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.” NWS 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. That last step is our advice; the tsunami guidance cited on this page does not cover an animal you cannot find. Come back and read the rest when you are on high ground.

Federal and state tsunami guidance covers zones, alerts and high ground, and says little about animals. NWS’s tsunami preparedness page gives pets one line: “Include your pets in all your preparedness efforts.” As of September 29, 2026, NWS’s pages on what to do during a tsunami and on understanding alerts did not mention pets, Ready.gov’s tsunami page mentioned pets only in its site navigation menu, and Oregon’s Department of Emergency Management tsunami page had no pet mention.

Pet evacuation advice, this site’s included, is usually built 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 assumption fails.

Why a Tsunami Breaks a Car-Based Pet Plan

The National Weather Service’s tsunami preparedness guidance says to 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 (DOGAMI), the agency that models coastal evacuation there, goes further on its Beat the Wave program page: “coastal residents and visitors will have 10-30 minutes to reach safety” in the next great Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami, and evacuation on foot will be the only means possible. Washington’s Emergency Management Division says a tsunami could arrive on its outer coast just 10-20 minutes after a major earthquake. The Alaska Earthquake Center describes near-field tsunamis from nearby earthquakes or landslides as giving people minutes rather than hours, and says tsunamis from submarine and above-water landslides can strike with no warning.

None of these statements is about pets. All describe the conditions that decide whether your pet comes with you: not vehicle capacity, but how fast you can move uphill while carrying or leading an animal, over ground an earthquake may have just rearranged.

Hazard	Warning	How you leave	What that means for pets
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	At most hours, no shaking, with an official warning	Drive or walk	Closer to a hurricane plan than a local tsunami plan

The first 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. 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 assumptions matter to anyone with an animal:

• The walking-time maps assume “a moderate walking speed of 4 fps (feet per second, 22 minutes/mile)”, which the report says is the standard pedestrian speed for crossing at signalized intersections.
• The Beat the Wave maps assume a “10-minute delay from start of earthquake before starting evacuation.” The report subtracts those ten minutes from the simulated wave arrival time to account for earthquake shaking, disorientation and the time required to evacuate buildings, and calls the assumption highly uncertain. The maps do not assume your speed. They show the minimum evacuation speed required to stay ahead of the wave, and that is the number to look up for your own address.

Read together, the pet problem becomes arithmetic. The report sets aside no separate time for an animal, but Oregon’s 2026 Tsunami Vertical Evacuation Structure Guidance for planners lists time spent trying to seek out or gather people, pets and belongings among the factors that delay evacuation. In our reasoning, everything you do with an animal comes out of that same ten minutes: finding the cat, getting it into something, clipping a leash to a dog that has just been through the worst thirty seconds of its life, going back for the carrier you left in the garage.

Then there is speed. The report says evacuation from the Clatsop Spit and Alder Creek areas will be extremely challenging in its XXL1 scenario (its maximum-considered Cascadia event, from a magnitude 9.1 earthquake) for people with mobility limitations, meaning those travelling slower than 4 fps. Twenty-two minutes per mile is about 2.7 miles per hour (our arithmetic). That is not a jog. It is the pace below which the report counts an evacuee as mobility-limited. On a Beat the Wave map, the speed your own block requires may sit well above that pace.

DOGAMI models people, not pets, and none of the sources cited here gives a figure for how much a carried animal slows an evacuee. The 10-minute delay and the 4 feet per second are DOGAMI’s. Applying them to pets, the idea that your animal spends part of that delay budget and can push you under the required speed, is our reasoning, not a finding.

Find Your Zone and Your Walk Time Tonight

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

Check whether you are in the zone, using your own state’s viewer. The national-sounding tools are not national.

• Oregon and Washington: the NANOOS NVS Tsunami Evacuation Zones viewer at nvs.nanoos.org/TsunamiEvac, which shows maps provided by DOGAMI and Washington DNR.
• Alaska: the interactive hazard map at tsunami.alaska.edu.
• Hawai’i and Guam: NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management and the Hawai’i Emergency Management Agency run an address-searchable zone viewer at tsunami.coast.noaa.gov. Maui County points residents to it to find whether they are in a red, yellow or green zone. Its coverage is Hawai’i and Guam only, so a Pacific Northwest reader who starts there gets nothing back.
• Anywhere else on the coast, start with your state geological survey or state emergency management agency.

Check home, work and wherever your pet spends the day. NWS says you may need to identify more than one safe place, depending on where you are when a warning comes.

Then get your walk time, not just your zone. A zone tells you whether the water reaches you. The walk time tells you how long you have, and that decides your pet plan. Washington’s Emergency Management Division and DNR publish Pedestrian Evacuation Walk Time maps alongside inundation maps. The Alaska Earthquake Center publishes pedestrian travel time maps for communities with completed inundation studies. In Oregon, a March 2021 DOGAMI announcement says the NANOOS viewer added a custom map view showing your quickest street route to safety, the distance to safety and how fast you need to travel. It launched for four communities, Seaside, Rockaway Beach, Pacific City and Coos Bay, with paths for all Oregon coastal communities being developed, so check whether yours is covered now. DOGAMI’s Beat the Wave maps color routes by the speed that must be maintained until safety is reached. DOGAMI warns that the quickest route may not be the obvious one, so it pays to study the map and practice your route, and some Beat the Wave reports model scenarios in which bridges 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 distance.
• If not, change the plan now. That might mean a carrier you wear instead of hold, a route that trades distance for a gentler grade, a nearer vertical evacuation option you ask your local emergency manager about, or a neighbor who has agreed in advance to take one of your animals.

Run this math per animal, not per household, as our multi-pet go-bag math does for supplies. Two cats is not one trip. If you cannot move everyone in one pass, our guidance on which pet to evacuate first exists so that decision is made calmly in advance.

Two Warnings, Two Different Pet Plans

NWS describes two kinds of tsunami warning: official and natural. It says both are equally important and that you may not get both.

Natural warning. You feel a strong or long earthquake, the ocean acts strange (rising like a fast flood, or draining suddenly to show the ocean floor like a very low tide), or you hear a loud roar from the ocean. NWS says 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 threshold for shaking: 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 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. The first three columns paraphrase NWS; the last is our reading of what each level means for an animal.

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.	No protective action is listed; NWS adds 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 and a tsunami is possible.	Stay tuned for more information and be prepared to act if necessary.	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.
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, by the door, or on your back. There is no trip to the garage and no assembling a kit. If your dog’s leash lives in a drawer in another room, your plan includes a detour you cannot afford.

Under an official warning for a distant tsunami, you may have hours and no shaking. That is a conventional evacuation, and everything this site says about go-bags applies: our DIY pet go-bag checklist covers the list. Or get the free printable go-bag checklist by email. Ready.gov recommends building two kits, one larger for sheltering in place and one lightweight for evacuating. A tsunami zone is the strongest argument for that split, because the lightweight version is the only one that will leave the house on foot.

A distant tsunami can arrive in the middle of the night with no shaking to wake you. That is the scenario a battery-backed NOAA Weather Radio with county-level S.A.M.E. targeting is for, and it 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 fumbling. A carrier you wear (a backpack, or a sling for a small pet) 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 tells you to practice your routes “including at night and in bad weather.”

Vertical Evacuation and What It Means for an Animal

Some coastal communities have no reachable high ground. Washington’s Emergency Management Division answers with 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 guidance points the same way: if you are concerned you cannot reach a safe place in time, ask your local emergency management office about vertical evacuation, since some strong (for example, reinforced concrete) and tall buildings may 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.

The Shoalwater Bay Tribe’s Auntie Lee Tsunami Tower User Guide describes a structure 33 feet high at the first deck and 43 feet at the highest, reached by stairs. Its bin inventory includes cases of water pouches, 360 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 says tsunami events can last several hours with multiple waves, that occupants must remain in the tower until local authorities declare it safe to leave, and that navigating the ground on foot afterward can be extremely hazardous because of debris, unstable structures and potential flooding.

The guide does not contain the words pet, animal, dog or cat. That is not a ban and not a welcome. It is silence, and silence is worth planning around. Oregon’s 2026 Tsunami Vertical Evacuation Structure Guidance for planners does list, among its questions, how many people and pets will need to seek refuge on a structure, so at least one state agency treats animals as part of the planning. 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. ADA.gov says service animals are dogs, of any breed and size, trained to perform a task directly related to a person’s disability, and says businesses and non-profits open to the public, along with state and local governments, generally “must allow service animals to go most places where the public can go”, including where there is a no-pets policy. A pets answer is not an answer about a service dog. This matters most where a handler also has a mobility limitation, the group DOGAMI’s report says faces an extremely challenging evacuation in the Clatsop Spit and Alder Creek areas.
• Assume nothing is stocked for your pet. No bowl, food, water dish, litter or crate. Whatever the animal needs for a stay of hours came up the stairs with you.
• Plan for cold, because the tower’s guide does. The inventory is sized for exposure: 400 mylar ponchos, twenty-five tarps with bungee cords and clamps for windbreaks and a contained area on deck 1, and two large patio heaters to use for warmth, especially at night. Every one of those countermeasures is sized for a person. A soaked eight-pound cat in a mesh sling has none of it. AVMA lists whining, shivering, seeming anxious, slowing down or stopping, seeming weak, or looking for warm places to burrow as signs of hypothermia in pets; it says short-haired and short-legged pets may get cold faster, that very young and very old pets may be more susceptible to temperature extremes, and that wet sweaters or coats “can actually make your dog colder.” If you suspect hypothermia, AVMA’s instruction is to “consult your veterinarian immediately.” This is not a treatment protocol. It is a reason to put a dry towel in the bag: carry something dry the animal can sit on and be wrapped in, and keep it dry on the way up.
• Plan for stairs. A dog that has never used open metal stairs, or a large dog that cannot be carried, is a route problem to discover on 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.
• Heed 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 too, and small animals in a contained, heated corner are the ones to watch. Our generator carbon monoxide guide covers it in more depth.

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

Staging: What Lives by the Door

For a tsunami, staging 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.

Do not build a staging plan that leaves an animal crated or shut in one room while nobody is home. The ASPCA says pets left behind “may become trapped or escape and be exposed to numerous life-threatening hazards.” Applying that to crating and closed doors is our reasoning, not an ASPCA instruction.

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 says pets should wear collars and tags with up-to-date identification and recommends microchipping as a more permanent form of ID. AVMA says to make sure microchip and other ID information is up to date. 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 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 it says helps document ownership if you are separated.

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: this page argues that carried weight pushes you under the speed your map requires, and several days of water for a large dog is real weight on top of the dog. Size the on-foot kit to a walk of minutes and a wait of 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. If you can only get one out the door, it is the small one.

Where you sleep. Closed-toe shoes you can get on without looking, and a headlamp. A plan built on about 2.7 miles per hour over ground an earthquake has just rearranged, possibly in the dark, fails in the first thirty seconds if you cannot see broken glass in an unlit hallway. Use 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 your evacuation routes, including at night and in bad weather, because familiarity makes evacuation quicker and easier if you ever need to evacuate for real. Do the walk with the carrier loaded, or with the dog on the leash you would actually use, to find out whether the straps need adjusting, your cat will tolerate the sling, or the shortcut has a gate.

Use the siren test as your drill. Washington’s Emergency Management Division says it maintains 121 All-Hazard Alert Broadcast tsunami sirens (as of September 29, 2026) in high-risk locations. It tests them on the first Monday of every month at noon with Westminster Chimes, and once a year with the actual wail sound on the third Thursday in October alongside the Great Washington ShakeOut. Whether your coastline runs a comparable test is a question for your county emergency management page; as of September 29, 2026, Oregon’s Department of Emergency Management tsunami page did not mention a siren test 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. Washington’s sirens have an audible range of roughly a mile and are not intended to be heard indoors, which is a reason not to treat sirens as your only warning channel. Our pet fire evacuation drill checklist has a drill structure you can reuse.

After the First Wave

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

NWS says 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 that the time between waves ranges from five minutes to two hours; in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami the fifth wave was the largest in many parts of Japan, and 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, wait for official clearance, then work through local animal control and shelters, where found animals surface. Our guide on finding a lost pet after a disaster covers the process. A rescue alert sticker posted beforehand speaks for the animal while you are stuck on high ground. Per the ASPCA it carries the number and type of pets in the home and your veterinarian’s number, and if you must evacuate with your animals and time allows, 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 come down, treat the ground as hostile to paws and low bodies. Ready.gov’s post-tsunami guidance warns against wading in floodwater, which “can contain dangerous debris”, says water may be deeper than it appears, and says downed or underground power lines can electrically charge water. The Auntie Lee guide makes the same point about moving on foot afterward. For animals, 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.

Escalation, plainly. 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, where your community is covered, the NANOOS viewer.
• 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.
• 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, once by day and once 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 starts this whole sequence, what to do with your pet during earthquake shaking covers the thirty seconds before any of this begins. Because a tsunami evacuation is on foot, carrier backpack versus sling for evacuating on foot is the closest gear comparison. Coastal earthquakes and heavy rain also drive the hazard in landslide and mudslide pet evacuation, which shares the minutes-not-hours staging logic. If your cat is the animal you are worried about, getting a hiding or scared cat into a carrier is the highest-value skill to practice. To build the whole plan, the pet emergency plan tool and the pet emergency kit builder tailor to your animals, and the pet emergency playbooks hub links every other hazard.

The most useful next step is to type your address into your state’s tsunami evacuation zone viewer. If you are inside a zone, open the walk-time or Beat the Wave map for the same address. Everything else on this page follows from that walk time.