Well, it's been a while since I last used the tsunami label on a post! Looking back I used it six times between 2010 and 2014, then…not until now. The first three years I lived in Hawaii each had a tsunami alert (two important enough to use the sirens), which primed to me think of them as roughly annual events. But then I haven't experienced one since 2014 (I don't think there were any while I was away in Australia), so when we started hearing tsunami watches (and then warnings) on the radio on Tuesday the 29th while working up at the Natural Area Reserve it was something of a blast from the past.
Thankfully, much like the others I've experienced living here, this one proved relatively uneventful. I've seen a reported wave height in Hilo of 4.9 feet, which was enough to flood some parking lots (and probably the first floors of some buildings) along the coast, but not enough to cause major damage. The wave was initially estimated to arrive just after 7 PM; it was still just light enough (right after sunset) that I put my drone in the air for about twenty minutes to see if I could see anything in the bay. The actual arrival happened around 8:30 PM, though, when it was far too dark to be see anything. (I also saw another drone in the air while I was up there, so I wasn't the only one with that idea.)
This was the largest tsunami alert since 2011, large enough that the sirens were activated – and since Friday was the first of the month, they also got activated for the usual first-of-the-month test, so I got to hear them twice in four days. Since I'm (decently far) out of the evacuation zone where I live it ended up being a relatively normal evening for me, but it's a good reminder that life's never boring when you live on a volcano in the middle of the Pacific! A hui hou!
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