Like many of you I’m pissed off with the Tsunami warning alerts that continued through last night, given that it had already passed Hawaii last evening our time, with no impact, as it spread out across the Pacific from the gigantic Kamchatka earthquake (8.8 on the scale). Similarly the MSM coverage is the usual World Ending clickbait shit we saw during the Covid pandemic.
But then the MSM have been this way for more than a century. In the superb book, Isaac’s Storm (2000), the story of the Galveston Hurricane in 1900 that wiped out the city, there’s a story about how newspaperman William Randolph Hearst sent one his famous “Sob Sisters” to the locale to report back – and she delivered with headlines such as “Even The Graves Yield Up Their Dead”.
Even so, when you know a Tsunami is going to strike with power, don’t hang around as these Japanese did (2m 33s of fear).
That’s an extraordinary piece of video. I’m amazed that guy survived without being crushed by the cars and buildings. This was the result of the Noto Earthquake (7.6 on the scale) on January 1, 2024 and I completely missed it because it didn’t come close to matching the 2011 horror, even though it killed 645 people.
One video that always got me was from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami where you saw the water coming up the street, but just as a ripple you could walk in, like at the beach – except it continued to grow until it was a flood higher than a man that just seemed to move faster every minute.
A Tsunami is not a “wave” as we think of one at the beach, even a big one. But technically it is, just one with a very long wavelength, which means it just doesn’t break, stop and retreat like even a big wave on a beach. It just keeps coming.
No Minister 
In open ocean Tsunami travel at 700 Kph.
As told elsewhere I attended a working meeting while doing a brief stint as a Community Board member for Akaroa following the Bali Tsunami where a total crock of sh*t was being delivered by ChCH City Councillors on formulating plans to evacuate the seaside Burbs from South Shore to Waimari.
A pretty significant risk is from a silt cliff where the Kowhai River enters the Pacific south of Kaikoura that if triggered as a collapse will send a tidal wave straight across Pegasus Bay to the City. They were discussing a warning time of 15 minutes and I quietly asked why such a wave might go around the Chatham Islands to offer their suggested time frame that I calculated would be maybe 20 seconds max, A distance less than 200 Kms of open ocean
THey had absolutely no idea.