Three prototypes are now being tested in the North Pacific and off Monterey Bay. Strategically located, these buoys have detectors 3 miles long embedded in the ocean floor that can measure a tsunami as it passes. Once in operation, these buoys will revolutionize the current primitive practice of inferring from an earthquake whether a tsunami has been generated and then just waiting for it to arrive. Scientists and disaster officials will actually be able to determine information in real time about the wave as it passes in midocean. Before 1997 few counties were aware of the tsunami threat and most had done little or no tsunami planning.
Local governments have to determine their own acceptable level of risk.
Many question the efficacy of spending a lot of money preparing for an event that occurs once every few hundred years. Neither hell nor high water, it seems, can keep people from developing prime California coastal land. Towns like Santa Cruz should learn from what happened in Crescent City. In places like Santa Cruz, there is tremendous pressure for development on coastal property, which is of course the area most at risk. Obviously the best solution is simply not to build along coastlines.