be touring the facility that morning. Since the Southeast Asian tsunami disaster, tours had become much more in demand. When Julie had scheduled the tour for Memorial Day, Kai was a bit surprised that a school would want to do anything that day that didn’t involve sand and surf. Then she told him the school group was from Japan, one of the countries covered by the PTWC, and it made sense.
He scanned the sheet. Twelve sixth graders from Tokyo for a thirty-minute tour, escorted by a teacher fluent in English. They planned to be done by nine thirty and move on to a full day of sightseeing.
He dropped the sheet back onto the counter and patted Bilbo.
“Come on. Let’s find out what’s going on.”
Following Bilbo, Kai walked the few steps into the data analysis facility, which was packed with state-ofthe- art computers and seismic sensing equipment. Huge maps of the Pacific lined two of the walls. Since the news media often got information faster than the PTWC did, the two TVs on either side of the room were perpetually tuned to CNN. He and Reggie spent most of their time in this room. Still farther back in the building were the individual cubicles and Kai’s tiny office.
Normally, George Huntley and Mary Grayson, the two most junior geophysicists, would be manning computers on the other side of the room. It hadn’t taken Kai long to realize they had started a relationship, and the last he had heard, they had both taken their day off to go surfing together on the North Shore.
Three of the other scientists were attending a conference that week in San Francisco, while the director, Harry Dupree, was on a three-day holiday to Maui.
Kai found Reggie hunched over a computer monitor, munching on an egg salad sandwich, the empty wrapper of a second sandwich lying next to him. When Reggie heard the dog’s claws clicking on the linoleum, he looked up.
“Thanks for joining us this fine morning,” Reggie said. “I thought maybe you were gonna play hooky today.”
Kai nodded toward Reggie’s sandwich, which was already half its previous size. “Is there ever a time of day when you don’t eat?”
“Hey, I don’t want to get all skinny like you.”
There was no danger of that. Reggie Pona, a huge bear of a man who used to be a defensive lineman at Stanford, must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. Reggie was also one of the brightest geophysicists Kai had ever met. A Samoan by birth, he had used his college football scholarship to accomplish his true goal of becoming a scientist.
Reggie took a bite and continued to talk while he chewed. “I thought you might go with your friends to the beach. Teresa is hot, by the way.”
“You know, sometimes you almost convince me that you’re not a nerd,” Kai said. “But then you open your mouth to talk and remind me. Besides, I couldn’t leave you alone with all those impressionable sixth graders. You scared the bejesus out of the last group.”
“I was just telling it like it is.”
“But did you have to show those pictures from Sri Lanka? I think ten-year-olds are a little young to see photos of dead bodies.”
“Hey, if it keeps them from running down to the shore during the next tsunami warning, I’ve done my job.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll do the next few tours. Where’s the bulletin?”
Reggie handed Kai a sheet of paper. On it was the date followed by a standard tsunami information message:
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 001
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 1858Z
THIS BULLETIN IS FOR ALL AREAS OF THE PACIFIC
BASIN EXCEPT
ALASKA—BRITISH COLUMBIA—WASHINGTON—
OREGON—CALIFORNIA.
… TSUNAMI INFORMATION BULLETIN …
THIS MESSAGE IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY.
THERE IS NO TSUNAMI WARNING.
OR WATCH IN EFFECT.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE
PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME—1858Z
COORDINATES—7.1 NORTH 166.4 WEST
LOCATION—NORTHWEST OF CHRISTMAS ISLAND,
KIRIBATI ISLANDS
MAGNITUDE—6.6
EVALUATION
A DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI WAS NOT GENERATED
BASED ON EARTHQUAKE AND
HISTORICAL TSUNAMI DATA.
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY BULLETIN ISSUED FOR
THIS EVENT UNLESS ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
BECOMES AVAILABLE.
THE WEST COAST/ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING
CENTER WILL ISSUE BULLETINS
FOR ALASKA—BRITISH COLUMBIA—
WASHINGTON—OREGON—CALIFORNIA.
Kai looked at Reggie. “It doesn’t seem like anything to be concerned about.”
Normally Kai would consult with Harry, but today Reggie and Kai were on their own. Although Kai was growing more comfortable with his responsibilities, he was still fairly new. This was the first bulletin issued while he was in charge.
The previous assistant director had left for NOAA headquarters in Washington to coordinate the development of a worldwide tsunami warning system. Kai’s position at NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research put him on the short list of replacement candidates. From Kai’s perspective, the job had seemed perfect. He could move his career forward while still doing interesting research. Rachel had plenty of job opportunities at Honolulu hotels. And Kai could finally get out of Seattle’s rainy climate and back to warm, sunny Hawaii.
“No, it shouldn’t be anything to worry about,” said Reggie. “But it
“Why?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute. But the threat of a tsunami is almost negligible because the event was not tsunamigenic.” The statement was made as a fact, not an opinion.
“You seem pretty confident.”
Reggie smiled. He always smiled when he was about to explain something that was perfectly obvious to him. “It barely triggered the alarms. The reading was just 6.6. A couple of ticks down, and we wouldn’t have even sent the bulletin.”
“Remember the Asia tsunami?” Kai said. “The initial readings on that were 8.0. It ended up being a 9.0.” Because the moment magnitude scale for earthquakes—a successor to the Richter scale—is nonlinear, the power of an earthquake goes up exponentially the higher it is on the scale: an earthquake measuring 9.0 releases over thirty times more energy than an 8.0 earthquake.
