Tsunami Pet Evacuation Planning: On Foot, in Minutes, With What You Can Carry

If the ground just shook hard or long, or the ocean has drained away, risen like a fast flood, or started roaring, do not finish this page. Protect yourself during the shaking, then get your pet and move immediately, on foot, out of the evacuation zone. If you have high ground you can reach, go to it. If your community is flat and has no high ground, go to the vertical evacuation structure or assembly area your officials have designated, and know which one that is before today; NWS’s instruction if you cannot reach a safe place is to “follow evacuation signs to safety or go as high or as far inland (away from the water) as possible.” The National Weather Service is unambiguous that a tsunami in that situation “could arrive within minutes” and that you should not wait for an official warning or for instructions. If you cannot find an animal in the time you have, go anyway, and report it to local animal control and shelters once you are safe. Come back and read the rest when you are on high ground.

This site has playbooks for hurricanes, wildfire, flood, tornado, earthquake, ice storms, and volcanic ash. Until now it had nothing on tsunamis, and that gap mirrors a larger one. Search for tsunami preparedness and you will find genuinely excellent federal and state guidance about zones, alerts, and high ground, written almost entirely as though nobody in the evacuation zone owns an animal. The National Weather Service’s tsunami preparedness page gives pets one line: “Include your pets in all your preparedness efforts.” As of this page’s publish date, the NWS pages on what to do during a tsunami and on understanding alerts contain no mention of pets at all. Ready.gov’s tsunami page mentions pets only in its site navigation menu, not in any of its guidance. Oregon’s Department of Emergency Management tsunami page has no pet mention.

Meanwhile the pet preparedness world, this site included, has built most of its evacuation advice around a vehicle. Carriers that fit a cargo area. Crates that strap to a seat. Kits sized to what a car can haul. For a tsunami, that entire assumption breaks, and it breaks in a specific, documented way.

Why a Tsunami Wrecks the Pet Plan You Already Have

The National Weather Service’s tsunami preparedness guidance puts it in one sentence:

“You should plan to be able to reach your safe place on foot if you can because of possible road damage, closed roads and traffic jams.”

Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, the agency that actually models coastal evacuation, goes further. On its Beat the Wave program page: “When the next great Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami occur, coastal residents and visitors will have 10-30 minutes to reach safety. Evacuation on foot will be the only means possible.”

Washington’s Emergency Management Division describes its outer coast as a place where “a tsunami could arrive just 10-20 minutes after a major earthquake.” The Alaska Earthquake Center describes near-field tsunamis, generated by nearby earthquakes or landslides, as giving people “minutes rather than hours to reach safety”, and notes that tsunamis generated by submarine and above-water landslides “can strike with no warning.”

None of those agencies are talking about pets. All of them are describing the exact conditions that decide whether your pet comes with you: not vehicle capacity, but how fast you personally can move uphill while carrying or leading an animal, over ground that an earthquake may have just rearranged.

Hazard	Typical warning	How you leave	What that means for pets
Hurricane	Days	Drive, with a loaded vehicle	Full kit, multiple carriers, records, medication
Wildfire	Hours, sometimes minutes	Drive, sometimes on short notice	Pre-staged carriers, go-bag by the door
Local tsunami	Minutes. The shaking is the warning, and it may be the only one	On foot, uphill or into a structure	Only what is already on you or in your hands
Distant tsunami	Hours	Drive or walk, with official warning	Closer to a hurricane plan than a local tsunami plan

That third row is what the rest of this page is about.

The 10 Minutes Oregon Already Spent on You

The number that reorganizes a pet plan comes from a technical report rather than a safety brochure.

DOGAMI’s Open-File Report O-16-08 modeled pedestrian evacuation for Warrenton, Hammond, and Clatsop Spit in Clatsop County, Oregon, under a magnitude 9.1 Cascadia scenario. Two of its stated assumptions matter enormously to anyone with an animal:

• The walking-time maps were built for “a moderate walking speed of 4 fps (feet per second, 22 minutes/mile)”, which the report notes is “the standard speed for pedestrians to cross at signalized intersections.”
• The Beat the Wave maps model a “10-minute delay from start of earthquake before starting evacuation.” Those maps do not assume your speed the way the walking-time maps do. They “depict the minimum evacuation speed required to stay ahead of the wave”, which is the number you go and look up for your own address.

Read those together and the pet problem becomes arithmetic instead of anxiety. The model has already granted you ten minutes to stop shaking, get up, get organized, and get out the door. Everything you do with an animal in that window comes out of that same ten minutes: finding the cat, getting the cat into something, clipping a leash to a dog that has just experienced the worst thirty seconds of its life, going back for the carrier you left in the garage.

And then there is the speed. DOGAMI’s report states plainly that evacuation from the hardest areas “will be extremely challenging for the XXL1 scenario for those with mobility limitations (i.e., those travelling at speeds less than 4 fps).” XXL1 is the report’s maximum-considered Cascadia event, generated by a magnitude 9.1 earthquake.

Twenty-two minutes per mile is about 2.7 miles per hour. DOGAMI calls that moderate, and it is: it is roughly the pace a signal timer assumes when it decides how long a crosswalk stays green. It is not a jog. The point is not that the modeled speed is hard. The point is that it is the floor, and the report is explicit that people below it are the ones in trouble. Carrying twenty pounds of frightened, shifting animal is a mobility limitation, whether or not anyone has ever described it to you that way. And on a Beat the Wave map the speed your own block requires may sit well above that floor, because the color on those maps is the minimum speed you have to sustain, not a speed anyone is promising will be enough.

We want to be precise about what is ours and what is DOGAMI’s here. DOGAMI models people, not pets. It has never published a figure for how much a carried animal slows an evacuee, and neither has anyone else we could find. The 10-minute delay and the 4 feet per second are theirs and are quoted exactly. The application to pets, that your animal spends part of that delay budget and can push you under that speed, is our reasoning, offered as reasoning and not dressed up as a finding.

Find Your Zone and Your Walk Time Tonight

For most hazards on this site, prep means buying and packing. For this one the work is free and it happens on a map.

Check whether you are even in the zone, using your own state’s viewer. That is where mainland coverage actually lives, and it is the step to get right, because the national-sounding tools are not national. Oregon and Washington addresses are covered by the NANOOS NVS Tsunami Evacuation Zones viewer at nvs.nanoos.org/TsunamiEvac, built with DOGAMI and Washington DNR data. Alaska’s interactive hazard map is at tsunami.alaska.edu. If you are in Hawai’i or Guam, NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management and the Hawai’i Emergency Management Agency run an address-searchable evacuation zone viewer at tsunami.coast.noaa.gov; Maui County points residents to exactly that tool, telling people to “enter your address, identify if you’re in a red, yellow, or green zone, and plan ahead.” Its coverage is Hawai’i and Guam only, so a Pacific Northwest reader who starts there gets nothing back. Anywhere else on the coast, your state geological survey or state emergency management agency is the right first stop. Check home, work, and wherever your pet spends the day if that is somewhere else, because NWS is specific that “You may need to identify more than one safe place, depending on where you may be when you get a tsunami warning (e.g., home, work, etc.).”

Then get your walk time, not just your zone. A zone tells you whether the water reaches you. It does not tell you how long you have, and the walk time is the number that decides your pet plan. Washington’s Emergency Management Division and DNR publish Pedestrian Evacuation Walk Time maps alongside inundation maps. The NANOOS NVS Tsunami Evacuation Zones viewer, built by DOGAMI with the University of Oregon and NANOOS, covers Oregon and Washington communities and, per the agencies’ own announcement, provides “a custom map view showing your quickest street route to safety outside the tsunami zone after a local Cascadia earthquake”, including “the distance to safety and how fast you need to travel to escape the tsunami.” Alaska’s Earthquake Center publishes pedestrian travel time maps for communities with completed inundation studies, modeling evacuation by foot and accounting for ground cover, steep terrain, and other barriers.

DOGAMI’s Beat the Wave maps go one step further by coloring routes with “the speed that must be maintained from the starting point until safety is reached”, which is why the program’s public materials talk in terms of walk, jog, or sprint. DOGAMI also warns that “The quickest route may not be the obvious one, so it pays to study the map and practice your route”, and that some reports model which bridges are likely to fail.

Now do the pet version of that lookup, which nobody will do for you:

• Find your required speed or walk time from your actual front door.
• Decide honestly whether you can sustain that speed carrying your specific animal, or animals, over that specific distance.
• If the answer is no, the plan changes now, not on the day. That might mean a carrier you can wear instead of hold, or a route that trades distance for a gentler grade, or asking your local emergency manager about a nearer vertical evacuation option, or a neighbor who has agreed in advance to take one of your animals.

Households with more than one pet should run this math per animal rather than per household, the same way our multi-pet go-bag math treats supplies. Two cats is not one trip. If you genuinely cannot move everyone in one pass, our guidance on which pet to evacuate first exists precisely so that decision is made calmly in advance rather than in a stairwell.

Two Warnings, Two Completely Different Pet Plans

NWS draws a distinction that pet guidance almost never picks up: there are official tsunami warnings and natural tsunami warnings. In NWS’s words, “Both are equally important and suggest the potential for a tsunami that may cause widespread flooding. You may not get both types of warnings.”

Natural warning. You feel a strong or long earthquake, or the ocean acts strange (rising like a fast flood, or draining away suddenly to show the ocean floor like a very low tide), or you hear a loud roar from the ocean. NWS: “a tsunami is possible and could arrive within minutes”, and “Do not wait for an official tsunami warning or for instructions from local officials.” The Alaska Earthquake Center gives a usable threshold for the shaking version: “If the ground shakes for more than 20 seconds and it is difficult to stand, and/or the tsunami siren is heard, anyone within the inundation/flood zone should move to higher ground or a tsunami shelter.”

Official warning. Broadcast through local radio and television, marine radio, wireless emergency alerts, NOAA Weather Radio, NOAA websites, outdoor sirens, local officials, text alerts, and telephone notifications. NWS publishes four levels, and most pet guidance never gets past the top one. The middle two columns below are NWS’s own words. The third column is our reading of what each level means for an animal, not theirs.

NWS level	What NWS says it means	What NWS says to do	What that means for pets
Information Statement	“An earthquake has occurred, but there is no threat or it was very far away and the threat has not been determined.”	NWS lists no protective action for this level, adding only that “In most cases, there is no threat of a destructive tsunami.”	Nothing changes. Note it and carry on.
Watch	“A distant earthquake has occurred. A tsunami is possible.”	“Stay tuned for more information. Be prepared to take action if necessary.”	This is the staging level. Carriers out and open, leash and harness on the door hook, phones charging, everyone accounted for. Do not leave yet.
Advisory	“A tsunami with potential for strong currents or waves dangerous to those in or very near the water is expected or occurring.”	“Stay out of the water and away from beaches and waterways. Follow instructions from local officials.”	Dogs off the beach, out of the surf, off jetties and river mouths, and keep them off. The hazard NWS names at this level is currents and waves dangerous to anyone in or very near the water, which is exactly where a loose dog goes.
Warning	“A tsunami that may cause widespread flooding is expected or occurring. Dangerous coastal flooding and powerful currents are possible and may continue for several hours or days after initial arrival.”	“Follow instructions from local officials. Evacuation is recommended. Move to high ground or inland (away from the water).”	Secure every animal and walk your route. No assessment step, no second lap of the house.

For a pet owner the natural and official cases produce two different plans, and conflating them is the failure mode.

Under a natural warning, you have no pack time. What comes with you is what is already on the animal, already by the door, or already on your back. There is no trip to the garage. There is no assembling a kit. If your dog’s leash lives in a drawer in a different room, your plan currently includes a detour you cannot afford.

Under an official warning for a distant tsunami, you may have hours and no shaking at all. That is a conventional evacuation, and everything this site says about pet go-bags applies: our DIY pet go-bag checklist covers the full list, and Ready.gov’s own recommendation is to build two kits rather than one, “one larger kit if you are sheltering in place and one lightweight version for if you need to evacuate.” A tsunami zone is the single strongest argument for that two-kit split we have come across, because the lightweight version is not a convenience here, it is the only version that will ever leave the house on foot.

One warning about the distant-tsunami case specifically: it can arrive in the middle of the night with no ground shaking to wake you. That is the scenario a NOAA Weather Radio with battery backup and county-level S.A.M.E. targeting is actually for, and it is the one channel that does not depend on your phone being awake, charged, and un-silenced.

Gear cannot buy you time here the way it can in a hurricane. What it can do is protect your walking speed and remove the fumbling. A carrier you wear beats a carrier you hold, because it leaves your hands for handrails, gates, doors, a child, or a second animal. A carrier that is already assembled and reachable beats a better carrier in a closet. If your realistic route is at night, our guide to reflective and hi-vis nighttime pet gear matters more here than for most hazards, because NWS specifically tells you to practice your evacuation routes “including at night and in bad weather”, which is a strong hint about when you might actually walk them.

Vertical Evacuation, and What It Actually Means for an Animal

Some coastal communities have no reachable high ground. Washington’s Emergency Management Division puts the problem plainly: “But what if there is no high ground nearby?” Its answer is Tsunami Vertical Evacuation Structures, purpose-built refuges engineered to survive “Strong earthquakes, aftershocks, and liquefaction”, “Multiple tsunami waves”, and “high-impact debris and extreme water forces.” NWS’s preparedness guidance points the same direction: if you are concerned you cannot reach a safe place in time, ask your local emergency management office about vertical evacuation, since “Some strong (e.g., reinforced concrete) and tall buildings may be able to provide protection if no other options are available.”

Washington reports that Ocosta Elementary School near Westport became North America’s first tsunami vertical evacuation structure in 2016, and that the first free-standing evacuation tower in the United States was completed in Tokeland in 2022 by the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe. The state estimates it will need at least 58 to 80 or more such structures to cover everyone at risk.

We read the one public user guide for one of those towers. The Shoalwater Bay Tribe’s Auntie Lee Tsunami Tower User Guide describes a structure standing 33 feet at the first deck and 43 feet at the highest deck, reached by stairs. Its published bin inventory includes cases of water pouches, hundreds of Meals Ready to Eat, a large first aid kit, 400 mylar ponchos, tarps and bungee cords for windbreaks, propane patio heaters, portable toilets and toilet chemicals, HAM radios, and a battery backup system “designed to provide power for approximately 3 days.” The guide warns that tsunami events “can last several hours, with multiple waves occurring”, that occupants must “remain in the tower until local authorities declare it safe to leave”, and that “Navigating the ground on foot after a tsunami can be extremely hazardous due to debris, unstable structures, and potential flooding.”

The document does not contain the words pet, animal, dog, or cat anywhere.

We are not reading that as a ban, and we are not reading it as a welcome. It is silence, and silence is worth planning around. Practically, for any vertical evacuation structure or official assembly area you might use:

• Ask your local emergency management office now whether animals are permitted, and get the answer before a warning rather than at the base of the stairs. If the answer is no, that changes your destination, not your decision to bring your animal.
• Ask about a service animal separately, and by name. A service animal is not a pet, and a pets answer is not an answer about a service dog. ADA.gov defines a service animal as a dog individually trained to do work or perform a task directly related to a person’s disability, and states that businesses and non-profits open to the public, along with state and local governments, “must allow service animals to go most places where the public can go”, including where there is a no-pets policy. If you are a handler, do not rebuild your route around a pets-not-accommodated answer. Ask the question that actually applies to you. That matters most where a handler also has a mobility limitation, which is the group DOGAMI’s report singles out as facing the hardest evacuation of all.
• Assume nothing is stocked for your pet. No bowl, no food, no water dish, no litter, no crate. Whatever the animal needs for a stay measured in hours is what came up the stairs with you.
• Plan for cold, because the tower’s own guide does. Read the Auntie Lee inventory again and notice what those items are for. Four hundred mylar ponchos, twenty-five tarps with bungee cords and clamps “for securing tarps to overhead eye beams”, and two large patio heaters that the guide says to use “to maintain warmth, especially at night”, with the tarps used “to create a contained area on deck 1 if needed to contain the heat and create a wind break.” That is a coastal Pacific Northwest structure planning for hours of exposed deck in the wind, and every one of those countermeasures is sized for a person. A soaked eight-pound cat in a mesh sling has none of it. AVMA’s cold weather guidance is that pets showing “whining, shivering, seems anxious, slows down or stops moving, seems weak, or starts looking for warm places to burrow” are showing signs of hypothermia, that short-coated, short-legged, very young and very old animals cope worst, and that wet sweaters or coats “can actually make your dog colder.” So carry something dry the animal can sit on and be wrapped in, keep it dry on the way up, and if you suspect hypothermia, AVMA’s instruction is to “consult your veterinarian immediately.” We are not veterinarians and this is not a treatment protocol. It is a reason to put a dry towel in the bag.
• Plan for stairs specifically. A dog that has never used open metal stairs, or a large dog that cannot be carried, is a route problem you want to discover during a practice walk.
• Plan for containment in a crowd. You may be on an open deck with strangers, other animals, and no fencing for hours. A harness plus a leash, or a fully enclosed carrier, is the difference between a contained pet and a pet loose above a flooded landscape.
• Note the heater warning. The Auntie Lee guide tells occupants to keep ventilation if the propane patio heaters are running, “to avoid carbon monoxide buildup.” Carbon monoxide is dangerous to pets as well, and small animals in a contained, heated corner are the ones you should be most careful about, a point our generator carbon monoxide guide treats in more depth.

If your community’s plan sends you to a public shelter after the water recedes rather than to a tower, shelter pet policy is its own question with a genuinely mixed answer, which we cover in do pet-friendly disaster shelters exist. Maui County’s own guidance to residents notes that pets at shelters “must be crated, please plan ahead”, which is a useful reminder that the crate is often the price of admission.

Staging: What Actually Lives by the Door

Every hazard page on this site tells you to stage gear. For a tsunami it stops being an optimization and becomes the plan, because the modeled delay budget is ten minutes and a natural warning gives you no pack time at all.

On the animal, permanently: a collar with current ID tags, and for a cat a breakaway collar, since The Animal Medical Center notes a cat’s collar “can easily catch on fences, sticks or other protruding objects, trapping the cat or worse.” ASPCA’s disaster guidance is direct that pets should wear collars and tags with up-to-date identification, and recommends microchipping as a more permanent form of ID. AVMA’s disaster guidance says the same about keeping microchip registration current. In a hazard where separation is a genuine possibility and phone networks may be down, the ID on the animal is doing more work than any app. Note the consequence of that breakaway, though: a collar designed to release is not a restraint point, so anything you clip to the animal, including a carrier’s interior tether, goes on a harness.

By the door you would actually leave through: a leash and harness on a hook at hand height, and an assembled carrier for each small animal. Not flattened. Not in a closet. Ready.gov also suggests a photo of you together with your pet, which does double duty as proof of ownership if you are reunited through a shelter.

In the on-foot kit, if it is grabbable in one motion: medication in a waterproof container, copies of vet records, a folding bowl, a dry towel, and whatever food and water you can carry without slowing down. Be honest about that last clause, because this page has spent its whole length arguing that carried weight is what pushes you under the speed your map requires, and several days of water for a large dog is genuine weight on top of the dog. Size the on-foot kit to the trip it is actually for: a walk measured in minutes and a wait on high ground measured in hours. Ready.gov’s fuller kit list, and Maui County’s recommendation to store two weeks of food and water per pet, describe the kit that stays home or rides in a vehicle. The at-home kit and the on-foot kit are different objects, and if you can only get one of them out the door it is the small one.

Where you sleep, not where you keep gear: closed-toe shoes you can get onto your feet without looking, and a headlamp. Everything else on this page assumes you can hold about 2.7 miles per hour over ground an earthquake has just rearranged, possibly in the dark, which is why NWS tells you to practice your routes “including at night and in bad weather.” Broken glass in an unlit hallway ends that assumption in the first thirty seconds, and it ends it before you have even reached the animal. A headlamp rather than a phone light, for the same reason the carrier goes on your back: your hands are already full.

Practiced, not just owned. NWS says to practice walking your evacuation routes, including at night and in bad weather, because “Familiarity with the routes will make evacuation quicker and easier if you ever need to evacuate for real.” Do that walk with the carrier loaded, or with the dog on the leash you would actually use. That is the only way you find out that the pack straps need adjusting, or that your cat will not tolerate twelve minutes in a sling, or that the shortcut has a gate.

Use the siren test as your drill. This is the cheapest recurring drill available to a coastal pet owner, and almost nobody uses it. Washington maintains 121 All-Hazard Alert Broadcast tsunami sirens on its inner and outer coasts, and tests them on the first Monday of every month at noon with Westminster Chimes, plus once a year with the actual wail sound on the third Thursday in October alongside the Great Washington ShakeOut. Whether your own coastline runs a comparable scheduled test, and on what day, is a question for your county emergency management page rather than something to assume; Oregon’s state tsunami page, for instance, says nothing about a siren schedule. When you hear your local test, run a two-minute pet drill: find the animal, get it into the carrier or onto the leash, get to your door. Time it. Note that Washington’s sirens have an audible range of roughly a mile and “are not intended to be heard indoors”, which is itself a good reason not to treat sirens as your only warning channel. Our pet fire evacuation drill checklist has a drill structure you can reuse wholesale.

After the First Wave

The most dangerous instinct after a tsunami is to go back down.

NWS: “The first wave may not be the last or the largest and the danger may last for hours or days.” Washington’s Geological Survey adds detail worth holding onto: the time between waves ranges from five minutes to two hours, and in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami the fifth wave was the largest in many parts of Japan, while in the 1964 Alaska earthquake the fourth wave was the largest to strike Crescent City. Evacuees should stay on high ground and not return until emergency management says so.

That applies to going back for a pet, and it is the hardest version of this advice to give. If an animal was left behind, the answer is still to wait for official clearance and then work through local animal control and shelters, which is where found animals actually surface. Our guide on finding a lost pet after a disaster covers that process. A rescue alert sticker posted before any of this happens is the one thing that speaks for the animal while you are stuck on high ground: per the ASPCA it should carry the number and type of pets in the home plus your veterinarian’s number, and if you got out with your animals you write EVACUATED across it so nobody searches an empty house. Our printable pet rescue alert sticker is a fill-in version you can post today.

When you do come down, treat the ground as hostile to paws and low bodies. Ready.gov’s post-tsunami guidance warns to avoid wading in floodwater, which “can contain dangerous debris”, that water may be deeper than it appears, and that downed or underground power lines can electrically charge water. The Auntie Lee tower guide makes the same point about moving on foot afterward: debris, unstable structures, and flooding. For animals specifically, that means leashed dogs and carried cats for every trip outside until you have walked the area yourself, no drinking from puddles or standing water, and a check of paws for cuts and embedded debris. Our flood pet preparedness guide covers the contaminated-water side in more depth.

Escalation, plainly stated. We are not veterinarians and nothing here is a diagnosis or a dose. If your pet is injured, struggling to breathe, weak, disoriented, or has swallowed floodwater or anything from the debris field, call your veterinarian or the nearest open emergency veterinary hospital. For a suspected poisoning or ingestion, the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center is reachable at (888) 426-4435, staffed around the clock, and a consultation fee may apply. Make that call rather than waiting to see whether it resolves.

The Tsunami Pet Checklist

• Look up your address in your state’s tsunami evacuation zone viewer (NANOOS NVS for Oregon and Washington, tsunami.alaska.edu for Alaska, tsunami.coast.noaa.gov for Hawai’i and Guam) for home, work, and anywhere your pet spends the day.
• Find your pedestrian walk time or required evacuation speed, not just your zone, using your state’s walk-time maps or the NANOOS viewer for Oregon and Washington.
• Decide honestly whether you can hold that speed while carrying or leading each animal, and change the plan now if you cannot.
• Do the math per pet, not per household, and pre-decide your order if you cannot move everyone in one trip.
• Learn the natural warning signs cold: strong or long shaking, the ocean draining or surging, a loud roar. Any one of them means go, without waiting for an official alert.
• Decide now, out loud, with everyone in the household: if an animal cannot be found in the time available, you leave and report it afterward. Nobody re-litigates that on the day.
• Hang a leash and harness on a hook by the door you would actually leave through, and stage an assembled carrier there for each small pet.
• Put closed-toe shoes and a headlamp where you sleep, not where you keep the rest of the gear.
• Choose a carrier you can wear, not just hold, if your route is long, uphill, or involves stairs, and clip any interior tether to a harness rather than a collar.
• Pack something dry the animal can be wrapped in, because a vertical evacuation deck is an exposed, windy place for a wet animal for hours.
• Ask your local emergency management office whether pets are permitted at your nearest vertical evacuation structure or assembly area, and get the answer in writing if you can. If you handle a service animal, ask that question separately, since a service animal is not a pet.
• Put current ID tags on every animal and confirm the microchip registry has your current phone number.
• Post a rescue alert sticker listing the number and type of pets and your veterinarian’s number.
• Add a battery-backed NOAA Weather Radio with S.A.M.E. county targeting for the distant-tsunami case, and register for your county’s alert system.
• Walk your actual route with the carrier loaded, at least once, and once more at night.
• Check whether your county runs a scheduled siren test, and if it does, run a two-minute pet drill on test day and time it.
• Write down that you do not go back down until officials say the danger has passed, and tell everyone in the household the same thing.

Related Reading

If the shaking is what starts this whole sequence, what to do with your pet during earthquake shaking covers the thirty seconds before any of this begins, including why grabbing at a frightened animal mid-shaking is the wrong move. Because a tsunami evacuation is on foot, carrier backpack versus sling for evacuating on foot is the closest gear comparison to this hazard’s real requirement. Coastal earthquakes and heavy rain also drive the hazard covered in landslide and mudslide pet evacuation, which shares the minutes-not-hours staging logic. If your cat is the animal you are worried about, and it usually is, getting a hiding or scared cat into a carrier is the single highest-value skill to practice before any of this matters. To build the whole plan rather than this page’s slice of it, the pet emergency plan tool and the pet emergency kit builder both tailor to your specific animals, and the pet emergency playbooks hub links every other hazard.

The single most useful thing you can do after reading this takes about ten minutes. Open your own state’s tsunami evacuation zone viewer and type in your address. If you are inside a zone, go one step further and open the walk-time or Beat the Wave map for that same address, because the zone map only tells you whether the water reaches you, and the walk-time map is the one that tells you how long you have or how fast you have to move. Everything else on this page follows from that second number.