With a tsunami alert drill taking place today in the south of France, we explore why it’s necessary.
Tucked away on the outskirts of Paris, France’s tsunami alert centre could hardly feel further removed from the ocean.
Yet the CENALT is the very epicentre of the country’s tsunami warning network – and the place that could one day save thousands of lives.
While it is highly unusual to see anything on the scale of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which killed around 250,000 people, tsunamis are more common than many people realise – including here in Europe.
In the Mediterranean, and the seas connected to it, there have been around a hundred tsunamis since the beginning of the 20th century. That’s around 10 per cent of all those recorded in the same period.
Although less common, tsunamis in the north-east Atlantic still account for around five per cent of the full total. Among these was one particularly catastrophic event.
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755
“The most powerful tsunami that we know about in the Atlantic was the one triggered by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755,” says Hélène Hébert, national coordinator of the CENALT – which stands for CENtre d’ALerte Tsunami.
That earthquake had a magnitude close to 8.5, she explains, which is similar to what we see in the Pacific Ocean several times a century, but in the Atlantic it’s very rare.
“Although the French coasts were largely protected by the Iberian Peninsula, the tsunami destroyed most of Lisbon and Cadiz and parts of Morocco, with several thousands of victims.”
The resulting waves reached as far as south-west Cornwall and Ireland.
“This is the kind of major tsunami that we can expect to happen every three to five centuries. So, it could happen tomorrow – or it could happen in the next century – but we know that it will happen.”
