At 8:46 PM, on April 1st, the Nazca and South American tectonic plates ground against each other, 60 miles northwest of Iquique, Chile, 12.5 miles beneath the coastal waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean. The resulting 8.2 magnitude earthquake triggered a swift reaction all along the South American coast, a region accustomed to large quakes and mindful of the dangers of tsunamis.
More than 1,000 miles away from the epicenter, in the Galapagos Islands, a newly crafted tsunami evacuation plan was being enacted minutes after the quake occurred. Sirens wailed in Puerto Ayora, the largest town on the islands, as people gathered for dinner. Circulating firefighters with megaphones urged people to move to higher ground through a network of previously designated meeting points. Most complied; some remained behind, unconvinced of the danger or confident in their topographical positioning.
The architect of the evacuation protocol, Ernesto Vaca, was in the heart of the action, along Puerto Ayora’s waterfront. In the darkness, he helped villagers and tourists move bags and board buses, cars, scooters – anything with wheels – to move up the mountain that dominates the island of Santa Cruz. Surf shops and tourist agencies were shuttered, promotional photos of tortoise-watching and snorkeling excursions incongruous in the tense evening air.
There was good reason to be concerned. In 2011, a wall of water swept across the Pacific Ocean following the earthquake that crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant. By the time it reached Puerto Ayora, the wave was over 12 feet tall; it crashed through glass windows and flooded most of the lower part of the town. Although the damage was relatively minimal, the event provided a stark wake-up call for local government officials.
Vaca has spent much of the last three years developing the evacuation plan as the Galapagos Province’s Director for Emergency Preparedness and Risk Management (he relinquished the post a few months ago). The position had been created only a few years earlier when, in 2008, Ecuador adopted a new constitution. “We are the only country in the world to insert a risk management component in our constitution,” he explains. “It is now mandatory to have plans to protect the civilian population, to instruct, train, and teach the public employees about what they should do in case of an emergency.”
The emergency preparedness remit for the Galapagos reads like an apocalyptic screenplay in a region prone to all manner of natural disaster – fires, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods. 600 miles from the Ecuadorian mainland, the islands also need to be mindful of sluggish external assistance.
Vaca supervised a thorough overhaul of each town’s safe zones, incorporating predictive models that revealed the flood-prone zones for a range of wave heights. He conducted seven evacuation exercises with schools and three large-scale test runs, one in each of the province’s main towns. His team examined local infrastructure to fortify emergency supplies of food, water, and electricity generation. (Vaca sought a 72-hour window of self-sufficiency before assistance would be forthcoming from the mainland.)
By 8:45 PM local time (the Galapagos are three hours behind Chile), the streets of Bellavista, a village well above the splash zone, were bustling, the evacuation plan an apparent success. As open-air cafes spilled out onto the sidewalks and crowds huddled around televisions, an atmosphere of kinetic, purposeful calm prevailed.
Fortunately, the wave never came during the night of April 1st (a minor, sub-meter surge was measured late in the evening), but the vagaries of tsunami formation made it a narrow miss. Tsunamis form when land motions associated with earthquakes displace the ocean and generate a series of waves. The magnitude of an earthquake itself doesn’t necessarily tell the full story of displacement and wave geometry; minute differences can mean the difference between a gentle swell and a wall of roiling water.
In the future, Vaca hopes, townspeople will be similarly cooperative and the Risk Management team will avoid boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. “The people tell me, ‘it never happened, so why should I get concerned?’” recounts Vaca. He’s hoping that a broad public education campaign, from schoolchildren to governmental officials, will prove convincing.
“Last night the evacuation was good,” Vaca says in soft dawn light on April 2nd. “There is still room for improvement, but we are ready.”
