then the water backs up and it begins moving? right. it s basically a slip fault or a strike slip that happens underwater and causes a wave to occur and push water away from it like you see in a bathtub or swimming pool and that s what hit areas of japan first. came across and hit some islands in hawaii and now have made it ashore in california but when s interesting is that as it spreads out it s not the same impact all along the coast. there s a greater impact. if you look at that modeling there s a little bit of redness that occurs up to the north part of the state which is in that crescent city area. impacts are varying depending on where you are in california and still happening. and briefly, we just heard jeff say that napa valley could be under a tsunami alert. being so far inland that is a bit shocking. what can you tell us about that? yeah. so basically those waterways
already seen abnormally high surf coming up along the coastline and reminded me of something else. we did get a report of somebody here in the city of san francisco watching the beaches. he said around 9:00 this morning there was a large evacuation of the water that left an open, exposed area of sand and no doubt at this point that there is something going on here today that can be attributed to the quake that could go down as the fifth strongest earthquake since 1900 that happened in japan. thank you so much, jeff, in san francisco. joi joining us now is kelly houston with california emergency management. what preparations are under way for the west coast particularly the area where jeff is and crescent city? so we have been under preparations since about last night around midnight. what we have been doing is making sure that we are making notifications to the counties up and down the coast of california because obviously notifying the
public, we had a length of time, eight hours to tell people that they need to evacuate or listen to their local officials about what they want to do and then now that the waves have started coming onshore crescent city to the bay area, we are seeing what jeff described, not exactly what we predicted but we are seeing wave activity that s causing damage in crescent city and santa cruz. and here s the catcher to this and that is that people think that when the first wave or two hits it s over with and they can go back to normal but the reality is we have several waves coming in over 18-minute segments and that s going to happen for several hours and some of the waves on the way could be larger than what we saw already come on to the coast at this point. and kelly, noaa put out a graphic an animation to show what what a tsunami wave really looks like. can you describe the process here where the ocean floor moves and that displaces the water and
i m thomas roberts. we have special coverage of the japan quake at 2:00 p.m. i m going to talk to an american actor living in japan for about 20 years and tsunamis can move as fast as a jet plane. i m talk to bill nye the science guy of how it spread from japan all the way to the west coast. and right now as we continue our continuing coverage right now, the tsunami warning for hawaii has been canceled but we still want to know what s happening in california so we go to san francisco and jeff vaneri. is there still a threat to the west coast of the united states? there is right now. we still remain under tsunami warning from the washington-oregon border all the way down to the santa barbara region. we have had some reports coming in. i m sure you saw the video of santa cruz where boats are tossed around and then to the