Tsunami in California?

With the huge destruction of life and property in the Indian Ocean still fresh in mind, it came as quite a shock to have the Emergency Broadcast System interrupt my TV viewing last night with a tsunami warning for the west coast of America.

I have lived in California all my life and earthquakes are a fact of life. Having the rational knowledge that earthquakes in the sea floor are the number one reason for tsunami creation does not necessarily translate to real-world expectations, however. From what I can see, the last tsunami to really hit this coast was back in 1964. That is prior to my birth and outside of my experience.

Secondly, I have only lived near the coast for a little over 4 years now. I am around 8 miles inland and live on the second floor, which should mean I am safe from the vast majority of tsunami effects. Because the coastal region in California has a number of challenges, including floods, liquefaction, mudslides, earthquakes, storms, and fires, tsunamis become something that happens in other regions, not here. There is enough to deal with already.

The amount of stress and anxiety that I experienced after the EBS broadcast its warning seemed out of context with the threat level. I attribute this to the images from December of people getting washed away in the floods. And all of the stories the news repeated during the first few days of the hundred who were missing and presumed dead.

The wakeup call was probably good. Today I am reading articles about areas that got to practice their emergency response systems (many failed), dry-run their evacuation techniques (many were successful), and got to see how certain infrastructures supported the emergency (phone lines clogged and became unusable in many areas, but other services seemed to hold up to the sudden strain).

Now for the real question on many minds: is this a precursor to more movement of our tectonic plate, or is this it for the near future? This makes two quakes above 5.0 in the last week with numerous 3s and 4s as aftershocks to those two.