Japanes reporters, crawling through the wreckage left behind by the March 11 tsunami, might have stumbled onto evidence of a failed tsunami warning system.
Reporters have written about finding bodies amid what’s left of residences, still wearing their natural disaster gear, like helmets. The odd thing is it looks like they barricaded themselves in their homes, instead of running to higher ground.
A reporter for ‘Spa!’, in Japan, said there are two kinds of tsunami sirens, one for waves under three meters, and a more shrill siren for waves over three meters.
For the small waves people are told to stay inside, which is what most of the victims, found in the rubble of their homes, did. Also, many of the residential areas were close enough to higher ground that the people should have been able to survive, if they knew a giant tsunami was coming.
The evidence suggests that for some reason the tsunami sirens indicated a small wave. Or, as one reporter pointed out, when tsunami drills are carried out, they’re only for small waves, suggesting that if the siren for the giant wave sounded, most people didn’t know what else to do, based on their training.
People had been trained so often to react to small tsunami, that, even though they had been told “when you hear the big tsunami siren sound run to the hills”, they automatically followed the small tsunami training.
