when you’re in a tsunami alert zone.
But those alerts can be misleading in Alaska. You can be in Soldotna or even Cooper Landing and still get a tsunami alert on your phone. That’s because the alerts go out based on weather zones territories, and the Kenai Peninsula only has two — for the western and eastern peninsula. To warn Homer or Seward of a legitimate tsunami risk, inland communities in those zones get alerts, as well.
“I understand that frustration,” Braun said. "At this time, we only have it split into these two zones. And Homer, of course, has higher tsunami threats than Cooper Landing but they also are going to be alerted because, most of time, the weather is similar overall."
Braun said the zones are used for more than just tsunami alerts. Other weather events affect entire regions, much larger than just coastal communities.
“These zones are also used for winter storm warnings and wind warnings and flood warnings and we have to think about each one of those,” she said.
Zone area boundaries are tweaked from time to time. The National Weather Service just went through a revision of its Alaska zone boundaries to better match the census boundaries that changed after the 2020 count. For instance, the Census Bureau split the Cordova-Valdez area into the Cordova and Chugach census areas, and the weather service updated its zone territories to match. That means people in Glennallen won’t get Prince William Sound tsunami warnings anymore.
Braun says redrawing zone boundaries in all coastal areas to better suit tsunami risk wouldn’t make sense for all the other weather hazards, which are much more regional.
"If we divvied everything up on individual lines of who sees what kinds of impacts, it would be a really crazy-looking puzzle. Some of this is us just trying to make sure that everything makes sense,” said said.
And someone in Kenai might be heading to Homer and should know what adverse weather situation they might face down the road.
"The Kenai Peninsula is so interconnected every community relies on another communities or drives through another community," Braun said. "I mean, there’s only that one main road. So, something that affects one area of our community affects us all, so it’s part of keeping that in mind, as well.”
The system isn’t perfect, Braun says, and change takes time. For now, the best thing to do is educate yourself about tsunami risks anytime you visit coastal communities in Alaska.
You can find all kinds of resources at tsunamizone.org/Alaska.
