A helicopter with search & rescue team assessing any shoreline damageI was at the tail end of my shift at the restaurant on Thursday night when we first heard the news. I came up to the bar to see what everyone was watching. A handful of employees were watching the local news featuring footage from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The amount of damage that we saw unfold was shocking. The wall of water that hit Japan was like a giant hand smearing the coastal town into smithereens.
Under the footage being shown was a red banner alerting Hawaii. At first it was a "Tsunami Watch" which was shortly upgraded to a "Tsunami Warning." We were told to expect the tsunami at 3 in the morning.
I let my last two tables know about the tsunami warning. I told them that their hotel would give them further instructions and evacuation details if necessary. They finished their food (not as quickly as I would have given the situation) and cashed out.
Since I live a block away from the ocean, I began making my own evacuation plans. My coworker who lives up at the highest point in town offered to let me stay with him and his roommates. I hurried home and threw essentials into my backpack. I threw together a change of clothes, my asthma medicine, soap and shampoo, and a book. As I was packing, I heard sirens from police cars as they raced around town to help evacuate everyone. And then there was a police officer on a bullhorn telling all residents to leave their homes as soon as possible and head to the high school on the top of Lahainaluna hill.
After my goods were packed, I headed out of the house and walked across the street and started walking up the very steep Lahainaluna hill to my coworker's home.
As I walked, I was passed by a long slow-moving snake of cars as Lahaina locals were fleeing to higher ground. There were other people on foot hauling suitcases.
On my way up the hill, I got a phone call from my friend who captains the Spirit of Lahaina who invited me aboard. He was taking the boat out of the harbor for safety. "Isn't the water the last place I want to be in a tsunami?" I asked him. He told me that being on the open water is a lot safer than being on land. "I've seen Poseidon. That's enough of a deterrent for me to going out on the boat," I said. "Besides, I'm about a mile up Lahainaluna, and I'm not prepared to stop now and walk back down." I wished him good luck and told him to call me in the morning.
I'm glad I ended up not going on the boat with my friend. The harbor was closed all Friday until Saturday morning. My friend was stuck on the boat until Saturday afternoon.
I was about halfway up to my friend's house before another coworker heading up the hill in her truck spotted me and had me leap in with her neighbor and their cats (they collectively had three).
When we reached my coworker's house, we unloaded newly purchased bottled water and canned food. We all cracked a few beers and began watching news footage. The expected time of impact was 3:27 in the morning for Maui. At about 11 pm, we heard the first warning sirens. We would hear the alarms every hour on the hour until about 3 in the morning. They sounded tinny and far away at my coworker's house, but I remember hearing them much closer at the beginning of the month when they do a test round to make sure they are working. They are eardrum shattering.
At about midnight we took a break from watching news footage and commentary, and I played Yahtzee for the first time. I lost by 3 points.
We continued to watch the news where there was live footage from Kauai. We could not believe how quickly the water receded from the shore revealing the craggy reef. The surge that ended up hitting the beach was minimal and uneventful, but I saw footage the next day of Oahu that was much more frightening (a English tourist was standing in the deluge watching the ocean come crashing over the embankments and flood into the street. From the footage he shot, it looks like he got stranded and lost his flip flops. If I was him, I would have stopped filming a long time ago and focused on running away).
Luckily for us in Maui, there seemed to be very little change. At about four in the morning it looked like the threat was over. The sirens hadn't sounded for about 2 hours. All of us began packing up our belongings to head back down the hill.
I got home a little before 5 and spent about half an hour emailing family, texting friends and updating Facebook to let everyone know that I hadn't drowned. I finally fell asleep. I woke up two hours later to a man shouting in the streets. I bolted awake, totally convinced that the tsunami wave had finally hit Lahaina--hours later than the original estimate, but real and destructive nonetheless.
But the yelling ceased and I could hear the birds singing outside the window like they always do. I rolled over onto my side and peeked out the window. The backyard was intact and dry. I rolled over again to move my face away from the sunshine and back into shadow. I was going to fall back asleep until I got a text from Nicole, my roommate who just left Maui and was spending some vacation time on Oahu before returning to her home in Arizona. Nicole wanted to know if I was OK. She had heard that Lahaina got hit hard by the tsunami.
I once again looked out at my window. The backyard was definitely still dry. I decided that if I wanted to see any tsunami damage, I was going to have to get up and walk to Front Street. I threw on a sweater over my pajamas, grabbed my camera and walked to the water.
The ocean along the shore was murky and dark with a few pieces of flotsam and jetsam bobbing along the surface. I walked towards the harbor. It was almost empty. Most captains took their boats out of the harbor late last night and anchored them in the open water. There were about two boats still anchored at their slips in the harbor. One of them had been pushed into the dock and took out a good chunk of it.
I asked around at the harbor, and it was reported that a 9 foot wave broke right at the harbor wall.
Later I heard that the other side of town got hit harder. People were clearing fish, octopi and two sea turtles out of the street.
I stayed at the harbor for another fifteen minutes or so watching the water churn disconcertingly. The water was swirling like a slow moving whirlpool before being sucked back out into the open ocean.
The (mostly) abandoned Lahaina harbor
I didn't have to work yesterday, but I was told that our beachfront property was undamaged, but everyone marveled at the shore. The water had been sucked out all the way to the anchored boats. They said they had never seen the reef so exposed before. The restaurant was closed until 1:30 pm since they had to wait for the gas to be turned back on.
I spent most of yesterday in a delirium. I ended up taking a 2 hour nap earlier on in the day, but after only 4 hours of sleep, I felt like a zombie. I met up with friends and coworkers for dinner at my new favorite restaurant (Amigo's for authentic Mexican food) where we traded tsunami stories. It sounds like we were all up hill partying and watching the news.
Today at work, the coworker that I stayed with on Thursday night said he was standing behind a tourist at Starbucks today who bitterly complained how his vacation had been ruined by the tsunami threat. The tourist was ragging the Starbucks employee about how he had been evacuated by his hotel and had to spend the night in his rental car at the top of a hill. He was livid that this had all been for nothing, and that there had been no wave at all. The Starbucks employee felt so badgered by this tourist she ended up giving him a complimentary pastry and apologized to the tourist that he had been so inconvenienced.
My coworker got so fed up by this man that he ended up confronting him. "What cause do you have to complain? You were safely evacuated with your belongings, and in the end, a catastrophe that could have caused a great deal of damage to your family, friends and residents here in Maui never happened. Would you have been happier if your hotel had been decimated by a tsunami wave or your family died in this disaster? Look at what happened to Japan. That could have happened to us Thursday night, and it didn't. Sure, you were slightly inconvenienced, but no one in Hawaii was hurt. That's a good thing."
The tourist blinked at him before saying, "I hadn't thought about it that way."
And it's important that this is what we focus on. There was a lot of grumbling the next day about the measures that Hawaii took to evacuate its residents and visitors when the threat was never met. We should be incredibly grateful that there was minimal property damage, that we are all safe and that we had jobs to go back to the next day. Our neighbors in Japan were not so lucky.
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