Tsunami Scare...

I often say to my roommate that I'd enjoy the excitement of being in a severe storm, better yet a Tsunami!  I realize that I'd probably have an opposite feeling once I'm in the middle of said crises, however, all my family and friends know that I'll take an adrenaline rush anytime I can get one.  I guess I got what I wished for...sort of...

A few weeks ago I hopped over to Kauai on an extended weekend to explore the island with my buddy, Dave. (I'll put up some more pictures of the trip as soon as I go through the 300 pictures I took).  We took backpacking and camping equipment since we planned to backpack remote wilderness the first 2 days.  On the second night we camped at Kauai's Salt Pond Beach (it was places like this where people first collected sea salt).

The salt ponds near the beach and camping area.

More salt ponds

We were just about to go to bed when the Civil Air Defense Sirens went off.  KY and OH have Tornado sirens; Hawai'i has Civil Air Defense Sirens, but are used for things like bomb warnings during war, hurricanes or tsunamis.  They only went off for 10 seconds, so I assumed a false alarm.  After all, Hawai'i is always having trouble with their sirens.  They test them at a frequency that seems to be almost bi-weekly, but despite their testing they frequently go off accidentally (which is really annoying when it happens at 4am).  The media here blames the problems on just about anything: an old siren system, new computer software that's supposed to help, workers accidentally setting them off, etc...  They didn't even use them correctly during the Pearl Harbor attack (human error that time), so I guess my expectations are kind of high that they'd be used correctly now...there's only been 65+ years of technological advancements (insert sarcasm here).  I digress...

This time it was real: there was a 7-point-something earthquake in the ocean off the western coast of Canada, and apparently the energy of the expected tsunami was headed straight for Hawai'i.  This probably received little-to-no coverage on the east coast, because it happened at the same time Hurricane Sandy was occurring.

Luckily a minute after the sirens only went off for 10 seconds, a park ranger alerted everyone to run for higher ground since a tsunami warning was in effect.  Some of the locals literally ran.  One person ran past us screaming, "oh my (gosh), this is gonna be it.  The big one!  Just leave everything.  Leave everything!" and he sure did leave his whole campsite as he ran for the parking lot.  Now, I realize being on a beach during a tsunami is not an ideal location, but I still took a couple minutes to tear down camp (and I also know that leaving anything unattended in Hawai'i will promptly get it stolen).  I took a look at the sea and it was still there.  It wasn't doing it's whole receding thing before the big wave.  The park ranger instructed us to go to a nearby shopping center parking lot and listen to the radio for a shelter we could go to since we were merely tourist.

Logically, we should prepare for the possibility of ensuing catastrophe, but we decided to just go into the grocery store and people watch.  It was awesome.  They were going nuts.  People were buying 5 gallons of milk and 72 bottles of water (no joking).  We did manage to get one bottle of water and some food (candy totally counts!).  All joking aside, we did know that this point that any tsunami that would hit was expected to be minor.  Only people in the tier 1 evacuation zones were told to leave, which allowed many others in multiple other evac-zones to stay put.

No more packages of water 1 hour post tsunami warning!

1 bottle of water = prepared! 

This is the best "72 Hour Emergency Preparedness Kit" I've ever seen, right?

So then we waited in the parking lot.  To make a long story a little less long: the tsunami was only expected to be a couple feet (ie. very minor and barely necessitating a public warning), however, we couldn't go back to the campsite/beach since it was obviously a tier 1 evacuation zone.  Just when we thought we were going to be spending the night in the car, one of my coworkers rescued us.  Turned out, she lived only 2 miles away from the parking lot we were sitting in.  So we went there to wait out the tsunami.   The forecasters finally called off the warning sometime in the middle of the night, but not before we all decided to go to bed.  She had a beautiful home, and we woke up to this awesome view from her lanai:

Somehow I feel like she gets paid a lot more than I do when I campare her view to my apartment...haha

The tsunami ended up being only a few inches high: waaaaaay off the demographics.  It was a complete media storm here in Hawai'i, and they realized once again that their sirens don't work (4 of the 5 biggest islands had malfunctions.  On some islands the coast guard was warning low lying areas via a helicopter with a speaker since huge areas did not receive any warnings).  The next day we went right back to sightseeing without a problem.

Mahalo for visiting!