A new tool provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration makes it easier for those with access to the Internet to pinpoint exactly where Hawai'i's tsunami evacuation zones are located.

People can still look in the front of the white pages of the Hawaiian Tel telephone directory for maps showing regions of areas in evacuation zones.

But the Internet tool, which merges Google Maps technology with NOAA information, allows people to type in an exact address and see if it is within a zone or not and provides other features not available with the telephone book, disaster emergency officials said.

Hawai'i is the first state to use the technology to create searchable evacuation zone maps online, and at least one other state has already asked for help in designing a similar system, said Russell Jackson, the coastal hazards program coordinator for NOAA's Western Pacific Services Center.

"The maps that are in the phone book, they're not the best maps in the world," Jackson said. "Roads are changing, there's development that's going on all the time. And there are only a few (major) roads so they're not too complicated and they're not labeled very well."

Additionally, he said, the phone book maps do not include all addresses in the state. "Now that there's so much more better technology out there ... this thing is built off of Google Maps," he said. The government is not charged for using the Google Maps system, he said.

Changes could also be made to evacuation zones, and the public will be able to detect such changes nearly immediately, Jackson said.

NOAA spokeswoman Delores Clark said the Web site has handy links to sites that give information on related topics such as tsunami preparedness, evacuation, types of warnings and risk.

"The site links to preparedness information that you may not get in the phone book," Clark said. "You can link to the Red Cross and all the county civil defense agencies as well as the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. There's a lot of information at your disposal in one place."

John Cummings III, spokesman for the city Department of Emergency Management, praised the Web site for being well-thought-out and organized.

"Up until now, really, your choices were to pick up the telephone book and look in there, or call the city's Department of Planning and Permitting and have them look it up for you, or you could look up through tax map key records, which is kind of a lengthy process," he said.

"So this is a very good tool for anyone in the state to find out if they're in an area that could be affected by a tsunami."

Reach Gordon Y.K. Pang at gpang@honoluluadvertiser.com.