A network of sophisticated buoys, anchored in strategic locations on the open ocean, have long provided reliable forecasts of possible tsunamis threatening our islands.

So it was disconcerting to learn that the system to process buoy data was shut down for nearly a week — not by rough seas, but by a burst water pipe in the National Weather Service office building in Silver Spring, Md. The data center that handles information from the buoys flooded on March 9, requiring the power to be shut off.

Staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration engineered a workaround, so monitoring continued during the shutdown.

But oh, the irony.