Nine Alaska seismic stations to go dark in January, slowing West Coast tsunami alerts

It was just before midnight when the tsunami that started with an earthquake in Alaska’s Prince William Sound reached Washington state.

The year was 1964.

At La Push, a 7-foot wave knocked boats and a dock loose from their moorings.

Floating logs battered oceanfront houses in Moclips, where an 11-foot wave flooded homes and swept several cars away.

At Pacific Beach, a married couple and their two grandchildren were rudely awakened when waves lifted their home off its foundation and shoved it 40 feet to the northwest.

Two people suffered heart attacks in Copalis, where water swept nearly half a mile inland. A man stopped his car on the state Route 109 highway bridge over the Copalis River to watch wave-tossed logs pile up against the bridge supports. The bridge collapsed, plunging him and his car into the river.

On a beach north of Aberdeen, a woman stepped out of her trailer and into waist-deep water after her trailer shook her awake. “We were up to our waist one minute and tumbling head over heels the next,” she told the Daily Olympian.

A magnitude 9.2 quake east of Anchorage, Alaska, had birthed the tsunami about four hours earlier.

No one died in Washington, though four members of the McKinzie family from Tacoma drowned while camping on a beach in Newport, Oregon. A woman in Gearhart, Oregon, died of a heart attack after a wave hit her home, and 11 people died in Crescent City, California. The quake and tsunami killed 115 people in Alaska.

At the time, just two seismic stations monitored the vast state of Alaska for earthquakes. Word of the tsunami barreling south toward the Lower 48 states failed to reach many people in time.

Today, a network of more than 200 seismic stations spans Alaska, and the National Weather Service has tsunami warning centers in Alaska and Hawaii, designed to get initial warnings to regions at risk around the Pacific within five minutes of an earthquake.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially terminated funding for nine of those stations, mostly in the seismically active Aleutian Islands, in September.

Six of the stations are in western Alaska, one is near Valdez, east of Anchorage, and two are in Southeast Alaska.

Washington state officials say data from those stations is essential for fast and accurate tsunami warnings up and down the West Coast.

“The Alaska-Aleutian subduction zone is very active,” University of Washington coastal hazards specialist Carrie Garrison-Laney said. “Much more likely to generate a tsunami that will head towards Washington’s coast than any other part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.”

Tsunami experts say warnings of Alaska-bred tsunamis would still go out without the nine stations, but they could be less accurate or delayed, leaving people less time to flee to higher ground.

“Losing nine seismic monitoring stations can provide a really big geographic gap, and then it may take minutes for other seismic monitoring stations that are located very far away, for the seismic waves to hit those,” said Washington State emergency management division hazards supervisor Maximilian Dixon. “You could have quite a bit of delay.”

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“It could shorten the amount of time we would have available to, let's say, kick evacuation plans into gear for coastal areas,” Washington State Seismologist Harold Tobin said.

Tobin said Washington would not be blind to tsunamis from Alaska, as he thought some media reports on the funding cut implied.

“I'm actually confident that eventually it would get sorted out and even-further-away seismometers will eventually detect that event, and then they'll be able to calculate a magnitude and a location of the earthquake that could be the source,” Tobin said.

Dixon said, even with waves that take three to four hours to reach Washington, time is of the essence.

“Three and a half hours is not a lot of time to be able to figure out what that tsunami risk is, get all of the alerts out, and get people to safety,” Dixon said. “It's very, very difficult to accurately forecast a tsunami. It typically takes around 90 minutes to potentially two hours to tell us how high could those waves be.”

Losing coverage of the Aleutians, a thousand-mile arc of volcanic islands stretching toward Kamchatka, would leave a crucial gap.

“If you and I had to place a bet on where the next tsunami in the United State will come from, we should put money on the Aleutian Islands,” Alaska State Seismologist Michael West said. “The Aleutians are an incredibly prodigious source of tsunamis.”

West said the Alaska Earthquake Center, which he heads, relied on annually renewed funding from NOAA to operate the nine stations. He said the federal funds stopped arriving, without explanation, in 2024.

“I was never, ever informed,” West said. “This is not some highly competitive research grant. This is a year-over-year contract that’s been in place for a very long time.”

The University of Alaska provided temporary funding to keep them operating.

In May 2025, West applied to NOAA to fund the stations through 2028. In September, the agency informed him it did not have funding for even one year’s operations.

The nine stations were set to go dark in November, but the University of Alaska came up with funding to keep them operating through January. “We don't need to panic about these stations going offline, but we need to make sure we're paying attention to long-term trends that might reduce funding for all of our tsunami preparedness,” Garrison-Laney said.

NOAA spokesperson Erica Grow Cei declined an interview request.

The Alaska Earthquake Center “is one of many partners supporting the National Weather Service's tsunami operations, and NWS continues to use many mechanisms to ensure the collection of seismic data across the state of Alaska,” Grow Cei said in an email.

West said he believes the defunding of potentially life-saving earthquake monitoring stems from the chaos that has engulfed federal agencies during the Trump administration. He said he’s optimistic that NOAA will restore funding to help keep people in five states safer from tsunamis.

“We’ve been engaged with NOAA, and they are looking for ways to solve this very quickly,” West said.