NCL’s Shame

We were quite aware of the earthquake and tsunami last week, and naturally a related story made it into True. Let’s start with that.

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off Kamchatka at 1:25 p.m., Honolulu time …while we were in the north Pacific. A Tsunami Watch was issued at 1:33 p.m., and was upgraded to a Warning at 2:43 p.m. The NCL ship left port at 4:00 p.m., giving very little warning for those ashore. While it does take a ship a little time to cast off lines and get moving, “deep water” isn’t very far off any of the Hawaiian islands.

What Cruise Ships Must Do

As the story says, ships must head for deep water if there is time! And there was plenty of time.

The rule of thumb for “deep water” is 1,000ish feet, or 300ish meters. When I researched this with ChatGPT, it said that “If under full emergency power and with port authority clearance, a cruise ship might get there in as little as 30 minutes. But more conservatively, 45–60 minutes is realistic for full tsunami safety.” That sounds pretty reasonable (it’s always smart to sanity-check Chatty-G).

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center — which is located in Honolulu — gave the estimated arrival time for the first wave as 7:17 p.m., or more than three hours after NCL departed. They literally left passengers on the dock, who then had to make their way to higher ground. Those who were on excursions were taken directly to a shelter, rather than to the port.

It’s left unclear how many crew were with the 600 passengers, which is certainly an estimate despite the fact they knew exactly how many passengers and crew were not aboard, as we check out with security every time we leave, and check in again when we get back. They do it by scanning our key cards, which records our arrivals and departures. At any moment, they can query the database for a list of who is off-ship.

Wanna bet it was actually more than 600 total? Not only might it be excursion-related crew, but part of the appeal for cruise ship employees, including housekeepers, waiters, bartenders, and officers, is they get time off to visit some ports, just like the passengers they serve.

Duty to Passengers

In addition to the tardy text message, the ship did a very poor job of communicating with those passengers. “Nobody knows what’s going on,” said “Mandy the Cruise Planner”, a “cruise addict” who documents her cruising adventures on TikTok. She was left behind while other family members on the ship were “terrified for us — we’re terrified for us,” she said. “The kids are just terrified on the ship, and the communication is not great.”

Hawaii News Now documented the ship leaving “chaos at the port” as it pulled out without people waiting to board …more than two hours before waves were due to arrive. It’s very well known that the time of arrival of a tsunami is quite precise to estimate, though its size is not at all easy to estimate. They of course could not return until the emergency was lifted and dock facilities were inspected for damage.

Wave size depends on the intensity of the earthquake, the distance the waves travel, the direction the waves are coming from and, importantly, the underwater geography near the coast. A wave may be barely noticeable in one spot but may be very destructive only a few miles away.

Yes, the NCL ship absolutely should have left. But in my opinion, they were way too hasty about fleeing, and unnecessarily stranded a lot of people, adding a significant burden on local emergency services. NCL should make a significant donation to Hilo disaster agencies to help with that burden. Only then will “Shame of America” be replaced by “Pride of America” in my mind.

You might say that cruise ship captains have a duty to safeguard their ships, and the passengers they have aboard. Indeed they do. Yet True is all about thinking, not reacting. They had plenty of time to gather nearby passengers …if the passengers knew to come back! Yet when they cast off, they had three more hours to get to sea. They could have, and should have, taken the opportunity to recall passengers with at least a half-hour of notice, if not more; not 18 minutes. Why was it delayed so much, eating up valuable time? Well, I’ll discuss that more below.

Where Were We?

As most of you know by now, my wife and I live full time on the first real Residential Cruising ship, which takes 3- to 3-1/2 years to circumnavigate the globe. What some may have not realized: we were in the north Pacific Ocean at the time of the quake, which happened in the north-west Pacific, just off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula — a place known for big quakes and tsunamis.

About 29 hours before the quake, I happened to take this screenshot of our location. Minutes before that, noticing we were passing Unimak island, I popped out to our balcony to get “a last look” at land before our long trek to Japan. Couldn’t see a thing: there was heavy fog — and it’s been that way for most of our trip to Japan. Oh well! But at least this recorded our location for me, with a time stamp.

And here was our approximate position at the time of the quake:

Speaking of distances, let’s look at the proximity of Crescent City, Calif. The hardest-hit U.S. location, with around $1 million in damages, is nearly 3,500 miles from the quake:

Why Are Ships Safe at Sea?

First, not all underwater earthquakes cause tsunamis. To start a tsunami, an underwater earthquake must have vertical motion and measure at least 6.5 on the Richter Scale, and it must be centered less than 30 miles under the ocean floor. Large volcanic explosions and underwater landslides can sometimes generate waves.

The key is large water displacement. The Kuril–Kamchatka Trench formed due to a subduction zone — where one tectonic plate converges with another, and the heavier of the two sinks under the other. When there is sudden movement (an earthquake) from pent-up pressure, and it’s underwater (yet not too deep in the crust), there’s vertical displacement of the water, which ripples out from the quake.

No matter what you saw in the terrible film The Poseidon Adventure, tsunamis are not giant waves in open water. They travel across the open ocean at up to 670 miles per hour, the speed being determined solely by the depth of the water. In open water, the wave cannot be seen or felt by boats, nor does it noticeably rise above sea level until it reaches land. (“Noticeably” is important: sea sensors can detect them — that’s how we know when a tsunami is generated.) That’s why ships in deep water are totally safe: the waves are, in a real sense, only under the surface.

Just like when you drop a pebble in water and multiple rings spread from the impact point, a tsunami is similarly multiple waves. NOAA uses a network of “DART” sensors — Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis — that have pressure sensors that lie on the ocean floor, which relays measurements to a buoy above, which then transmits its findings to the Tsunami Warning Center.

In the Tsunami Warning bulletin shown (tall and thin, well above), it notes that DART 21414 measured waves of about 0.28m (0.9 ft) with a period of 32 minutes between the waves. That’s a long, slow, ripple — yet those ripples are moving at more than 600 mph! DART 21416 also picked up the waves, but they were bigger: 0.9m (3.0 ft!) with a period of 24 minutes. A positive reading, and a confirmed reading. That’s how they knew the tsunami existed.

Plus, remember that big quakes typically have aftershocks, and if big enough, can also produce their own waves. I’ve not heard of that happening in this quake, though.

And because we have a reasonably good map of the sea floor — we know the depth of the ocean at least with enough accuracy to know wave speeds — a computer can pretty quickly predict wave arrival at any point in the Pacific. Such as Hawaii. That answer wasn’t “sometime between 7:00 and 7:30 p.m.” but rather precisely at 7:17 p.m.

It’s not until a tsunami reaches shallower water and approaches land that its speed drops. In 60 feet of water, speed goes down to about 30 mph. But when the speed drops, the faster water behind builds up, and the wave rises in height. By the time it crests at a beach, the wave can be many feet high.

Back when I was in college, I interviewed Mark Spaeth, then the Tsunami Program Director of the National Weather Service, and one of the nation’s leading experts on tsunamis. He told me that the first wave usually isn’t the largest, though marine scientists are not sure exactly why. And the third and fourth waves sometimes are even bigger than the second. “I’ve seen records where the maximum wave might have occurred 24 hours after the first,” he said.

That’s why the active phase of the disaster is hours and hours long, sometimes all day. That’s why a ship can’t return after “the wave” has hit, because there’s almost certainly going to be multiple waves, separated by hours.

First Reports

I happened to have been at my desk when all this unfolded. I get quick reports of major earthquakes: when I worked at NASA/JPL, I knew a gal who worked at the Seismological Laboratory at Caltech, and she told me how to sign up for those reports. I’ve been getting them for more than 30 years now.

And when I got the first report, inserted above, it showed the quake was an 8.0. An 8.8 is much larger — why the “mistake”? I later got an update, as shown here.

When there’s an earthquake, preliminary automated systems issue an initial magnitude within minutes — based on limited data. The alerts go out quickly by email (and probably other means; I’m on the email distribution). As more seismic stations report, more sophisticated waveform modeling kicks in, and the magnitude is revised. An updated email goes out.

In this case, that update showed an increase to 8.7. Then seismologists review the data, and probably get more detail from other seismic stations. In this case, the magnitude settled on 8.8.

Unimak Island

To give you a little idea of the destructive power of a tsunami, consider Unimak Island, the little spot we cut through to get into the Bering Sea, which is part of the North Pacific. In 1940, the U.S. Coast Guard rebuilt the lighthouse on the southwest corner of the island. I would have been able to see it if it hadn’t been so foggy:

As you can see, it was built up on a hill, the preferred place for lighthouses, and the construction is pretty darned solid. Why is it so big for a tiny, rural spot? Because even with the lighthouse (the first one was built in that spot in 1903), there were often shipwrecks nearby, and the survivors would make their way to the house for safety. For instance, in 1942, the Russian freighter Turksib wrecked near the station. The 60 survivors lived at the station for several weeks because rough seas prevented a rescue ship from reaching the station.

On April 1, 1946, a nearby magnitude 8.6 earthquake generated a tsunami. This is what the lighthouse looked like afterward:

All five of the lighthouse crew were killed.

Four and a half hours later, waves started to hit Hawaii:

Despite the 4.5-hour delay, there was no warning for Hawaii, and 159 people were killed, and many more injured. It’s because of that delay that scientists realized that there could be a network of seismographs and ocean sensors built to provide plenty of warning for areas that could be in grave danger.

That system was built. It’s what provided warnings for Hawaii, Crescent City, and other affected areas last week.

All of This — the technology, the system set up to give fast warnings that waves are on the way, and when they’ll arrive, and more — that is the real “Pride of America”, figuring it all out and putting it together to prevent the tragic loss of life. NCL needs to make things right for Hilo for adding to their emergency.

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Addendum: the Real Issue is Communications

Every time — every single time! — I’ve been involved in a big emergency incident, the After Action analysis points to failures in communications as a contributing factor to the chaos.

And I’ve seen it time and time again in big incidents I’ve read about, such as the Columbine School Shooting. Whether it’s the radio system being overloaded, different responders from different agencies not having common communications systems to be able to talk with each other, or simply having someone (or in truly large incidents, several someones) assigned the responsibility to communicate what’s going on to the first responders involved, and/or the public at large.

The Tsunami Warning System is very well set up: it did its job of communicating what was going on, what was at stake, when it was going to happen, and delivering that message to those who needed to hear it, such as Emergency Managers in every coastal area at risk.

That’s fairly easy; the feds just say “Here’s how we will tell you” and it’s up to local officials to monitor that channel.

The hard part is, “then what?”

But even small- and medium-sized companies need to have emergency plans in place, and a means to communicate from there. I speak here especially of Norwegian Cruise Lines.

It’s actually a positive sign that — even if delayed — they could send a “text message” to passengers who were ashore. It’s unclear whether that message was sent through the NCL app, which I had on my phone when Kit and I traveled on an NCL ship when we crossed the Atlantic in 2024, or if they had a system to gather passenger cell phone numbers and a mechanism for sending SMS text messages.

The Key: Having a Plan

I worked with our county’s Emergency Manager for nearly 20 years, with two different people in that role. My specialty with them was radio communications, but I was very aware that their primary responsibility was to have a bookshelf full of detailed, written plans for multiple scenarios.

What if a wildfire is threatening a populated part of the county? There was a plan for that. It wasn’t just that it was on the bookshelf, but that everything was thought through about what to do. One obvious thing: there had to be a way to communicate the danger to the public, and tell them clearly what to do to save their lives.

That meant the county had to budget for, procure, and set up a system for sending (yes!) voice and text messages to residents, as well as a way to choose which landline and cell numbers to call. That’s not an easy task: a visitor from out of the state could be in that danger area, and probably didn’t provide their number to a “list” for emergency messages. There are ways to alert them, hence the need for a budget and service procurement to do it, and it needs to be set up ahead of time, and tested periodically.

And that’s just one of many possible disaster scenarios.

Back to Cruise Ships — Ours

Since I’m a “scenario planning” sort to begin with, I long ago considered the “what if?” of a tsunami during our long ship voyage. I already knew there is no problem for us when in deep water, but what if a tsunami hit a port we were heading for, causing significant damage? We might not be able to go there to see it and, worse, we might not be able to get supplies, fuel, and more.

And “what if” we are already in port? Hopefully the ship would have time to head to deep water to escape danger. Yet indeed, anytime we’re in port, some portion of the Residents are likely to be ashore, exploring. It’s part of why we’re there.

NCL at least had an app, and it was handy that they were in the U.S., and most cruise ship passengers are from the U.S.; the same is true on our ship. But we have no smartphone app. They do have a list of all of our cell numbers, but probably no system to text us in bulk.

Residents haven’t just shrugged: we have a loose communications system among ourselves. It’s not just that most of us have several friends in our phonebooks so we can text them, though that helps …a little. We also have groups set up on WhatsApp where we can reach many shipmates.

The problem is, that’s not official, and not everyone is on it, including no ship personnel. And even if everyone was on it, often those groups’ notifications are silenced because there’s too much chatter on them, and none of us want to be bothered by constant alerts.

The bottom line is, neither the company, nor the ship’s captain, has any way to quickly reach “most” of us, let alone all of us, in an emergency when we’re not onboard. Worse, we don’t have a reliable way to call the ship, either. We have to resort to calling the numbers we have for other Residents, hoping they’re on the ship and can (and will) pass a message to someone who will act on it. (The official way to contact the ship is to email the Service Desk, which is manned 24×7.)

Destructive tsunamis can be years apart …or days apart. We never know when there will be a big quake. Two tsunamis were generated, threatening Alaska, while we were in the state. The first one was on July 16,  a 7.3 quake near Sand Point, Alaska, which generated a small tsunami that resulted in evacuations from Homer, Alaska …5 days before we arrived. Luckily, those waves were inches high, not feet high. I paid close attention to that one, too.

Consider it a wakeup call. If we (and by that I mean all cruise ships, Residential or otherwise) didn’t hear the first wakeup alert, we had better have heard the second, and done something about it, before the next one hits.

August 7 Update

This Just In: My former colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory report that the SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite, a joint effort between NASA and the French space agency, captured the tsunami about 70 minutes after it was generated. The data was turned into the map/chart shown here.

The measurements included a wave height exceeding 45cm (1.5 ft) in open ocean. Considering we were in swells of 1-2m (3-6 ft), there was virtually no chance that we would have noticed that zooming by, even if we knew exactly when it was coming and where to look. It’s possible that we might have felt it …among the scores to hundreds of other bumps that we normally feel over the course of an hour.

Here’s the key: “A 1.5-foot-tall wave might not seem like much, but tsunamis are waves that extend from the seafloor to the ocean’s surface,” said Ben Hamlington, a JPL oceanographer. “What might only be a foot or two in the open ocean can become a 30-foot wave in shallower water at the coast.”

So why does this satellite data matter? The tsunami measurements SWOT collected are helping scientists at NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research improve their tsunami forecast model. Based on outputs from that model, NOAA sends out alerts to coastal communities potentially in the path of a tsunami. The model uses a set of earthquake-tsunami scenarios based on past observations, as well as real-time observations from sensors in the ocean.

The SWOT data on the height, shape, and direction of the tsunami wave is key to improving these types of forecast models. “The satellite observations help researchers to better reverse engineer the cause of a tsunami, and in this case, they also showed us that NOAA’s tsunami forecast was right on the money,” said Josh Willis, another JPL oceanographer.

The NOAA Center for Tsunami Research tested their model with SWOT’s tsunami data, and the results were exciting, said Vasily Titov, the center’s chief scientist in Seattle. “It suggests SWOT data could significantly enhance operational tsunami forecasts — a capability sought since the 2004 Sumatra event” — the tsunami generated by that devastating quake killed thousands of people and caused widespread damage in Indonesia.

For more about the satellite, see JPL’s SWOT subsite. It was launched in December 2022, and is 2 years, 7-1/2 months into its planned 3-year life.

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