Saturday, February 27, 2010

Just another day in Paradise.

Ahhh, another day in tropical paradise, wakened to the sweet tones of...tsunami warning alarms!?

Yes, that is part of what it means to live on a little rock in the middle of the deep blue sea. Although why they had to set them off at 6AM in the morning is beyond me...

If you haven't heard, sometime yesterday there was a magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the coast of central Chile, that spawned tsunamis heading out across the Pacific. If you look at a globe, you'll see that there is pretty much nothing between the central coast of Chile and the island of Hawai`i, which is why they began an evacuation of coastal sites everywhere on this and the other seven islands.

I was dreaming when the alarms went off, so it took me a few minutes to figure what on earth was going on. The alarms also woke up my housemate Josh, so we calmly got on the Internet and after a few minutes of relevant Google time managed to work out that we were not in imminent danger of being swept away. The ETA of the wave wasn't until after 11 AM Hawai`i time, and after consulting the Hawai`i county civil defense tsunami evacuation maps, we determined that we were outside the evacuation area. Josh has been through these a few times before, so he wasn't too worried. As of this writing, (about 2PM), the tsunami warning on the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center website has been canceled, so I'm guessing the wave wasn't too big (Josh mentioned one source said it was about 3 feet high).

So as you can see, life is never dull on an active volcano in the middle of an ocean that's surrounded by the Ring of Fire! And now I must get back to my homework...I doubt the teacher will accept "There was a tsunami!" as an excuse for turning it in late (now, if it had happened on Monday, maybe....).

4 comments:

  1. Methinks they set off the alarms so that 24-hour news would have something to actually report...

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  2. Heh heh. That, or perhaps an element of "if we have to be awake at 6AM on a Saturday morning, so does everyone else in Hilo!".

    Seriously, I wonder how many people slept right through it, considering a full half the people in my house did.

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  3. Glad you're okay Daniel! I was watching it live on the internet and was bummed not to see a huge tsunami - haha. But glad Hawaii is okay! We have friends that are cruising there now, so was worried about them AND you! I knew you'd put something on your blog! Too bad you couldn't have gotten a "hurricane day" out of it....since you're not in Nebraska and can't claim "snow days" anymore! Oh wait a minute, you were home-schooled, probably didn't have those! ;) Thanks for the updates and again, glad you're okay! Love, Jolene & Neil and girls

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  4. They actually did close down the whole UH system Saturday for a "tsunami" day. Now if only it had been a weekday...

    Nope, no snow days for us. Though that may have had something to do with the fact that we never lived anywhere that had snow. Good to hear from you guys!

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