Thumbnail photo: Wednesday's tsunamis lifted H Dock off its pilings, temporarily submerging it, resulting in separation of its segments. | Photo courtesy of the Crescent City Harbor District Two days after a magnitude 8.8 earthquake near the Russian Far East sent tsunami surges into the Crescent City Harbor, Del Norte County’s emergency services manager posted a big thank you on Facebook. Deborah Otenburg praised first responders, local law enforcement, the city, school district and tribal partners as well as the county health and human services and building maintenance departments, which set up a temporary evacuation point at the Veterans Memorial Hall in Crescent City. Otenburg also lauded the Gasquet Neighbors Helping Neighbors group and the Gasquet American Legion Hall — unusual recipients of her thanks when the only areas in immediate danger for most of Wednesday were the harbor, beaches and the Elk Creek, Klamath and Smith River mouths. “Everybody did run for the hills,” she told Redwood Voice Community News on Thursday. “There were a lot of people up in Hiouchi and Gasquet, but thankfully the American Legion Hall was generous enough to open their doors. The Gasquet Neighbors Helping Neighbors group set that up. They went to cars parked on the side of the road and said, ‘Hey, come on in.’ They really came through for the community.” Otenburg said it was strong language coming out of the National Tsunami Warning Center that might have caused people to over evacuate. The Del Norte Office of Emergency Service sent a subsequent message to the community via its community alert system on Everbridge, warning people that if they’re near the mouth of Elk Creek, the Klamath and Smith rivers as well as on the beaches and at the Crescent City Harbor, they should leave the area. But it didn’t order an evacuation, she said. About 15 people showed up to the county’s temporary evacuation point at the veterans hall and 13 stayed the night, Otenburg said. The first tsunami waves rolled into Crescent City Harbor at about 12:50 a.m. Wednesday, about eight hours after the earthquake struck off the eastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. That surge measured about 1.2 feet, Harbormaster Mike Rademaker said. The largest surge in Crescent City, measuring roughly 4 feet, came at about 1:39 p.m., according to Ryan Aylward, coordinating meteorologist with the NWS’s Eureka office and co-chair of the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group. An hour later another surge lifted the harbor’s H Dock off its pilings, temporarily submerging it resulting in segment separation and progressive structural failure, Rademaker said. Other areas of the harbor also experienced significant damage, primarily to its electrical, water and fire suppression systems, the harbormaster stated in a press release Friday. Initial repair costs are approaching an estimated $1 million, Rademaker said. On Thursday, Rademaker said the Harbor District is working with the California Office of Emergency Services and the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors. He said he hoped the Board of Supervisors would issue the emergency declaration necessary for unlocking state and, hopefully, federal disaster dollars. The 70-plus year-old Citizens Dock is another area of concern, according to Rademaker. “We’re going to be launching a boat to get a real up close and personal look at Citizens Dock,” he said. “Obviously the wooden pilings are a real concern. When we did an engineering assessment as part of our MARAD project, we identified that some of the pilings are 90-percent deteriorated. Some damage is clearly visible, but we’ll have to take a closer look to see the extent of any hidden damage.” The MARAD project refers to the planned reconstruction of Citizens Dock and its adjacent seawall using about $15 million in U.S. Department of Transportation Maritime Administration grant dollars. Crescent City Harbor District's H Dock was designed to absorb the energy from any tsunami surges sweeping into the Harbor. Harbormaster Mike Rademaker said it did its job on Wednesday. | Image courtesy of the Crescent City Harbor District Harbor District staff will also be assessing the breakwaters and rip rap, Rademaker said. He said he’s been in conversation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which allocates about 1 percent of its budget for disasters. CCHD officials hope to tap into that funding source, Rademaker said. Rademaker said Congressman Jared Huffman’s office also reached out and offered assistance with federal intervention. Though the disaster may not meet the threshold FEMA set for emergency funding, according to Rademaker, Huffman’s continued involvement will be instrumental, especially when working with the Army Corps of Engineers. No injuries were reported at the Crescent City Harbor and its “core infrastructure” remains operational, Rademaker said. The $1 million damage estimate from the 2025 tsunami “stands in stark contrast to the $50 million in damages sustained in 2011.” “In 2011, the inner boat basin was like a pinball machine,” he told Redwood Voice, describing the impacts from the Tohoku earthquake in Japan roughly 15 years ago. “You had boats bouncing around and knocking into each other and knocking into the docks. It was just wave after wave of subsequent damage.” Crescent City is uniquely prone to tsunamis for two reasons, according to Aylward. One reason is due to a ridge that stretches “straight out in the middle of the Pacific” — the Mendocino Fracture Zone, according to the Associated Press — and since tsunami waves tend to travel along ridges, the ideal place for those surges to hit is Del Norte County, Aylward told Redwood Voice on Wednesday. Secondly, the Crescent City Harbor “happens to resonate with tsunami waves that typically occur every 20 minutes.” “The waves go up and down, the resonance hits right and you get larger waves in that harbor,” Aylward said. Two days later, Aylward’s colleague, Amanda R. Admire, a research associate and lecturer in Cal Poly Humboldt’s geology and oceanography departments, said she was still seeing diminishing tsunami activity in Crescent City. She and her colleagues were waiting for that activity to subside to begin gathering and analyzing data. The Crescent City Harbor District’s sunset camera may prove to be an important component of that data, especially as Admire, Cal Poly geology professor emeritus Lori Dengler and other scientists with the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group compare the 2025 tsunami with the 2011 tsunami. “We saw extensive damage in Crescent City from the tsunami that came from Japan,” she said, adding that the footage came from security cameras at the harbor. “We saw currents within the first 3-and-a-half hours at a maximum speed of about 4-and-a-half meters per second, which equates to roughly 10 mph coming in and out of the entrance there.” The camera shut down after that first 3-and-a-half hours because the CCHD lost power, Admire said. However, she said, she noticed that the sunset camera posted on the Harbor District’s Facebook page points at roughly the same area as the security camera. Admire said she’s hoping to get archival footage of the Kamchatka tsunami to see how the currents were behaving during the event. That footage could help scientists and engineers understand how Crescent City’s more tsunami-resilient inner boat basin held up, she said. “I think you can safely say we’re looking at a comparison between 2011 and 2025,” Admire said. “It will be interesting to see how they compare — if they do compare. [For example] we’ll look at what the tsunami signal looked like and we’ll look at how it impacted the harbor pre-construction of the new design and post construction. And also the response, the way the community and emergency officials were able to respond to that event is another important component of the story.” Like Admire, Otenburg and other officials will piece together the story of the community’s emergency response during a debrief likely next week. They’ll see what went right, what went wrong and what needs to be adjusted for next time. Otenburg said she expects the notifications that are sent to the public may need to be changed to differentiate between a near-source tsunami and a distant-source event. That could include how many hours people might have to get to high ground. “Maybe people will need to know if something happened in Alaska they have a minimum of three hours from the event and probably longer,” she said. “Maybe we need to be a little bit more educational in those respects so people know how their response needs to be.” In addition to Neighbors Helping Neighbors, other notable responders included Pete Craig, of Gasquet’s Community Emergency Response Team and “first responder extraordinaire.” The American Red Cross and Del Norte Unified School District also offered help as did the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office and Search and Rescue. The Yurok Tribal Police Department also assisted with emergency response for everything past False Klamath Cove, she said.