The incredible new film The Impossible follows the unimaginable true story of one family’s survival of the 2004 tsunami that devastated Thailand the day after Christmas. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor star as the husband and wife who were on vacation with their three young boys when the wave ripped their family apart. The Impossible has been attracting strong buzz since its debut at the Toronto Film Festival, including best actress talk for Watts (The Painted Veil, Fair Game). Watts was recently nominated for best actress by The Houston Film Critics Society, The Screen Actors Guild, and The Golden Globes. It’s one of those films that raises the bar on so many genres – including the disaster action flick – and redefines what a real “family film” is. It’s certainly not a film for the faint of heart, but will stick with you forever.
My brother who lives in Tokyo was very close to where the tsunami hit in 2011, and words cannot describe the worry and fear my family and I went through waiting to hear from him. So all of this got me thinking – is there a possibility that a tsunami could ever hit the Gulf Coast or Galveston in particular? An article from The Houston Chronicle dated April 3rd, 2011 explores that very subject.
“Although the probability for a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico is low, the evidence of undersea landslides thousands of years ago shows that the potential remains,” said Uri ten Brink, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey during a conference on tsunamis at Texas A&M University Galveston.
I spoke with meteorologist Mike Iscovitz from Fox 26 Houston about the kind of devastation a tsunami would cause in the Gulf Coast. He explained, “Think about this: why were the casualties from the 1900 storm so mind-bogglingly awful? In the event of an unprecedented earthquake that occurred in the Caribbean or even a cataclysmic event in the Atlantic like a large meteor, it is likely that too many people would be left in low-lying areas and could be killed by a tsunami. If there were less than at least a 12 hour warning, I am sure the death toll would far exceed that of the 1900 storm. Could you imagine people stuck in traffic on I-45 when a 25-foot wave slams the coast?”
In the film The Impossible, the Bennett family had no warning for the record-breaking wave that killed over 230,000 in fourteen different countries. The film focuses just on one family, but through great direction from Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage), it always puts this family in perspective to the devastation around them. It’s a touching film that will leave no dry eye. However, with such a flurry of recent tsunami warnings and activity, The Impossible does for tsunamis what Twister did for tornados or Jaws did for sharks – it certainly will have everyone talking.
The earthquake that created the record-breaking tsunami is listed as the third largest earthquake ever recorded, with Galveston’s Great Storm of 1900 still listed as number one. “Since the events of December 2004, the tsunami warning agencies around the world have become much more coordinated and cohesive. I think the main problem was the size of the wave, the huge region affected, and the fact that many of the areas have very little access to warning communications,” Iscovitz explained. “The best thing that has happened is the development of the DART buoy systems. DART stands for Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis. The technology was around before the 2004 tsunami, but for obvious reasons, funding was increased greatly thereafter, and now dozens of buoys are located around the world that provide real-time data on the state of the sea surface.”
While the geophysicists, scientists, and even our own meteorologists agree the probability of Galveston facing a tsunami are small, they all agree it isn’t out of the question.
“There is sufficient evidence to consider submarine landslides in the Gulf of Mexico as a present-day tsunami hazard, as there are clear observations of large landslides along the continental margin of the Gulf of Mexico,” Brink said.
Hopefully, Bayona’s The Impossible is the closest any of us will ever get.
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