Tsunami warning puts disaster response to the test
The Tiburon Peninsula was briefly under the highest-level tsunami warning last week after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck off Humboldt County’s Cape Mendocino, with many residents taking to higher ground, local first responders visiting low-lying areas to issue warnings and dozens of parents retrieving their kids from Reed Elementary School, where the district ordered all schools to evacuate lower levels.
But other residents, including those in mapped tsunami inundation zones, were left in the dark about the local response as Tiburon and Belvedere relied in part on AlertMarin for public outreach. Just 37% of 94920 residents have signed up, county officials say, and for those who have, some notifications were significantly delayed.
“This was an actual exercise” that could in theory have been devastating, said Belvedere’s Tom Cromwell, a disaster-response champion who’s chair of both the Block Captains Committee and the Belvedere-Tiburon Joint Disaster Advisory Council. “It reminds us we might need to crank up efforts.”
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