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Los Angeles County Fire Captain Larry Collins spent seven years pushing officials to plan for a tsunami that could swallow Malibu and cripple the biggest U.S. shipping terminal. A state report this week agreed with him.

The state Seismic Safety Commission paper said tsunamis "pose a significant threat to life and property in California'' and urged officials to establish evacuation routes, give port workers safety training and educate residents of the danger.

A tsunami generated by an earthquake on one of the state's offshore faults may imperil 1 million residents, wreck supertankers and shut down Southern California shipping. The Asian tsunami that hit Dec. 26 last year killed as many as 200,000.

"There will be lives lost if a major tsunami strikes California,'' said Collins, 45, who in 1998 co-wrote a tidal-wave response plan with county Lifeguard Captain Angus Alexander. "We were raising the red flag, but it wasn't a priority. People didn't understand the gravity of the potential hazard.''

The economic losses would include the closure of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. A two-month shutdown would cost $60 billion and affect 600,000 jobs in the state and 2.5 million nationwide, according to data from the ports.

Collins and Alexander couldn't convince officials responsible for disaster management at the local and county level to fund education, evacuation routes and a warning system.

"It's fair to say that additional funding needs to be provided,'' said Jeff Terry, emergency manager at the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management. "It's up to the government at the state and federal levels to decide who funds what.''

Persuasion

The state report may persuade city, county and state emergency planners to prepare for the worst, said Collins, who has won medals of valor and written a three-volume textbook on rescue operations.

"It quantifies better for the public and all the elected officials exactly what we're dealing with,'' Collins said of the state report. "A lot more funding is needed to make this work, for things like sirens on the beaches.''

Geologic formations discovered off California's coast since 1994 are capable of generating a quake that could spawn a tsunami as large as the one that devastated coastal areas in Asia a year ago, said Lucile Jones, scientist-in-charge for Southern California at the U.S. Geological Survey and a member and recent chairwoman of the commission.

In June, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck offshore of Northern California, prompting the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration to issue a tsunami warning from San Diego to British Columbia. Many local officials either had no plan or chose to do nothing about the June warning.

The report said that response proved existing procedures are inadequate and advocated a system that assesses threats locally, giving officials more information on whether to evacuate.

Threat

The greatest threat to the West Coast comes from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which runs offshore from Northern California to Canada, Jones said.

A tsunami originating there would reach the state in no more than 15 minutes, the same amount of time it took last December's wave to hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia. It would hit southern California in about 90 minutes, Jones said.

The Cascadia fault produces a magnitude 9 temblor, equal to the one that generated the Indonesian tsunami, about every 500 years, according to research by Tom Heaton of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. The last one was recorded in 1700.

Southern California is also at risk from faults just off its coast, including one under Catalina Island, 50 miles from Los Angeles. There are nearby undersea canyons where even a smaller quake could set off a landslide displacing enough water to create a major tsunami.

"If it's a nearby tsunami and you have 15 minutes, you're going to have to have practiced what to do,'' Jones said. "We have not educated anybody.''

Report

Building codes in low-lying areas should be revamped and ports should take measures to better shield or secure equipment that can become lethal when borne inland by tsunami waves, the state report said. The report also calls for the state to add tsunami education to its school curriculum and inform coastal populations of the hazards.

Teaching people that they need to evacuate low-lying coastal areas following an earthquake or to recognize draw-down, when water recedes rapidly from shore just ahead of a tsunami's landfall, can make the difference between life or death, Jones said.

Jones estimates there's a 50 percent chance of a major tsunami generated by the Cascadia fault hitting within the next 100 years.

Collins, who assisted in responses to the Oklahoma City bombing and the Sept. 11 attacks, worries a wave like that could rush through beach cities including Venice and Marina Del Rey, sweeping away their 200,000 residents.

Collins and Alexander said they are still pressing for detailed response plans from local agencies.

"The odds may be low, but it can happen and we have to plan for it,'' Collins said. "Otherwise it would be catastrophic.''

From www.bloomberg.com