I’m going to disagree with some of that. I have no problem with an “abundance of caution” alert, which this apparently was, but ANY alert is counterproductive if the follow-up information is not available. Counterproductive because people will not pay so much attention next time, or because people will do the wrong thing due to confusion about what’s going on.
So you’re saying that if an oceanic earthquake is detected which is a potential tsunami risk, that information should be deliberately withheld from the public until the data is more carefully analyzed, web sites are updated, etc? I’m going to disagree with that. If I’m walking on the beach and it’s going to take me a half hour to get back to my car, I want to know about a tsunami risk ASAP. I don’t need the authorities to craft a carefully worded set of recommendations before I act.
No, of course I’m not saying that. You seem to think I am a moron. I am saying this: send out the alert, then open another window in your computer (or whatever you have) and start quickly typing, and post online somewhere searchable what you know so far. For example, for this event, at the time of the alert, they knew “Large earthquake in ocean off of Humboldt County, tsunami possible. Details to follow as available.” I was seeing much more detail than this 5 minutes after I got the alert, when I tuned into the TV.
I was thinking about this and found this article:
Why San Francisco’s emergency sirens still won’t turn back on
The city’s 100 or so sirens have been offline since 2019 due to concerns about their vulnerability to cyberattacks. In 2017, hackers tapped into the 156 emergency sirens in Dallas and blasted them in 15 90-second intervals during the course of a weekend, startling residents.
The sirens were originally supposed to be inactive for just two years, but that timeline ballooned to four years after officials struggled to find a funding source. However, city leaders were motivated to find the needed money for new sirens after wildfires last year that devastated Lahaina, Hawaii
@markn_1 , did they sound in HMB?