The SF Bay Area tsunami warning showed me that my family is not prepared for emergencies

A year and a half ago, my blended family—me, my partner, his ex, and her girlfriend—were trying to establish an emergency plan that would keep us and our co-custody child safe in the event of an earthquake.

We imagine that cell phone service would be down, and we set up a strategy for picking up children if it was a weekday and an alternate plan if it was a weekend. We decided on a place to meet and there was talk of saving grab-and-go bags.

Then the details became unclear.

My partner and I debated where to store water and survival items but couldn’t decide if the house or the back shed or a car was the best idea. Never reaching a conclusion, we left everything in the crawl space below our basement, which in hindsight will almost certainly be inaccessible if a significant earthquake struck.

It was decided that I would store food for everyone.

“We can all go over to our house and survive on our mutant-sized kale plants, birdseed, and the 800 pounds of dried pasta Nuala always has on hand,” my partner suggested to the group.

Thursday’s tsunami warning put these admittedly incomplete plans into action. Within 20 minutes of our phones blowing up with news of a 7.0 earthquake, the child had been picked up from school by the intended parent and driven to Grizzly Peak, 1,758 feet into the Berkeley Hills—after we were notified of a tsunami warning. The school offered no such guidance, but the chaos and lack of information led us to believe it was the best course of action.

In the meantime I took stock of our provisions. Our backyard garden miraculously still has mutant-sized kale plants. We were low on birdseed, but as promised I had several kilos of dried pasta. Other than that, we only had a few cans of coconut milk, some mac’n’cheese, and half a box of granola bars.

I had completely forgotten to stock up on non-perishables. If the five of us were to rely on the meager food I had collected, it would be up to me, I decided, to offer myself first if we were forced to resort to cannibalism.

It wasn’t just our family that was completely unprepared for such a crisis.

An hour after the warning was issued, I was still unclear how a tsunami would affect Oakland, where we live. Information was sparse and the warning sirens, one of which is outside my front door, remained silent.

While San Francisco Mayor London Breed tweeted out information, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s report not given such guidance.

That doesn’t mean everyone in Alameda County shirked their duties completely. The county has one online map of the tsunami hazard areawhere you can enter their address to see if they are in danger if you hit. I entered our home and school addresses and found that neither of us were at risk of a tsunami. The county requires residents to obtain information from a government site that advises on tsunami protocols. However, the guidance depends in part on responding to information provided by officials. In the panicked aftermath of this tsunami warning, none was issued.

Decades of dangerous wildfires have forced California to develop detailed protocols on what to do if one breaks out near residential areas. Fire preparedness is an area many of us are well versed in. During dry seasons, residents practice preventative measures such as clearing brush around the home, preemptively hitching their trucks to horse trailers to quickly evacuate livestock, and filling their vehicles with gas. Our parks are closing under red flag warnings and officials are sharing this information widely on social media.

Obviously, we have no such plans in place for tsunamis. Thursday’s lack of communication from our leaders drove home that we need to take steps to educate ourselves about such a disaster and develop our own emergency plans.

Already my family text thread is blowing up with suggestions on how exactly to do this. We are considering expensive long-range walkie-talkies in case cell service goes down. I have found an old backpack that I can use as a go-bag. I’m pushing in passports and car titles as I type this.

All five of us have arranged a meeting to talk through our plans and get more detailed: with two of us working in San Francisco, for example, how will it change our order if the ferries stop, the bridge is closed, or as it happened Thursday, will BART stop service through the Transbay Tube?

There is a lot to find out. But as stressful as Thursday’s tsunami warning was, it was a wake-up call for us all to be better prepared.

Next stop for me: the grocery store, to finally stock up on emergency food.

Reach Nuala Bishari: [email protected]; Bluesky: @nuala.bsky.social