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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Yglesias applauds the Bushies for worrying about an East Coast tsunami:

GOOD CALL. I'd like to take the opportunity to offer some rare words of praise to the Bush administration for its decision to support expanding the tsunami warning system to include the Atlantic Ocean. This is exactly the sort of issue politicians usually do the wrong thing on. Tsunamis are very rare in the Atlantic, so such an endeavor can be easily caricatured as a waste of money. Indeed, The New York Times article describing the decision doesn't even bother to explain what it is that those of us worried about this issue are worried about: La Palma in the Canary Islands:

• [H]uge landslides and the mega-tsunami that they cause are extremely rare - the last one happened 4,000 years ago on the island of Réunion. The growing concern is that the ideal conditions for just such a landslide - and consequent mega-tsunami - now exist on the island of La Palma in the Canaries. In 1949 the southern volcano on the island erupted. During the eruption an enormous crack appeared across one side of the volcano, as the western half slipped a few metres towards the Atlantic before stopping in its tracks. Although the volcano presents no danger while it is quiescent, scientists believe the western flank will give way completely during some future eruption on the summit of the volcano. In other words, any time in the next few thousand years a huge section of southern La Palma, weighing 500 thousand million tonnes, will fall into the Atlantic ocean.
  What will happen when the volcano on La Palma collapses? Scientists predict that it will generate a wave that will be almost inconceivably destructive, far bigger than anything ever witnessed in modern times. It will surge across the entire Atlantic in a matter of hours, engulfing the whole US east coast, sweeping away everything in its path up to 20km inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami and the Caribbean.

Needless to say, that would be very bad, and it would be well worth spending some money to make sure we have the chance to minimize the loss of life.