'Hey! I had a funny thought- a year ago today we were on tsunami watch!!'
I chuckled under my breath and thought I would blog for just a sec. before we headed out to church.
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Last night a year ago I was busy making Chicken Kabobs for the BBQ we were going to have the next day (Feb. 27) with Matt's cousins Tim and Conny and my brother and his wife- both were visiting from the mainland. For some reason I decided to use a whole bag of Coscto chicken for the kabobs- I knew it would be an overkill and we would have a ton of leftovers but figured my boys would eventually eat them up. I finished up the Kabobs pretty late and headed to bed.
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Our phone rang at 4 am- It sits on my side of the bed so I grabbed it with a groggy 'Hello'? The chipper voice of my dad came across the line, 'Hi Hun! Just checking in to see if you had seen the news. Hawaii has a Tsunami Watch and I wanted to make sure that you knew.'- If you read my previous post you will already know what I am about to share. Because we live so far out in the country, we do not hear the Tsunami Sirens- This would not be a problem except that we live right on the ocean. We depend on friends and family (especially if it is in the middle of the night) to call and let us know if there is there is any type of 'warnings' we should know about.
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I copied and pasted from KHON News parts of their feature, 'One Year Later: Lessons learned from Hawaii's last Tsunami Scare:'
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"We had a long lead time, the tsunami was going to arrive around mid-day, Civil Defense could make a reasonable decision to sound sirens early in the morning, people had several hours to get ready," said Charles McCreery, Director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
Geophysicists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center
But at that time, gauges along the coast of Chile
"Thats a little bit slow for us and its frustrating to have wait an hour to see if something happened there," McCreery explained. "So now those gauges have all been upgraded and they transmit every five minutes so that’s much, much, much better."
Residents living in tsunami evacuation zones are told to head for higher ground.
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That was us! We were headed for higher ground- Conny and Tim were not staying with us, there were staying at a local hotel. My brother and sis in law were staying in a guest house here at the ranch. Conny and Tim's hotel evacuated them and they were not able to make it over for BBQ- My bro, his wife, Eli, Ryan, Matt, I, Roxy and Hurley (our rabbits), our dog Oklie, the BBQ (cause we were not going to miss a fine opportunity of bbq), some personal items, and those CHICKEN KABOBS headed to the top of our driveway (the blessing of our driveway is that it climbs to about 1800 feet in a matter of 1.5 miles). The tsunami came in a lot smaller that what they were thinking- THANK YOU JESUS- (I think it was a 3 inch rise)- and we had a great day BBQ'in with not only my bro and his wife but some other friends showed up with their friends and all those kabobs I had made the night before was the perfect amount to feed everyone! (I do not want to take away from the fact that Tsunami's can be very dangerous. For us, with this particular Tsunami Scare, we knew that we were not in any immediate danger and wanted to keep it serious enough that we did what the State was asking us to- evacuate, have plenty of food, water, etc...- but not so serious that we freaked our boys or our visitors out)
Below are some pictures of the day.
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| BBQ'in at the top of our drive way- and if you notice the view we had of the ocean... |
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| This was our set up- with the chairs facing the ocean |
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| The small wave hit Hilo, HI first and made it's way down to our island- We knew from listening to the radio that the wave was not going to be big- Matt, my bro, and Eli went down to the beach to check it out- this picture was taken exactly when the wave was hitting. |
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| my bro and beautiful sis in law |
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| Tim and Conny finally made it over for dinner a couple day's later. |
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