If you were in a tsunami zone at around 11 am, today’s tsunami test was hard to miss. But not impossible.

Planes buzzed the coast with loudspeakers, sirens blared and (some) broadcast stations sprang to life with warnings.

All this redundancy makes for a lot of moving parts during today’s rare test drive. Humboldt has a lot of coastline to protect, and these sweet new inundation maps put even more real estate in the danger zone. 

That said, today’s tsunami drill left a lot of room for improvement. Some sirens didn’t trigger and some that did were hard to hear indoors. The broadcast emergency alert wasn’t wholly functional, and there were reports of the plane’s PA messages being unintelligible. 

Troy Nicolini of the National Weather Service lives in one of the most tsunami-vulnerable areas: the northern peninsula. On today’s Coastal Currents, he walks through the machinations of today’s Tsunami Warning Test: What worked, what didn’t, and how to help improve the system.

Audio