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We can’t prevent tsunamis from occurring, but we there are ways to protect coastal areas from their impact. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
“The most conservative approach is what the city of Hilo did on the island of Hawaii in the Hawaiian Islands.”
Gerard Fryer is an associate geophysicist and tsunami Researcher at the University of Hawaii.
“Hilo was hit by the tsunami of 1946. It was hit again in 1960, and both times the shorefront was completely destroyed. And they eventually said enough is enough, and they withdrew from the shoreline. So now there is park land along the shoreline, and they decided they’re just not going to build there.”
If you do build along a coastline, there are other preventative measures you can take to lessen the impact of a tsunami.
“Hotels in Waikiki on the island of Oahu, for example, they are all built so that they have no bearing walls which are going to be hit by a wave coming in from the shore. All the bearing walls are perpendicular to the shore, so waves can go right through them. We see from what happened in Thailand, all the videos taken from people on the third floor or higher of all the high-rises, that those buildings survived fine. So, we can do that in all tsunami prone areas. We can quite easily build big buildings that will survive. One of the ways of reducing the impact of a tsunami is to – if you’re going to build a little bit further from the shore, you can establish a forest along the shoreline. Trees really slow the waves down very rapidly and cause them to lose a lot of energy. And in Japan they’re doing this now. In a lot of places they have what they call tsunami forests, which slow the water down and reduce the impact. All of this is known. It’s trying to convince people that it’s necessary to change their building habits just a little bit so that they acknowledge that this hazard exists, rather than trying to ignore it.”