The predicted January 2005 earthquake on New York's Spitzer fault generates an underwater landslide of legal reforms."?This triggers a regulatory tsunami that sweeps through the countryside, claiming the top four publicly-traded brokerages in the US insurance industry. Then the waves spread to distant shores where brokers lose contingent bonuses and are compelled to disclose to homeowners and other policyholders their financial interests and profitable"?affiliated relationships in all transactions.

Now there's a metaphor that gives new meaning to a natural hazard!

If the reality of millions homeless and a quarter-million dead along the Indian Ocean coast in December 2004 was a bit too remote, Larry Morrison, president of Business Transition Network Inc., followed it up a few months later with a story for the US business world that really hits home.

The trigger for Morrison's "tsunami disaster" was New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's successful civil fraud suit against Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc., the nation's largest insurance brokerage firm, claiming that the company steered unsuspecting clients to insurers with whom it had lucrative payoff agreements.

The parable's parallels between events in"?the insurance industry and those in real estate are hard to ignore, with RESPA lawsuits crashing up on a beach near you this past year. But I'll ignore them.

My point in this post is the real deal: serious, and"?seismic,"?tsunamis striking US coastal communities. This is not shameless marketing, by the way"?-- we got hit just"?last month!

On November 15th a magnitude 8.3 earthquake in the Kuril Islands northeast of Japan generated a tsunami aimed at the US West Coast. Its waves crossed the North Pacific and reached 2.5 feet high in Santa Barbara and nearly 6 feet in Crescent City, California, where it caused nearly $1 million in damage. It could have been deadly. The waves arrived bigger, later, and farther south than the US Tsunami Warning Center had warned the public to expect. California shore-dwellers got off lucky this time.

Crescent City is no babe in the woods when it comes to seismic sea waves. The great quake of 1964 beneath the Gulf of Alaska sent 20-foot tsunami surges into town that inundated 29 city blocks, killing 12 and causing $15 million in damage (in 1964 dollars).

But November's tsunami was our second"?in 2006. On May 3rd, magnitude 7.9 quake in Tonga"?produced a tsunami that reached 1.5 feet high along the Hawaii and California coasts, and several inches high along Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.

Hurricanes notwithstanding, tsunamis are among the most serious coastal hazards to life and property -- and they can happen in the Atlantic Ocean, too! Communities up and down the West Coast and in Hawaii have developed tsunami response plans, evacuation routes to high ground marked with blue road signs, and, in some towns, audible alerting and warning systems.

Where these public safety measures are in place, the tsunami hazard is clearly "public knowledge" and agents are well-advised to disclose the fact of tsunamis whether or not the law requires it. If your local government has a tsunami response plan, get a copy and provide it to your buyer. If not, let your fingers do the walking. Increasingly, coastal telecom providers include tsunami evacuation routes and even inundation maps in the ancillary pages of their phone book.

And it's not just distant tsunamis we have to fear.

Local ones, made in the USA by undersea faults and landslides along our own coast, will strike with little or no warning. The "perfect storm" for tsunamis in the US will likely be the one caused by the next great earthquake along the Pacific Northwest's "Cascadia subduction zone."This is the mother of all US faults. It runs"?beneath the edge of the continent just offshore from Washington, Oregon and northern California."?Its last great quake (comparable to the magnitude 9.1 Sumatra-Andaman Islands earthquake in 2004) was 306 years ago. Its prehistoric track record suggests that the average time between ruptures is about"?three centuries, more or less. Its next one lurks sometime in our not-too-distant"?future.

Native American accounts of that last Cascadia tsunami, and recent tsunami modeling by scientists, combined with striking similarities between the Cascadia and Sumatra fault zones, suggest that the next big tsunami originating in the Pacific Northwest could send waves over 50 feet high against nearby shores.

This will be our "Indian Ocean tsunami," to use a metaphor.