Adventures in the First Person

Corals and Tsunami in Samoa

By Douglas Fenner ’71

On the morning of September 29, 2009, I was getting ready to drive to work when the shaking started. My house groaned and swayed, but it was a smooth side-to-side motion that was slow for an earthquake. Once, in Philadelphia, I was in a minor quake that had short, sharp motions, and things clinked on the shelf and fell off. Not this time. I walked outside, and watched the car jiggle back and forth for about a minute. I knew it was a big one.

I live on American Samoa, a 17-mile-long rock in the middle of an ocean that covers half the planet. American Samoa is thought to be the starting place for the Polynesians who spread across the Pacific, discovering and inhabiting islands from Samoa to Easter Island to Hawaii to New Zealand. For 2,000 years, they were the world’s greatest navigators. Their great catamarans were capable of traveling vast distances and could outmaneuver the clunky wooden ships of the European explorers. Lacking the compass, they navigated by observing the stars, the wave patterns, the birds, bits of algae, cloud formations, and clever strategies to explore vast oceans and get back home. When outsiders came, Samoans called them “palagis” (“g” is pronounced “ng”) which means “burst from the sky.”

American Samoa lies north of the Tongan Trench, where the rigid plate beneath the Pacific dives under the Australian plate. Like the San Andreas Fault, it tends to stick and every once in a while break loose, generating an earthquake and—every once in a while—a tsunami. (The last big one was in 1917.)

After the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the territorial government here set up a warning system that consisted of signs on the waterfront stating that tsunamis could happen. No joke. In fact, it takes the warning center in Hawaii 10 minutes to figure out if there is a tsunami after it detects an earthquake. We are about 120 miles from the Tongan Trench, and tsunamis travel at over 500 miles an hour. You do the math. We had about five minutes’ warning—at least, we should have had five minutes’ warning. Turns out that $13 million that was supposed to pay for a tsunami warning system can’t be accounted for. It certainly never paid for a warning system.

So the earthquake stops. What now? I’m due at work. The Tongan Trench almost never produces tsunamis. So I hop in my car and head to the office. I work for the local government, monitoring coral reefs. Take data each year to see how they are doing. Raise the alarm if there are any problems. Did I mention that they pay me to dive on beautiful coral reefs? Wonderful job, best I ever had.