"WASHINGTON — This month as Japan commemorated the 10-year anniversary of a tsunami that killed thousands of people, the United States has been reckoning with the vulnerability of its own systems for detecting the massive sea waves.
The nation’s main tsunami detection system experienced an outage March 9 when a broken water pipe in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Maryland headquarters knocked out the program’s servers, according to an agency spokeswoman. Ocean monitors positioned around the globe couldn’t send information to the country’s two tsunami warning centers, leaving a critical part the country’s alert system offline, tsunami experts said.
The United States wasn’t completely unprotected — weather forecasts weren’t affected, and scientists could still use data on earthquakes to issue early tsunami warnings. The outage lasted nearly a week, until staff devised a workaround allowing monitoring data to reach the warning centers March 15, according to National Weather Service spokeswoman Susan Buchanan. But the system is still under repair."
Anna M. Phillips reports for the Los Angeles Times March 16, 2021.
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