The March 2011 Tsunami In Hawaii

Tsunami Wave Height Model Shows Pacific-Wide Impact

Yesterday was a long day. Then it got longer. Then it became today.

I was up at 5:00 a.m. to prep for a 7:00 a.m. GoToMeeting meeting that ended up being cancelled, but that was okay, because I’d been fighting with another client’s hosting service for two days trying to get them to fix a server problem that was preventing my WordPress install from working properly. (Long story… don’t ask.) By the late morning, I’d succeeded in getting it to work, so my client was happy, and I felt victorious.

I spent the rest of the day tying up a couple of other projects, went to my 4:00 p.m. meeting, finished up my last must-do and was thinking I deserved to call it a day, make dinner and just coast for the rest of the evening in front of the TV with my wife. I was proud of the day’s accomplishments… a feeling I don’t always get to indulge in.

Well, the dinner part of the plan worked out pretty well (those cooking classes my wife gave me for our 10th anniversary continues to pay off) and I was just settling into the coasting idea when my wife looked up from her iPad and uttered the words,  ”#hitsunami hashtag.” My heart sank. I knew only too well what that meant. The last time I saw that hashtag, the ordeal started in the wee hours of the morning and didn’t end until late in the evening.

We flipped the channel to CNN and found out about the 8.9 earthquake in Japan (later upgraded to 9.1), something I’d managed to miss between meetings and trying to clear my to-do’s. I grabbed my iPhone, checked my Twitter mentions and found my friends @DaniaEdibleHI and @sandyryanmaui trying to alert me to the fact that something was happening with that hashtag.

I switched to my iPad, started digging and got the whole picture—8.9 earthquake in Japan, tsunami headed this way, ETA 3:00-ish. It was around 9:00 p.m. I sighed and resigned myself to being up all night, a fact driven home on Twitter by another friend, @naugusta. Even if I decided to ignore the whole thing, hope for the best and just sleep through it, I knew the tsunami sirens going off every hour would keep me awake.

I made a fresh pot of coffee and dove in. There was a lot going on. The videos of the tsunamis in Japan were like something out of a big budget Hollywood disaster movie. We consumed and shared every shred of information and media we could get our hands on in an effort to glean how bad it was going to be when it got to us.

When the hour finally arrived, I remembered the feeling from a year ago. Everyone had done everything they could and there was nothing left but the waiting. The world was eerily quiet. Hawaii News Now was being streamed at our information hub, hitsunami.info, and they were moving from livecam to livecam, looking for signs of arrival. I referred back to what I’d heard about arrival times through each of the islands. The waves were late.

The cameras in Kauai didn’t yield anything, and we only got spotty reports about what what was happening over there. Finally, one of the cams showed ripples in Waikiki and the ocean receding and rushing back. Same thing in Diamond Head. It was on. We watched the tweets from the ground as the waves made their way through Kahului and Hilo.

Keep in mind, what you really want at times like this is for it to be a non-event. When it was becoming apparent that this was going to be one of those, we all breathed a sigh of relief. From what we were seeing, there was going to be some damage for sure, but we were getting the sense we’d dodged a bullet, for the most part. Even at this hour, our ocean is still oscillating back and forth, but we know we’ve averted catastrophe, especially when you consider what’s happened to Japan.

What struck me during the night was how smoothly and efficiently everyone was sharing information and being helpful to each other. It was as if we’d all been through it before and knew the drill. Which in fact, we had. The tsunami generated by the magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile last February had taught us well. Information flowed through our hashtag with ease and everyone was calm, collected and alert, despite being exhausted.

It illustrated the power of online social engagement and its ability to bridge distances and galvanize a community of friends and strangers during a crisis. It was just like last year, only better. There are more of us this time around, and we all know our jobs. After the last event, my friend @roxannedarling wrote about how social media helped keep people informed, focused and calm. This time around, that proved even more evident. Once again, our tsunami was a social one.

Check out the Maui Time News Feed for on-the-ground media updates from our island, and keep an eye on the #hitsunami hashtag for the very latest. And once again, I’d like to mention how impressed I am with the preparedness of our government officials, emergency services and Civil Defense on the islands. You guys rock.

And spare a thought or prayer for the people of Japan. They could use it. In spades.

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