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tsunamis that come ashore in a few minutes. The broadened scope aims at encompassing the
range of national tsunami warning and preparedness efforts.
The Range of Options Available for Tsunami Hazard Mitigation
As the scope of the study was broadened to include aspects of tsunami hazard mitigation,
the committee recognized the need to deine the term “mitigation” and set some boundaries
for the study, because the full suite of mitigation options exceeds the purview and capacity of
this particular study. The deinition of hazard mitigation and the actions it includes differ among
various hazard communities. Some members of the academic community consider the full
range of hazard mitigation options to include three classes of actions (White and Haas, 1975):
(1) modifying the natural causes of hazards, (2) modifying society's vulnerability (e.g., levees,
wind- and seismic-resistant houses), and (3) redistributing the losses that occur (e.g., insurance,
emergency response). In contrast, natural hazard practitioners consider the range of human
adjustment to natural hazards to fall into two major classes of actions: (1) mitigation of potential
losses through interventions in the constructed world in ways that lessen potential losses from
nature's extremes (e.g., land-use management, control and protection works, building codes),
and (2) preparedness for, response to, and recovery from speciic events and their associated
losses (Mileti, 1999).
Focus on Warning and Preparedness
Although land-use planning and adjusting building codes is important in mitigating
the impacts of tsunamis, the charge to the committee is focused primarily on the detection,
forecast, and warning for near- and far-ield tsunamis and issues directly related to the effec-
tive implementation of those warnings. To be responsive to its charge, the report focuses on
the second class of mitigation actions, which generally includes pre-event planning to develop
preparedness plans, appropriate organizational arrangements, training and exercises for issu-
ing event-speciic public warnings, an adequate emergency response, and plans for recovery
and reconstruction. These types of adjustment are based on the notion that the adequacy of
pre-event planning determines the effectiveness of event-speciic response. This view also
places insurance in the preparedness class.
THE NATION'S TSUNAMI WARNING AND PREPAREDNESS EFFORTS
Only very recently has there been a national interest in tsunami warning and prepared-
ness. Before 2004, most efforts were spearheaded by local, state, or regional initiative operating
on very limited budgets. Integrating these existing individual efforts into a national tsunami
program has led to a very different type of program than that of a national tsunami warning
program designed from the outset. The history of tsunami warning and preparedness efforts
can be traced back to two of the six destructive tsunamis that caused causalities on U.S. soil.
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