Proposed budget cuts to tsunami warning system put Hawaiʻi at significant risk
President Trump’s budget proposes to eliminate seismic and water monitoring, needlessly putting coastal residents in jeopardy.
Budget cuts proposed by the Trump Administration would compromise the timeliness and accuracy of tsunami forecasting and warnings, putting coastal residents at risk, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
The budget cuts, unveiled last week, would also negate key provisions of the Tsunami Warning, Education, and Research Act
According to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the cuts will significantly reduce warning time of an incoming tsunami to coastal populations—especially in Alaska and Hawaiʻi.
In addition to eliminating over 60 percent of the staff for the NOAA Tsunami Warning Center (from 40 positions to only 15), the Trump budget would terminate funding for three separate tsunami detection systems:
Land-based seismic sensors;
Coastal water level sensors; and
Deep-ocean buoys (the Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis or DARTs).
NOAA’s own Congressional Submission concedes that, “This termination is anticipated to have a 20 percent or greater impact on the accuracy, certainty, and timeliness of NOAA’s tsunami watches and warnings.”
But PEER believes that even this is a significant underestimate of the actual impact of the cuts. In addition, the populations that will be most impacted by the cuts are the ones already at the highest risk from tsunami inundation and damage.
“Disconnecting land and water-based tsunami sensors is an incredibly foolish false economy,” said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. Ruch noted that the total package of $35 million in proposed spending reductions would be dwarfed by the public savings from timely early warning of even a single tsunami. “This proposal makes it apparent that the experts at NOAA are divorced from their own budget planning.”
In addition, the Trump cuts would functionally nullify key provisions of the Tsunami Warning, Education, and Research Act—which President Trump himself just signed into law on April 18. (The act is part of the larger Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017, unanimously adopted by both houses of Congress). Its purpose is to improve “mapping, modeling, and assessment efforts to improve tsunami detection, forecasting, warnings, [and] notification.”
“It looks as if the left hand does not know what the right hand has already signed in the Trump White House,” said Ruch, while pointing out that this was one of the few substantive new laws (other than repeals of late-term Obama regulations) Trump has signed thus far.
Ruch added, “While many predict that this Trump budget will not be adopted, disturbingly, the logic that produced this plan still persists among Trump decision-makers.”
