Why we need two daily papers

For all our criticisms of the Dallas Morning News, they do produce the occasional remarkable story. Consider this example from this morning's front page:

It could happen here, but Texas has no tsunami plan

The upshot of the piece (whose online version inexplicably has an altered headline) is that if a Tsunami comes Texas-way, Bruce Willis; a rocket ship; and an Aerosmith ballad won't be enough to help us.

Fascinating. And certainly an angle we never would have considered.

Comments

[Jeff Harrell]

Texas has no plan for dealing with a tsunami for the same reason that it has no plan for dealing with a typhoon or a cyclone: because those things cannot happen in this hemisphere.

A big-ass wave resulting from a seismic event is only called a tsunami when it happens in the western Pacific. Anywhere else, it's properly termed a "seismic sea wave."

So no, guys, it could not happen here. By definition, a tsunami could never happen in the Gulf. We could, however, see a seismic sea wave as the result of something like a meteor strike.

Of course, this distinction appears to have been told to take a flying leap, because everybody and his sister is referring to the thing that happened in the eastern Indian Ocean last week as a tsunami. It wasn't. It was a seismic sea wave.

It's not like this kind of hair-splitting is unprecedented. The exact same storm is called a typhoon when it happens in the western Pacific (from the Japanese "tai fu," or big wind), a cyclone when it happens in the Indian Ocean and a hurricane when it happens in the Atlantic, Caribbean or Gulf.

[Bruce]

According to Encyclopaedia Brittanica, a source that is pretty qualified in my book, a tsunami by definition is:

also called  Seismic Sea Wave, or Tidal Wave,   catastrophic ocean wave, usually caused by a submarine earthquake occurring less than 50 km (30 miles) beneath the seafloor, with a magnitude greater than 6.5 on the Richter scale. Underwater or coastal landslides or volcanic eruptions also may cause a tsunami. The term tidal wave is more frequently used for such a wave, but it is a misnomer.

Nowhere did I see that it is limited to a specific area.

My advice: never stop with just one source....because one may sound convincing, but not know what they're talking about...

[Ben]

"We could, however, see a seismic sea wave as the result of something like a meteor strike."

A good example of this is the K-T boundary visible along the banks of the Brazos River near the Hwy 67 bridge near Cleburne. For miles down the river, between killing 12 packs of warm cheap beer on a lazy float down the river, one can easily see the destruction brought on by the massive Tsunami-Seismic Wave from the meteor that hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago. A big thick line of debris stretches as far as the eye can see..........