Hawaii County Civil Defense and Mayor Mitch Roth on Tuesday defended the county’s response last month to a tsunami threat triggered by the eruption of a volcano in Tonga.
Roth and Civil Defense Director Talmadge Magno appeared at a meeting of the County Council’s Committee on Parks and Recreation and Public Safety to account for the county’s handling of the incident.
Late Jan. 14 in Hawaii, the undersea volcano Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, about 3,100 miles southeast of Hawaii Island, erupted explosively, causing tsunamis throughout the Pacific Rim.
However, the only warning provided to Hawaii residents by Civil Defense was an alert sent early Jan. 15, notifying that a tsunami advisory was in effect for the island and state, but that no evacuation order was in effect. Waves 1 to 3 feet high struck Big Island shores early Jan. 15.
Magno said he has since received complaints from West Hawaii residents wanting to know why the state’s emergency sirens did not warn them about the potential dangers.
“When those sirens go off, it causes people to panic, it causes chaos,” Magno said, adding that forcing a nighttime evacuation of Kailua-Kona would have caused more problems than the damage that actually occurred as he told West Hawaii Today days after the event.
“By the time things were happening … we already had officers down there,” Roth said. “If we had got the news at 6 p.m. (when the eruption happened), maybe we would have been able to do something more, but we only got the news at 10:06 p.m.”
Civil Defense Administrator Bill Hanson said the delay between the eruption and the alert to the county was because the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center’s instrumentation is largely tuned to monitor for earthquakes, rather than volcanic eruptions.
“This was kind of an anomaly,” Hanson said. “They were kind of in uncharted waters.”
Hanson also said that the PTWC disseminated its first series of warnings to sites within a 100-kilometer radius of the eruption, which didn’t include Hawaii. When the PTWC was able to detect the eruption’s intensity — the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the eruption’s shockwave was equivalent to a magnitude 5.8 earthquake — it issued warnings throughout the Pacific Rim.
The PTWC message that the county received specifically noted that there was no threat to Hawaii, Hanson said.
Roth acknowledged that the county’s assessments of the severity of the tsunami damage would likely be small comfort to businesses affected by the surge — Kailua-Kona tour operator Sea Quest Hawaii sustained thousands of dollars in damage to its store.
But Hanson and Magno said Civil Defense reached out to waterfront resorts in West Hawaii in the wake of the tsunami, but none reported any damage.
Magno also added that the county is not eligible for federal disaster relief funds for what tsunami damage was sustained.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.