ON 14 June, at 7.50 pm local time, an undersea quake rocked the coast of northern California, and the entire west coast of the US and Canada was instantly put on a tsunami alert.
The alert turned out to be a false alarm, but the patchy response to the scare is raising questions about whether the vulnerable coast will be ready if a big tsunami really does strike. And evidence of past tsunamis is showing that big ones do happen, and with ominous frequency.
Last Tuesday’s alert was triggered by a magnitude 7.2 quake that occurred about 140 kilometres off Eureka, a town about 400 kilometres…
