After laying off its 10-person team and cutting its hours ahead of the new year, the Pacific Tsunami Museum (PTM) in Hilo, Hawaiʻi, is doing everything it can to stay open in light of mounting financial troubles that threaten to shutter the space entirely.
Strategically placed along the Hilo bayfront that was devastated by numerous deadly tsunamis during the 20th century, the museum plays a vital role in educating local residents and tourists alike about the signs of and safety maneuvers for tsunamis. The institution incorporates survivors’ accounts and commemorates the hundreds killed by natural disasters across the coast.
PTM President Cindi Preller, who said she forwent her own salary amid the lay-offs, told Hawaiʻi Public Radio that the museum is wholly reliant on weekend volunteers and docents at the moment — including herself. Preller and the museum are seeking funding opportunities and investors to mitigate the financial strain of a leaking roof, a broken air conditioning system, the subsequent mildew, and other building maintenance endeavors along with less traffic due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Olsen Trust, a Hawaiʻi-based nonprofit investing in sustainable local agriculture as well as social and environmental causes, recently donated $200,000 to the museum and has called on other companies in Hilo to do the same, as repairs could cost up to $1 million.
The museum did not immediately respond to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.
Tsunami expert Walter Dudley and Jeanne Branch Johnston, who survived Hawaiʻi’s deadliest modern tsunami in 1946 that killed 159 people, co-founded the museum in 1994. The First Hawaiian Bank donated its historic Kamehameha Branch building to the museum as a permanent home in 1997, where it remains today. The building is nearly 100 years old and thus requires extensive renovations and maintenance.
In a separate interview with the Kaua’i news outlet Garden Island, the museum’s chairperson Carol Walker explained that the institution was suffering due to fewer admissions on account of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on tourism in Hawaiʻi, and acknowledged the passing of some key donors.
Walker also noted that while the museum had thrived in the past, it has “become a little less immediate for some people because there hasn’t been a tsunami for a long time, which is great.”
“But it also means that people’s memories are fading, and some of the folks who were most directly affected have passed on,” Walker continued, noting that this might have impacted fundraising. She explained that the three crucial elements that make the museum worth saving are its meaningful history and place in the community, its breakdown of the science behind tsunamis, and its commitment to safety and hazard mitigation through education.
In addition to funding opportunities, Preller told Hawaiʻi Public Radio that she’s seeking an archivist to preserve and digitize the museum’s collections, including hundreds of oral interviews with tsunami survivors that were conducted by co-founder Johnson.
“It’s because of the survivor interviews that we know what those [tsunami] warning signs are … the survivor stories are teaching us exactly what is happening at the time,” Preller said. “I mean, we can’t set up instrumentation to measure what’s going on during the event, because it all gets destroyed.”
