Rough waters Life on the tsunami coast

At the edge of the Pacific, Tofino is beautiful but precarious. Its residents and officials plan for a threat that could reshape their world

- Leyland Cecco TOFINO

Justin Goss was in the shower when he first heard the piercing wail of a nearby tsunami early-warning siren. Still dripping wet, he threw on clothes, grabbed his dog and rushed to the truck. The pair made it 3 metres and no further.

"The whole parking lot across the street was jammed up. It was gridlock within three minutes," he said.

"I thought, 'Oh shit, this is not good."" In downtown Tofino, a town on Vancouver Island, there are no sirens. But word quickly spread that people were fleeing the beaches. Panicked parents rushed to pick up their children from day camps. Restaurants in the Canadian holiday haven emptied.

"We told everyone to get out fast," said Brenna MacPherson. "We didn't know how bad it was going to be." Some patrons settled up, others left bills unpaid. Some wandered the street with cocktails in hand.

Residents of this small town have long been braced for a deadly tsunami.

When - not if - a tectonic plate snaps upwards, the energy will convert to a wave moving at the speed of an airliner. As it reaches shallow water, it will advance towards the shore at 32km/h but swap speed for size. A wall of water 20 metres high is possible when it reaches land.

This summer, on 29 July, the powerful but distant Kamchatka earthquake in Russia that triggered sirens in Tofino amounted to little more than a swell against the coast when the wave arrived hours later. Still, the false alarm forced residents to confront the town's precarious geography - and an old question: how do you prepare for a disaster whose timing is unknown? Tofino is a sliver of thick forest flanked by kilometres of beach. It is connected to the rest of Vancouver Island for food, medicine and fuel - by a single highway riddled with steep gradients, hairpin turns and rockslides.