AHAB

No, this is not 'Reading News'. :-)

On September 16th there will be a "tsunami warning communications test along the entire west coast of the lower 48 states." This will include a test of the AHAB (All-Hazard Alert Broadcast) siren. We will NOT actually be evacuating. The National Tsunami Exercise with evacuation drill will be on 3/24/2010. But the AHAB will sound at Lower Elwha, triggered by the satellite warning system as it ought to work in the real world; in fact it sounds every first Monday at noon, for a test, but in those cases the button is pushed by the tribe's Community Emergency Response Team leader. The event on the 16th is statewide.

AHAB siren on the roof of the shop at Lower Elwha... (Click for larger image.)

We are in the tsunami zone. At Elwha, and here in town along the harbor. Here's a map. Click for larger image. (Sorry for the blurriness. It's from the Washington State Hazard Mitigation Plan, Hazard Profile - Tsunami, 2004, and I can't find a better version anywhere...)

I've borrowed this train of thought from the Elwha Klallam Library's blog, where I posted it yesterday. I don't mean to make this a regular thing, but one of my projects for the weekend is to reconsider my web presence. There is at present a mostly rigid wall around my librarianly life at the tribe, because I have construed it as not mine to tell about; that's why what I write here is nearly all beach-bunny all the time, with not even as much about my library life as I share on Twitter. And in fact AHAB and the tsunami map, and the preceding post about the Washington Coastal Atlas, really belonged here rather than there; only I couldn't think of anything else to post and needed to put something up.