No damage from tiny surges

The harbor was lit up Tuesday night, but no tsunami materialized. The Daily Triplicate/Bryant Anderson

Despite concerns that the initial surge was expected to come at high tide and measure up to two feet in height, the waves did little more than raise the docks and jostle the fleet of ships inside the inner boat basin.

“So far as we can tell at this point there’s no damage,” Harbormaster Richard Young said. “We tried to do a survey of the harbor and didn’t find anything broken or damaged.”

The first surges arrived around 9:30 p.m., which is when the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Administration estimated the waves would hit Crescent City. It wasn’t until about two hours later that larger surges started to come in and a noticeable current could be seen at the mouth of the inner boat basin.

While most of the emergency personnel that were at the harbor went home around this time, an NOAA tide gauge recorded some of the largest oscillations from 11 p.m. Tuesday to about 4:30 a.m. Wednesday.

“There was quite a bit of activity from midnight on,” Young said. “All the action took place around low tide, so it was okay from that standpoint.”

Even though Crescent City is historically known as a tsunami magnet and a place where the waves strike hardest, it didn’t even have the distinction of claiming the largest measured surge height in the state.

According to Troy Nicolini, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Eureka, the largest tsunami surge in Crescent City only had an amplitude of about eight inches above sea level, which means that if the wave was measured from trough to peak it would be about twice that.

“People in Crescent City are used to their harbor getting the worst of it,” Nicolini said, “but in Point Arena it was 1.1 feet.”

As in Crescent City, he added that there was no report of damage caused by the tsunami in Point Arena, or in any other part of the state.

When the tsunami advisory was sent out Tuesday, NOAA expected Crescent City to see a surge measuring 26 inches in amplitude, though it was not expected to touch dry ground.

“The wave came a little smaller, but it was within the realm of what we were looking at,” Nicolini said. “And just like our weather forecast models it was not perfect.”

Part of the reason for the inaccuracy, he said, was that as the surge spread out from the South Pacific, the direction of the wave bypassed Hawaii where there are tsunami measurement instruments that could have helped update the information that was already available.

Del Norte County Emergency Services Manager Cindy Henderson said she was pleased with the interagency response to Tuesday’s tsunami, calling it “good practice” for the future.

“That’s the best training you can get is with these small live events,” Henderson said. “The luxury is we had the time and the small wave that we were going to get.”

Because Tuesday’s tsunami was a distant source event and therefore allowed for more preparation time, officials were able to use reverse 911 technology to notify fishermen and boat owners about the impending danger to their property. This allowed those people to go to the harbor and either secure their vessels or ride them into the open ocean where they would be out of the hazard area inside the inner boat basin.

“There’s a certain time that we all have to agree that it’s too dangerous to get the boat out,” Henderson said. “But it’s their livelihood and we understand that.”

Tuesday’s event was a “signature tsunami,” according to Young, and had all the associated characteristics one would expect to see in a Crescent City surge, from the late arrival of the largest waves to the hours of oscillations that were observed. And like Henderson, he too was impressed with the local mobilization effort.

“I think (Tuesday) night was a great example of what it’s like to live in a small town,” Young said. “We had all the local emergency services and we had all the help that was available from local resources (at the harbor).

“Fortunately they weren’t needed.”