Charles McCreery

Charles “Chip” McCreery’s quarters next to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center is itself in a risky zone from giant waves — only five feet above and less than 1,000 feet away from the ocean along Fort Weaver Road in Ewa Beach.

The center soon will move to a safe fourth floor of a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration building on Ford Island, a new high for an agency with which McCreery has been familiar for nearly two decades and where he has been in charge since 1997.

McCreery arrived in Honolulu from Kansas in 1968 as a University of Hawaii student. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in printmaking but was fascinated by a campus job as a freshman, where he began making scientific drawings at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics on the Manoa campus.

He continued working at the institute for 20 years and earned a doctorate in geophysics. He left UH in 1993 to join the Tsunami Warning Center and spent two years as head of the downtown International Tsunami Information Center before returning to the warning center as director.

While McCreery is focused on looking out for potentially lethal ocean waves, he sees no possibility of reducing their occurrence. Like others, he questions the late Michael Crichton’s suggestion in his 2007, “State of Fear,” that global warming, in this case set off by eco-terrorists, can be the cause of a tsunami.

“I would say global warming could certainly have an effect on the impact of tsunamis because if sea level rises a little bit, all ocean hazards get worse,” McCreery commented. “Big surf gets worse, tsunamis get worse, storm surge from hurricanes gets worse, but I don’t know about climate change having anything to do with tsunamis because there’s no known relationship between that and earthquakes, for example.”

QUESTION: Are there certain things that are going to be put in your system because of shortage of information about the recent tsunami (on Oct. 27)?

ANSWER: I’m certain some things in our operations will change as a result of this event. They actually do after every single event we have because every single tsunami is unique, and with every tsunami we learn something more that helps us for the future. In this particular case, the lack of data from that spot was pretty critical, because we just had nothing at all between the earthquake and Hawaii, and unfortunately it was by design, because we just did not expect anything from that area to produce something for Hawaii.

Q: Why not?

A: Because (of) the mechanisms of the earthquakes. … If you look at almost all the earthquakes in that region, they’re of a strike-slip kind. … The two-plates slide past another horizontally, there’s no vertical motion, and it’s the vertical motion that actually either lifts up the ocean or drops down the ocean and causes the tsunami wave to be generated.

Q: Can you say that one area more than others is likely to be the source of a tsunami that might threaten Hawaii?

A: Absolutely we can. Our history of tsunamis in Hawaii tells us something about that because we’ve actually had many tsunamis from Chile; it’s a very long subduction zone, very active, lots of big earthquakes down there, and lots of ones up around the magnitude 9 range. So we know they’ll come from there, we know they’ll come from the Aleutian Islands. Our biggest historical tsunami here was in 1946 from the Aleutians, but just a few years later in 1957 we had something approaching a magnitude 9 in another part of the Aleutians. Now most of that energy went west of Hawaii, but Hawaii still had big effects from that tsunami as well. We’ve had, just like we did in 2011, we’ve had at least three tsunami impacts from Japan. Now the places where we have big subduction zones that we don’t have any historical impacts are places like the Mariana Islands, the Philippines Trench, the Tonga Trench, those places are also subduction zones, but we just haven’t had anything in the historical record to tell us that they can generate big tsunamis that would affect Hawaii.

Q: What is a subduction zone?

A: A subduction zone is where two of the Earth’s plates are converging, and typically the oceanic plate is going underneath the continental plate as the two plates move together. So what happens is that they get stuck, and so the oceanic plate that’s getting pulled along by convection in the mantle of the Earth is stuck against this upper plate and so the pressure builds and builds and builds and the upper plate gets pulled down a bit and the oceanic plate actually gets kind of pushed up in the back from where this contact zone is, until finally it breaks, and when it breaks, this parts flips up and that part drops down, and above that is water — so that’s what generates the tsunami.

Q: How has the detection improved over the years?

A: There’s two things: One is detection of the earthquake … We have many more seismometers, so our response time now for earthquakes around the Pacific is typically less than 10 minutes, from the time of earthquake until we’ve done our reviewed analysis and issue a bulletin. Detection of the tsunami is a little bit different, because we rely on coastal sea level gauges as well as these deep ocean gauges, and that takes longer because tsunamis, although they move quite fast across mid-ocean, roughly the speed of a commercial jet, it will still take them typically half an hour to an hour before they reach the nearest sea-level stations in the Pacific or in any of the other oceans that we cover. We have to wait that time until the tsunami reaches that gauge, and a single cycle of a tsunami wave may only be something like 15 or 20 or 30 minutes for one cycle, so we have to wait until we get a cycle or at least half a cycle before we can even measure the tsunami.

Q: Was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami a point where improvements were made as a result?

A: Absolutely. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami pretty much woke up the world to what this hazard is. It’s primarily because the last large earthquake that had happened before that was in 1964, so we went from 1964 to 2004, a period of 40 years, with no earthquakes above magnitude 8.5. We’ve actually had six earthquakes above magnitude 8.5 from 2004 until today, so we’ve had a lot of big earthquakes.

But 2004 primarily because there were a lot of reasons. One was that it had so many casualties — I believe around 250,000. The Indian Ocean had no warning system. Most of the casualties were in an area pretty near the earthquake itself, in Banda Aceh in Indonesia, but you also had a lot of casualties in Sri Lanka, India and even across the entire Indian Ocean over in Somalia and Kenya. It made our government as well other governments around the world realize that this was a hazard not to be taken lightly, even if though it’s rare when one of these things happens, the consequences can be pretty bad if you’re not prepared.

At that time, for example, our center here was not manned 24 hours a day with someone in the center. You might have noticed we at least have some houses on the site out here. There were always people here to respond, but they would respond from their homes, and at nighttime we’d go to sleep; we had an alarm system that if computers detected something, it would wake us up. Well, Congress appropriated money so that our center and the Alaska center now have enough staff to be able to man the center with somebody in the center 24 hours later. Aside from that, these deep ocean gauges around the Pacific? In 2004, we had six of them; now we have 39. All of that funding came as a result of the 2004 tsunami. It also boosted a lot of research, so a lot of scientists around the world started to get funding to work on these problems.

Q: Are there technology improvements you see on the horizon?

A: There’s lots of things that have some promise. Probably the biggest one right now is GPS, the global positioning system. Geophysicists use GPS to monitor the motion of plates, and on the Big Island they use it for monitoring the volcano to see how the volcano is swelling or deflating, or under the sea where you don’t have a GPS for under the seas — you’ve got to have them on land — you can kind of project to see what might have happened.

One of the challenges for us when we analyze an earthquake right now is that when we get the location of the earthquake from those first arrivals, that just tells us where the rupture started. If the rupture starts there, these are the first signals that go out from the earthquake, and they are the first ones that arrive on all the seismic stations, so you back-project for eruptions and to see movements. There’s a lot of movements in the volcano. For example, just because gravity wants to tend to pull the flanks of the volcano down, and so sometimes they can see these motions with GPS. For earthquakes, if you can get the data back in real time, and that’s doable — it’s being done in lots of places — then when a large earthquake happens at least from places where there’s land, you can see what the deformations were.

For tsunami warnings, that can be pretty important, because if you see a lot of uplift or a lot of down-drop, you can use those readings to help interpret what might be going on and you get to spot where the rupture started. For great earthquakes, which are the ones that cause the big tsunamis, the rupture could go left, or it could go right along the fault zone, or it could go both directions. The Japan (one) went both directions, the Chile went both directions, the Indonesia of 2004 went one direction — and, of course, then that in turn affects what you have to do to model the tsunami properly.

Now this earthquake here, the one we had the other night, the magnitude is too small for that to make much of a difference. 7.7 is hugely smaller than the magnitude 9, by close to a factor of 100, I’d say.

Q: Several years ago, there was an internal memo that the center was understaffed. Was that the case?

A: Well, we would like to have more people in our staff here. For example, we don’t have anyone who’s dedicated to doing outreach… to go out and educate our partners, help educate the public. That’s a position within our organization that every weather forecast office has one of those positions.

Q: Weekend before last, there were people on the beach after the warning was made. Does that indicate that outreach is needed?

A: Possibly. Now, of course, we’re a tourist state, so I don’t know anything about those people, but it’s also possible that they were tourists who came from a place like I came from, the Midwest, where we don’t even know what a tsunami is. But sure, that’s the point of outreach, at least a lot of it, (which) is to try to keep the public educated about the hazard. We call it a high-fatality hazard. It’s not like something where you can hunker down in your house and wait for the storm to pass. If you’re caught in a tsunami, you have a high likelihood of dying, because the water is extremely powerful and you not only can drown but you can get crushed by all the debris in the water. Outreach is very important. I shouldn’t say we ignore outreach, we still do it in spite of not having a dedication position. …

Q: Do you think it was right to put out the warning rather than an advisory?

A: Certainly from the standpoint of what we were able to determine from that earthquake, a warning was the right call. We have to act conservatively. If it’s a close call, we’re going to err on the side of caution. One of our big challenges here always is that there’s going to be many more types of scenarios that are close calls than there are ones that are big tsunamis that are, for us, going to be easy to call.