We have to do better than this. I imagine there is a lot of man/woman hours and boats involved.

With this number of buoys covering that distance, it seems as though there needs to be more than NOAA in maintaining this warning system. The maintenance has to be more local with specific time lines to inspection and monies dedicated for that purpose and for repairs. There is no sense to even deploying a warning system people will count on, if it can't be maintained to standard and reliable.

If the lifetime of one of these buoys is a year or less, there needs to be replacements at a cost that is affordable that are deployed annually while the old ones are brought ashore to be refurbished. Reliability is the problem and people cannot count on a system that isn't working to protect them so much a political stunt.

We used to "Duck and Cover" at one time, too.

30 April 2010
By Matthew Harwood

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (click here) is having a hard-time maintaining its network of expensive high-tech tsunami detection buoys, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Wednesday (.pdf).

Known as the Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) program, this network of 39 buoys makes up the early-warning system to protect 767 U.S. communities at risk of tsunamis—large, devastating waves, typically generated by seismic events or undersea landslides—that can destroy coastal and island communities.

The last significant tsunami hit U.S. soil in September 2009, when a series of waves hit American Somoa, killing 190 people and wiping out coastal infrastructure. In February, NOAA scientists initially feared Hawaii could get pounded by a massive tsunami after the 8.8 earthquake off Chile, but fortunately only 3-foot tsunami waves hit the state's shores.

The DART system consists of surface-level buoys connected by mooring lines to ocean-floor-anchored recording devices that monitor seismic activity. Data from the recording devices is transmitted to a satellite in 15-minute intervals until an event triggers transmissions at 15-second intervals. The satellite then delivers that data to two tsunami warning centers based in Alaska and Hawaii, respectively. The centers are responsible for warning U.S. coastal states, island territories, and over 90 countries when a tsunami threat occurs.

The buoys, however, are expensive and temperamental. Last year, DART operation and maintenance cost $12 million, or 28 percent, of NOAA's total tsunami budget for the fiscal year....

This is why there is such anger among Americans. The technology the USA invested in is not doing it's job and the cost was high to deploy them in the first place. I betcha there has been no real research done to the longevity of these buoys, huh?

This is a humanitarian effort our national treasury help support and it is not doing it's job. That is not acceptable. Do not do this stuff and provide false hope.

There needs to be a permanent budget for the tsunami buoys in the federal budget. 

May 19, 2012
By Tom Banse

Honolulu - One quarter (12 of 39) of U.S.- (click here) operated tsunami warning buoys in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are out of service. That includes the two tsunami detection buoys directly off the Pacific Northwest coast. But the warning system has some redundancy built in.

Normally, there’s a tsunami detection buoy anchored more than 200 miles off the mouth of the Columbia River and another roughly that far offshore of Coos Bay, Oregon. But both buoys broke from their moorings this winter and spring, probably because of storms. The earliest they’ll be replaced is September. So does that leave us vulnerable in the meantime?...