December 30, 2004

At the Hawaii Tsunami Warning Center

This NYT article suggests what happened at NOAA's Hawaii Tsunami Warning Center.

Their instinct was to contact governments and scientists rather than the media directly. The scientists learned about the first of the destruction from CNN.

1 Comments:

Blogger JAB said...

I've never experienced pressure like this, and hope never too. But in the both the experiences of the American and Japanese scientists, their trained habit to punt to a supervisor caused a catastrophic delay. The Japanese may have made a graver error, with no indication he tried anything else.

This suggests that, although there is a real risk of panic and cry-wolf problems for distributing information too soon, the instrinsic conservatism of the bureaucracy - I don't mean the scientists, I mean the information systems in place -in controlling information is too strong, catastrophically.

December 31, 2004 at 10:53 AM  

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