Tsunami exercise represented small but damaging waves

(CNS): Officials from Hazard Management Cayman Islands have confirmed that had last week’s tsunami exercise been the real thing, Cayman would have suffered some significant flooding. Although it was just a three foot surge, tsunamis behave very differently from regular waves, Simon Boxall of HMCI explained and warned it would have caused a continuous, ongoing three foot wave of water coming across our shores without receding.

Given that recent extremely high tides around a foot or more above average crossed the road in a number of places on Grand Cayman, a tsunami akin to the one in the recent exercise would definitely have required residents around the coast to have been evacuated.

“Large parts of Cayman are just a foot or two above sea level so it does not take much to have impacts,” Boxall told CNS, but he said with few historical records about local tsunami impacts predicting what might happen is not easy, he added, pointing out that in the event of the real thing the HMCI would err on the side of caution

“With only a couple hours of warning we would have tried to warn residents and visitors as best we could, to move away from the shoreline,” he said but with no mountains or hills to speak off going far in land or evacuating vertically, in other words going up a floor, in a strong building would be the best response for residents until the all clear. “If a tsunami wave was really heading towards Cayman, all members of the RCIPS would have been called up to assist with traffic control and evacuation of coastal areas, while it was still safe to do so,” he said. “Police vehicles with public address systems would be dispatched to announce along coastal areas expected to be impacted by the wave.”

He said the media would be enlisted to help get the messages out to as many people as possible and government would provide appropriate advice in the circumstances.

Thankfully on this occasion it was just a regional exercise to ensure that the relevant government agencies were on their toes if such an incident was to occur. The Caribe Wave/Lantex 15 exercise across the region was triggered by a simulated earthquake off the cost of Panama which led to a Tsunami of more than three feet reaching Cayman’s shores.