What causes more damage-A tsunami or a bonafide cat 5?

[JTD]

I'm off to bed so I'll check this again in the morning but if you were in say Cancun and somebody gave you two choices:
1. The same type of tsunami that hit the epicenter of the December 26th quake near Sumatra? Not the waves that hit Sri Lanka, Maldives, etc but the waves that hit Indonesia.
2. A cat 5 with say winds of 170 mph+.

What would you choose? Which would cause less damage? Is there any appreciable difference?

[Normandy]

A tsunami...of great heights of course. Anything taller than 100 feet would wipe out a coastal town.

[PurdueWx80]

A tsunami would cause more widespread damage since they aren't as localized as a hurricane.

[mike18xx]

A fifty-foot wave in a cat-5 hurricane has a trough-to-trough length of maybe a hundred feet tops; a fifty-foot wave in a tsunami has a trough-to-trough length of up to a hundred miles.

How long do you want to be underwater?

[BLHutch]

I would choose to be in neither of those two options.

Brady

[Scorpion]

A tsunami since there is little warning and the water moves further inland and much faster.

[wxmann_91]

Tsunami would be worse. It comes with little warning, and water is one hundred times more powerful than air. A 160 mph wind is less powerful, in fact, than a tsunami traveling half that fast. And a tsunami is made of a series of waves, catching people off guard. Sure, a hurricane has an eye, but it only has one. There can be 5 or 6 breaks between tsunamis, and those breaks can be deadly.

[mike18xx]

There is only spot in the world were a tropical cyclone can kill as many people as a tsunami: the Ganges delta in Bangladesh.

[hicksta]

A tsunami since there is little warning and the water moves further inland and much faster.

I read a story about all the fish that it shoved up on land. Remember finding nemo the fish with the light over its head. Theres a fish looks exactly like it

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

The Tsunumi that could hit the East coast when that island near the cape verdes falls into the sea will be a big one.

[mike18xx]

The Tsunumi that could hit the East coast when that island near the cape verdes falls into the sea will be a big one.

I'm waiting for the big island of Hawaii to crack in half. Unlike the Cape Verde island, the Hawaiian crack is actively spreading, meaning part of the island is actually slowing sliding.

[BLHutch]

I'm waiting for the big island of Hawaii to crack in half. Unlike the Cape Verde island, the Hawaiian crack is actively spreading, meaning part of the island is actually slowing sliding.

Would that travel west across the Pacific or East towards the West Coast of the U.S.?

Brady

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

I would not went to live on the beach/coast when that happens. Or visiting for that matter.

[hicksta]

I would not went to live on the beach/coast when that happens. Or visiting for that matter.

It'd be like the running of the bulls. Insted running of the Tsunami

[mike18xx]

I'm waiting for the big island of Hawaii to crack in half. Unlike the Cape Verde island, the Hawaiian crack is actively spreading, meaning part of the island is actually slowing sliding.

Would that travel west across the Pacific or East towards the West Coast of the U.S.?

Southeast toward South America.

[mike18xx]

(Inadvertant double-post....where's the delete button?)

[Aslkahuna]

Tsunamis, of course travel much faster than 160 mph-more like 500+ mph. A Basin wide tsunami would involve a much larger area than the Cat 5 as Cat 5's don't have inner cores 1000+ miles in diameter. Locally in a small area, the storm surge could be a devastating as a tsunami of equivalent size but the overall area affected with be much greater with the tsunami.

Steve

[EDR1222]

The Tsunumi that could hit the East coast when that island near the cape verdes falls into the sea will be a big one.

I remember seeing a documentary discussing this. Some experts believe there would not be adequate time for people to get away from the coast if this scenario unfolds. And it also mentioned the possibility that the impacts could be felt along many areas of the east coast of the United States and also could travel far inland.

[Windy]

I'm off to bed so I'll check this again in the morning but if you were in say Cancun and somebody gave you two choices:
1. The same type of tsunami that hit the epicenter of the December 26th quake near Sumatra? Not the waves that hit Sri Lanka, Maldives, etc but the waves that hit Indonesia.
2. A cat 5 with say winds of 170 mph+.

What would you choose? Which would cause less damage? Is there any appreciable difference?

A tsunami, hands down. An unexpected tsunami wipes out everything in its path, it nearly inescapable, and is highly lethal. More people died in the first ten minutes of the tsunami of December 26th than in all hurricanes and typhoons over the past decade.

[HurryKane]

The Tsunumi that could hit the East coast when that island near the cape verdes falls into the sea will be a big one.

I remember seeing a documentary discussing this. Some experts believe there would not be adequate time for people to get away from the coast if this scenario unfolds. And it also mentioned the possibility that the impacts could be felt along many areas of the east coast of the United States and also could travel far inland.

I saw that documentary too. It's about the Las Palmas (or La Palma, depending on your source) island in the Canary Islands, where the western half of it could supposedly fall into the Atlantic and cause a tsunami that would hit the east coast only about eight or nine hours later. The entire eastern seaboard would theoretically get smacked. I don't remember them showing how the tsunami would filter through the Caribbean and GOM though. However, since that doc ran, a lot of people have popped up to say that the piece used poor science and was going for the scare 'em to death angle.

Here's a couple of articles describing the situation as originally posed by the documentary:
http://www.newsmedianews.com/tsunami.php
BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/20 ... nami.shtml

And for fun, the counterpoints arguing against the fearmongering about it:
http://www.lapalma-tsunami.com/tsunami.html
http://www.iberianature.com/material/megatsunami.html


Here's a great Q&A session about tsunamis and the US from the Public Broadcasting Service/NOVA: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tsunami/ask-050404.html