Well, there you have it. We are living in a tsunami danger zone. We live in New Zealand. They are on top of two continental plates, the Australian plate and the Pacific plate and they are trying to pass each other. Unfortunately, it results in one plate being pushed down while the other pushes over the top. (Look up plate tectonics if you want to know more.) As they crash into each other earthquakes occur. Tsunamis are caused by earthquakes. Generally the quakes occur offshore and then through a change in the floor level of the ocean, there is a rippling dispersal of water that causes the sea level to rise dramatically.
New Zealand has started to get serious about tsunamis. An earthquake off the coast of Japan caused a tsunami that took out the nuclear power plant in Fukushima Japan in 2011. In 2022, their neighbor Tonga, was nearly wiped out by a tsunami caused by the eruption of an underwater volcano. So the danger is real.
We received a flyer in our mailbox alerting us to an evacuation planning meeting. Matt is very focused on disasters and by that I mean, he worries about them. A lot. Me, well, I just can’t think too hard about it. But he wanted to go to the meeting. So, there we sat with our neighbors while scientists tried to bring home the fact that this kind of event can come at any time and with little notice. And it can kill you.
I certainly believe them. But the advice is to have a go bag and get ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice. If you feel a strong and long earthquake, go. The goal is to clear out of the danger zone. For us, being at sea level, that zone is a good mile out. It is hard to imagine outrunning a tsunami without sufficient time. I think it is virtually impossible. It depends on where the earthquake occurs. If it is close by, as happened in Tonga, well, forget it. Imagine if you are on the road walking/running away and the earthquake was close by. That wave is coming fast. You can hope is dissipates quickly so you don’t have to travel all that far to get out of its way. But there is no way to know what is going to happen. The best you might do is the vertical escape–climb a tree and hope the wave is not as high as the tree. From stories on the news, that seems to be how most people survive.
If the earthquake is far enough away and there is advance warning, you might have a chance to get out.
There is only one road in and out of this community. We are surrounded by farms. So we spent some part of the meeting looking at potential alternatives, possibly across farm land, possibly along paths leading away from shore. This is just the planning phase and they government civil disaster reps are going to see what they can do based on input from people who have lived around here much longer than us.
This is all so new to us. We are Atlantic Ocean people. Tsunamis are not our thing. Hurricanes, yes. Giant waves from earthquakes? Not so much. Well, I guess we need to learn.
A Yank Among the Kiwis 