Tidal Waves

Even today, the motels place the one-page flier in each room. "TSUNAMI!" it reads. "How to survive this hazard in the Crescent City Area." The sheet features a simple drawing of a giant wave, and a stick figure fleeing up the beach. Anyone can see that the stick figure won't make it. Forty years after the only tsunami ever to take lives in the continental United States swept through this town, washing away 29 city blocks and killing 11 people, the calamity seems to hang in the ever-present fog.

Ellen DeGeneres will "just keep swimming" in her new "Finding Nemo" sequel, "Finding Dory. " The talk show host, who voiced the friendly-but-forgetful blue tang fish of 2003's "Nemo," has been lobbying Disney and Pixar for years for a follow-up for the Academy Award-winning ocean adventure. On Tuesday, Disney made it official, announcing that the film would be released Nov. 23, 2015, Movies Now reported . And DeGeneres couldn't be more excited. "I have waited for this day for a long, long, long, long, long, long time," she said in a statement.

Tidal waves, known often by the Japanese word tsunami, are most common in the Pacific Ocean and since 1946 have twice caused substantial death and destruction in Hawaii and once in California. Such waves, which have crested as high as 210 feet, are usually caused by earthquakes at sea, such as the one that struck Flores island in the Indonesian Archipelago on Saturday, although occasionally the cause can be land-based earthquakes, landslides or volcanic eruptions.

Things are a little crazy out here on the water to begin with, and then the water polo team shows up, dragging along a floating goal. Hey, McHale, I think I found your navy. McCovey Cove is insane this World Series, full of kids-at-Christmas smiles and all manner of flotsam and personal watercraft. Mostly kayaks, but surfers too. Swim teams, water polo players, dogs, beer bongs, reefer. Lots of reefer. At one point, I think the idiots on one raft exhausted their stash and had resorted to smoking the rope.

Dear Cynthia: I love the beach. I have never had a traumatic experience in water and I'm not afraid of going in boats. But ever since I can remember, at least three times a year I dream about huge tidal waves. Usually in my dream I'm at the beach and I have this strong feeling that a tidal wave is coming, so I try warning everyone. No one listens but when the wave starts coming at us, we all run. I seem to always run up this sand hill.

A strong earthquake in the Pacific on Tuesday triggered tidal waves that washed away dozens of homes on Nicaragua's western coast, killing at least 14 people and leaving at least two dozen missing. The quake measured a magnitude of 7.0, according to the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo. It hit in the early evening, and its epicenter was 75 miles southwest of Managua.

Government scientists have developed an automated tsunami warning system to give a few minutes alert of onrushing tidal waves to people who live and work in coastal areas where such systems do not exist. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the inexpensive system uses earthquake and water level sensors, computers and an existing weather satellite. The initial system has been installed in Valparaiso, Chile, a city that has lost more than 1,500 people to tsunamis since 1900.

Tidal waves whipped up by a mighty earthquake came crashing down on the coastal villages of New Guinea and its surrounding islands Saturday, sweeping hundreds of houses out to sea. At least 10 people were killed, and the death toll was expected to rise. One town alone lost 600 houses. Some waves towered an estimated 21 feet high, authorities said. The quake registered at least a magnitude 7 and by some accounts as high as 8. The quake hit at 2:59 p.m. Saturday.

Polar sea ice, tidal waves and other oceanic wonders will become less mysterious to scientists as they turn to satellites capable of providing a "tidal wave" of information, marine experts say. The measurements of some ocean conditions will be multiplied by several hundred times with the installation of the satellite equipment, according to John Sherman III, an oceanographer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

At least eight people were killed by a tidal wave triggered by a powerful New Year's Day earthquake that hit Sulawesi Island, police said. The chief of police in the central province on Sulawesi said the eight died in Damsol, a small village on the island that is located between Borneo and the Moluccas Islands. The village is in the same area where officials had reported 384 houses and buildings damaged by Monday's earthquake, which measured 7.0 and was centered in the Celebes Sea.

When the first wave hit, Luis Gatica allowed himself a glimmer of hope: Maybe he, his wife and their 4-year-old daughter would survive. Clinging to a tree on a small island just offshore, they braced for the next surge of sea water bound to follow the magnitude 8.8 earthquake. The initial tsunami wave had reached only to his knees. "I thought for a moment that we were going to be spared, and we would have this story to tell when we were old," Gatica, a firefighter and paramedic, said days later in a barely audible monotone.

A nervous Japan on Sunday prepared for Godzilla. What it got instead was closer to the car insurance gecko. Fearing a major tsunami could be triggered by Chile's magnitude 8.8 earthquake, authorities here ordered nearly a quarter of a million households along the island nation's eastern seaboard to evacuate to higher ground. Disaster workers expected 10-foot waves or larger. Instead, by Sunday evening, only a few 6-inch to foot-high waves lapped onto Japanese-controlled shores.

The devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, caused by a major earthquake under the seafloor north of Aceh in Sumatra, struck five years ago today, killing more than 200,000 people. Scientists say another massive undersea earthquake is long overdue beneath the Mentawai islands in Indonesia and could trigger another deadly tsunami any time. Here is some of the science behind the process. How tsunamis occur In the Sumatra area, tectonic plates meet in a subduction zone -- a place where the boundaries of one plate are forced beneath the other plate.

Convoys of military vehicles brought food, water and medicine to the tsunami-stricken Samoa Islands on Thursday as victims wandered through what was left of their villages with tales of being trapped underwater, watching young children drown and hoisting elderly parents above the waves. The death toll rose to 160 as grim-faced islanders gathered under a traditional meetinghouse to hear a Samoan government minister discuss a plan for a mass funeral and burial next week. Samoans traditionally bury their loved ones near their homes, but that could be impractical because many villages have been wiped out. The dead from Tuesday's earthquake and tsunami include 120 in Samoa, 31 in American Samoa and nine in Tonga.

Rocking an infant nephew in her arms, Mary Poloai stood outside the main entrance of the imposing Samoan Congregational Christian Church in Carson on Wednesday staring up at the sky and fighting back tears. "I'm so sad that I can't think straight," said Poloai, 58, one of more than 100 people who gathered at a special prayer service for victims of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Samoa and American Samoa early Tuesday. "They still haven't found my mother's sisters," she said.

Angelo Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial Corp., must have known his company was skating on thin ice more than a year ago as he began to cash out more than $140 million in shares in the company. It wasn't as if he was late on his mortgage payment or anything. Countrywide has fired more than 11,000 employees so far and its stock is now worth 85% less than a year ago. The tsunami from the mortgage industry meltdown will be felt for a long time. AT&T shut down service to more than 450,000 customers who could no longer afford to pay those bills.

Last April's magnitude 7.1 Humboldt County earthquake gave rise to small tsunamis in California and as far as Alaska and Hawaii, the only recorded tidal waves generated by a California quake in this century, according to scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The waves, which have not been reported until now, have been the subject of considerable study since the quake.

Concerned about the threat a tsunami could pose to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a state agency agreed Thursday to launch a study of potential risk to the busy ports in light of nearly $10 million in damage caused last year by wild, tsunami-driven currents that hit the harbor of Crescent City.

A powerful storm unleashed tidal surges and ferocious winds that prompted hundreds to evacuate in Britain. Waves up to 20 feet high rolled up against sea defenses in Lowestoft, the most easterly point in Britain, about 120 miles northeast of London on the North Sea coast. But the peak of the predicted surge passed without causing any major damage. Britain closed the Thames River barrier, downstream from London, as a precaution.