Disarming nature's force
Scientist Tad Murty's expertise in tsunamis evolved from an early fascination with natural hazards
He helped create a Pacific monitoring system, and his knowledge is in demand, Graham Fraser writes
GRAHAM FRASER
NATIONAL AFFAIRS WRITER
OTTAWA—Dr. Tad Murty is suddenly the centre of attention.
"I am sure you have heard the expression that everybody has 15 minutes of fame," he said with a smile. "This is my 15 minutes."
It is not surprising that he has been suddenly in demand, receiving phone calls from scientific journals, newspapers and television networks all over the world.
For Murty has been studying tsunamis for 40 years — and helped develop the warning system now in place for countries that border the Pacific Ocean.
If such a system had been in place for the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, Murty maintains, thousands of lives could have been saved. But without such a system, nothing could be done to warn people of the impending disaster.
As a former public servant, Murty understands why; the last tsunami to hit India was in 1945, when the country was still a British colony. Other things seemed more pressing — until Dec. 26.
Now semi-retired — or, rather, embarked on a new teaching career at 67 — and living in Ottawa, Murty's interest in natural disasters was first sparked when he was a teenager in India.
Born Tadepalli Murty in Rambhatlapalyam, a small village in southern India's coastal state of Andhra, he was a teenager in high school when India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was visiting the region following a cyclone.
"Probably a couple of million people came to see him," he recalled in an interview.
"They set up rows and rows of loudspeakers, so I could hear him clearly although I was a good mile away from the stage.
"He used his audience to talk about natural hazards."
In his speech, Nehru — the man who virtually created modern India — complained, only half joking, that India's scientists were spending their time writing equations that only they could understand.
"`I wish once in a while they would work on real, practical issues and explain to the layman what the hell is going on,'" Murty remembers him saying. "`No wonder 99.9 per cent of the human race hates maths — including myself.'"
Nehru promised that India would commit financial resources to institutions that did practical, down-to-earth work on natural phenomena like floods, droughts, earthquakes and tidal waves.
"He didn't use the word tsunami — he probably didn't know there were tsunamis — but he said tidal waves," Murty said. "That was the first time in my life I heard the words `natural hazards.'
"In a sense, that speech by the prime minister inspired me."
A few years later, when he was working on his Master's degree in oceanography, he was fascinated by reports of the Alaskan tsunami in March 1964.
Two things puzzled him.
Outside of Alaska, there were two communities that suffered serious damage: Port Alberni, B.C., and Crescent City, Calif. On the face of it, this didn't make sense: they were protected by inlets.
But subsequent research revealed the answer.
Port Alberni was the victim of what scientists later called "quarter-wave resonance amplification"; instead of providing protection, the inlet formed a kind of echo chamber.
And the tsunami headed west to Japan, and was reflected back across the Pacific. Along the way, it became focused like a lens on Crescent City.
When Murty completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago, he had a number of job offers in the United States.
But in August, 1967, he visited Montreal for Expo '67, and before returning to Chicago, spent several days in Ottawa and Toronto.
Delighted by what he saw, he decided he would make his career in Canada. The federal government was hiring scientists then, and within a few days he had several offers — and accepted one from the Oceanographic Survey.
But he continued to be interested in tsunamis — and was first named to the scientific group established by then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau to study the possibility of a tsunami following the announcement in 1971 that the U.S. planned to do nuclear testing in Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands. (His group concluded that the risk of tsunami was minimal.)
But this led to his being named as the research scientist to represent Canada in the creation of the International Tsunami Monitoring System.
As a result of that work, a monitoring system was put in place for the Pacific Ocean that warns of the creation of tsunamis, with warning facilities in 185 B.C. communities, and an elaborate computer modelling system that warns of the conditions that create them.
It is a career and an expertise that has taken him around the world: to Victoria with the federal government, to Adelaide, Australia, where he spent three years as head of the National Tidal Laboratories there, and back to Ottawa where, until last August, he worked with an engineering consulting firm.
But he had one unrealized ambition — to teach university. So he left the firm to teach — at the Natural Resources Institute in Winnipeg last fall and, starting next term, at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa.
However, what Murty calls his 15 minutes of fame has opened new opportunities.
Foreign affairs department officials have already been in touch to see if he would consider travelling to India as one of Canada's experts on the creation of a tsunami monitoring system.
"They know I'm retired and doing fun things," he said with a smile.
Additional articles by Graham Fraser
