After surging through the Pacific Ocean, a massive tsunami crashed into Hawaii in 1946, killing 159 people and destroying hundreds of buildings. It was the deadliest such event in modern U.S. history " and it sparked a reckoning. The wave was caused by a distant underwater earthquake near Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Few in Hawaii knew the deadly tremor had occurred, or that a massive wall of water that reached as high as 130 feet, was on its way, moving as fast as a commercial jet. The disaster, along with another earthquake-caused tsunami in 1964, pushed the United States to beef up its alert systems in part through the National Tsunami Warning Center, operated under National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After NOAA ceased funding to the lab that's been monitoring seismic activity for more than 25 years, nine stations tracking tsunami-causing earthquakes for the agency will go offline by the end of the month.