Thursday, April 8, 2010

Tsunami!...?

So what do you do when a devastating tsunami is on its way? You eat up all you expensive food of course!So at 5 AM (we were the last to leave our section of the street) we cooked up our shrimp (there was no way the ocean was going to reclaim it) and finished off the milk. And we brought the Martinelli's in our food rations.

So here's how the events played out:
11:30 PM - Ryan comes home from work and informs me that we are on tsunami watch due to an earthquake in Chile.
2:19 AM - call from Ryan's sister in Georgia informing us that we are on tsunami watch. We roll back over and go to sleep.
2:35 AM - call from Georgia, this time Ryan's mom informs us we are on tsunami watch. We thank her, roll back over and try to sleep.
3:45 AM - the apartment manager wakes us to tell us the tsunami watch has been upgraded to a warning and we are being evacuated. Everyone is to be gone by 6 AM. I roll back over to go to sleep, Ryan gets up and begins preparing. After five minutes I give up, get out of bed and help him.
4:30 AM - our neighbors, Hannah and Jarett, leave for the hill.
5:00 AM - After packing everything we could fit in two backpacks and moving everything else up as high as we could get it, we start eating our "good food".
5:25 AM - The first counselor and his son come over to make sure we were aware of the impending danger. I don't think they were quite sure what to think about our little cook-out.
6:00 AM - Ryan and I realize we are the only people left on the street. There are no sounds, cars have long since stopped driving by, it's quite eerie. Right on cue, just as I am expressing to Ryan my feeling that we are the last ones here, all of the street lights go out. It is still dark here at 6 in the morning. We took off on the moped right as the warning sirens went off and, to add insult to injury, the rain started.
We made camp in Hannah and Jarett's car. Eventually the rain did stop and I was able to get an hour and a half of sleep.

Right after my nap.
The hill behind the temple was the designated evacuation area for Laie.
I thought this plaque was accurate. Laie is known as "the Gathering Place" but before that it had the name "City of Refuge".
Our view from the hill.
This was the rock we used to gauge the water level.



The back of the temple.

Shiloh gave me a play-by-play while she watched the live feed of Hilo Bay.
Then the news came: The water had risen several...... centimeters? Centimeters! It was projected as the most devastating tsunami Hawaii had seen since the 1960's. The only thing devastated was a good night's rest and my apartment.

But we learned some valuable lessons:
1. We really need to work on our food supply. We grabbed what we had in the cupboards so if the disaster should have happened we would have had to live off of Martinelli's, a can of vanilla frosting, some crushed pineapple, and some Japanese butter mochi. Hmm.
2. Telling your neighbors that you're going back to your apartment to grab some movies and your portable dvd player and some books when there's less than one hour left to zero time makes you crazy.
3. Actually doing it makes you crazier.
4. The show must go on! That night we had our final performance of "The Music Man".

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Well we're glad that nothing happened and that y'all were ok.

Jacob and Cami said...

-46y7uik (love, Lily)

Your food storage sounds about like ours, minus the Japanese butter and Vanilla frosting!

Cali and Travis said...

I learned something from the tsunami too, When you tell your in-laws, "Man I hope they get video of it! I've never seen a tsunami!" You've officially lost your marbles.

Darryl and Cindy Cunningham said...

What? No beer tents?

Darryl and Cindy Cunningham said...

And yes.... I'd work on that food storage thing if I were you.