The Samoan earthquake coverage and the fragility of facts in a breaking story

The Sunrise program had ended at 8 a.m., but Dan and Taizo and I were still in the darkened studio when the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center sent word that there had been an earthquake. Our producer Scott Humber came in to make sure Dan Cooke was ready to break in to the CBS morning show, but Dan was already gathering information for it. Taizo "built a graphic," as these TV people say, positioning a picture of the Pacific with the earthquake symbol in the right place. Dan interrupted regular programming and tannyabed a flawless first report. At that point all we knew was that a Richter 7.9 earthquake had hit somewhere near Samoa and there was a tsunami alert for all of the Hawaiian Islands. I retrieved the laptop that sits before me on the program from its resting place beneath the anchor set and powered it up again, wrote what Dan and Taizo were shouting to each other into a couple coherent sentences, and fed it into the TelePrompTer. By now we knew the location from 110 miles south-southwest of American Samoa, and we knew that the tsunami alerts had extended over much of the southern Pacific, including Tahiti, Tuvalu, Fiji, Kiritbati, Palmyra and New Zealand. The newsroom put the story on the Web. I'm not sure who did what but I heard Anna Gomes working on it and assignment editor Brenda Salgado was already putting out feelers. Malika showed up and pitched in, making phone calls to learn what she could, at least one of them conducted in her fluent French. Back in the studio, I indexed for websites that would have information and found that the U.S. Geological Survey has revised the Richter reading to 8.0 and also posted an 8.3 reading on the moment magnitude scale. One of the cable networks got the story wrong, using the 8.3 number but calling it the Richter reading. Dan immediate began mentioning the moment reading so viewers who monitored multiple sources wouldn't be confused by hearing two different numbers. Charles Richter taught at Caltech. His 1935 scale is logarithmic, so that an 8.0 earthquake has 10 times the magnitude of a 7.0 earthquake. The moment magnitude scale, also developed at Caltech but in 1979 by Tom Hanks - no, not that Tom Hanks - is also logarithmic. The two are almost identical up to Richter 5.0, but after that the moment magnitude number tends to be larger. The newsroom reached a contact in Samoa who said there were no deaths, but later confirmed reports from other sources that said there were. Big waves had moved cars in Pago Pago harbor and wiped out a beach village on the southern short of Western Samoa's most important island. The quake itself was felt all over Samoa. The BBC initially said it was 20 miles down. Later USGS said it was more like six miles. Breaking stories are always like this. People get information wrong, or get it late. Even official Richter readings get revised. One scale is mistaken for another. But it's fascinating to watch it come together.