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shannon_aWe have survived another natural disaster that didn't happen. This one was the July 29th 2025 tsunami that was generated by the shocking 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Russia. We first heard about it in the early afternoon and then it was wait-and-see until after 7pm, because there are apparently few or no buoys between Russia and Hawaii to tell scientists what the tsunami might look like. (I believe the first read that scientists could really get a on the tsunami's size was when it hit Midway, which is on the far, far side of the Hawaiian archipelago.read )
It was still just a Tsunami Watch when I clocked off work (meaning: hey, watch out there could be a tsunami), and my dad queried if I still wanted to swim, because I'd expressed interest in Sunday. I demurred, because I could see a report of a much taller than expected wave coming in, and there being a mass-panic to get out of Poipu. And about then the Tsunami Watch turned into a Tsunami Warning. Our emergency sirens, which usually test on the first workday of the month, went off for real for maybe the second time since we moved if (I think they also went off once for the hurricane that didn't happen), though the real message came through on our phones about 2 seconds later. There was definitely a tsunami coming our way, with the estimate being that the waves would be 3-9 feet tall.
Northern quakes can genuinely cause big problems in Hawaii. There were Aleutian earthquakes in 1946 and 1957 that did. The 1946 quake, which was 8.6, was said to cause waves up to 45 feet in Hawaii and resulted in over 150 deaths. The 1957 quake, which was an 8.3, apparently caused more damage by fiscal count but only resulted in a couple of deaths.
Mind you, I was also aware of a tsunami warning either just after my folks moved here or just before we did (I can't place when it was exactly any more, I just know I was paying more attention to the islands for one reason or the other) and after hours of speculation and concern, a teeny wave hit the islands. So not every big northern quake translates to big waves here in Hawaii.
Kimberly and I went out to the golf course after I finished work and played a game of Harmonies there and finished reading "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula Le Guin (adore her novels, but the short stories are mostly just OK to good so far). Around 4.10 we got another siren and warning: the first waves were now three hours away.
Then I walked the perimeter of the course with my dad. Honestly, despite the two emergency sirens, I wasn't thinking about the tsunami that much by this point because we're way up on a ridge line (our house is at about 750 ft altitude) and a mile and a half back from the coast. We're unlikely to be affected by even a really big tsunami except indirectly in problems with goods and services.
When my dad and I walk the golf course, part of the walk is along some tree-covered paths that run right alongside one of the streets our corner house is on. (You can actually see our house as you turn a corner on the path; we're literally across the street from that corner of the golf course.) As we did that last night, we saw bumper-to-bumper cars on the street right alongside our back yard. Yikes! They were clearly backed up the couple of blocks to the stoplight onto the highway. That was just a few minutes after the two-hours-left emergency siren went off.
I was a little shocked. What was up with this mass exodus from high ground? We figured people should be hunkering down, but that's absolutely not what was going on. FB reports said this thing was going on all over the island. The highways were all clogged as people were in what some news reports described as a "panic", trying to get from one arbitrary place to another. I'm sure many were trying to get to family, to ensure they'd be OK, but it became increasingly obvious over the course of the evening that there were a lot of gawkers too, who were trying to get some place to see what they thought would be big waves.
The golf course was actually mostly quiet. I walk there with my dad maybe three or four days a week on average, and so there's a community of walkers, runners, and dog walkers (mostly dog walkers) who we casually know. But they mostly weren't about. Then we got to the highest parking lot in the golf course, which is by the clubhouse and overlooks the southwest corner of the island from probably 800 or 850 feet (it's slightly above our house), we found it jammed with 20 or 30 people, mostly families (which suggests they were mostly tourists, since island tourists move about in clumps of 4-6 family members most of the time).
I momentarily thought that the golf course's upper parking lot might have been designated as an evacuation area, as an evacuation order had gone out for the island's tsunami inundation zones by this point. But, no, as I looked around, these people were mainly gathered to look down at the coastline. I decided that they were rubber neckers, hoping to see the tsunami.
As my dad and I walked further, we started hearing messages on the golf course intercom. Well, we didn't really hear them, because their intercom system is awful, but from the words we made out, we were pretty sure that they were telling the people they had to get outside of the golf course, because they were going to be locking the gates, which they do every night around 6.30. (Because we couldn't really make out the message, my dad and I also cut our walk short, in case they were actually saying they were closing the gates earlier than usual so that the golf-course workers could get home.)
Afterward, Kimberly and I were able to get home OK. The back-up by then had receded to just beyond where we need to turn to get home. We later heard the community center and the local restaurant right beyond that turn were totally jammed, both presumably by evacuees.
We had some dinner when we got home and watched some TV. (We've recently started season one of Succession.) Alarms went off at an hour before the first predicted tsunami strike and 30 minutes out while we ate. There somewhat surprisingly wasn't an alarm for when the waves might start hitting. I guess they figured people were out or not by then.
We turned on some news after Succession, by which time it was after 7.10pm, which was the first predicted time for the waves. We were flabbergasted by the shot of a beach on Oahu where tourists were sitting out, waiting to see the waves. HOW STUPID ARE YOU? (Pretty stupid.) Throughout the coverage, we saw people wandering beaches, but no waves.
The tsunami was a nothing burger. It finally arrived maybe an hour later than expected, which meant it was dark by that time, totally disappointing the huge numbers of rubber neckers. The first waves we heard of were 8 or 12 inches. Apparently some hit as high as 4 or 6 feet sometime overnight, and there was some flooding.
Oh, did I mention Twitter's Grok AI was lying about the tsunami warnings? Yep. It's crazy this isn't front-page news everywhere, but it's only on some lesser known (but trustworthy) papers. Grok incorrectly asserted that the warnings had been canceled. People don't yet understand that AIs don't know anything and don't understand anything. They just regurgitate words that algorithmically sound good together. And because people don't understand that AIs aren't a source of truth (quite the opposite), this type of shit will get people killed. (And might have, if the tsunami waves didn't turn out to be pretty minor.)
Predictably, there are people this morning claiming the tsunami center cried wolf. And to be fair, we get a ridiculous number of weather alerts in Hawaii. Flash flood and areal flood alerts come in every month or two. (Funny story, both K. and I thought that "areal" flood was flooding from the air, before we realized it was about AREA floods.) I've been out and about during one of them, and I got an alert every five minutes, when I passed into a new census area that was under alert. We were woken twice in the middle of the night our first year here due to tornado alerts(!). (Apparently there's a strip of land about five miles west of us that's a tornado alley.) And of course we got the hurricane alerts maybe our second year here, when the hurricane missed the island. So, there's something to be said that the alert systems are creating complacency by alerting constantly. (With that said, at least a few of the rainfalls were quite serious.) But much as with the hurricane, they really couldn't predict with this tsunami. There was an abundance of caution, which seems fair for an unusual, extreme weather event.
Today, news on the tsunami fell right off the cliff. Most of the reporting stopped last night when the warning dropped to an advisory. The advisory then ending this morning, but it was a silent event in an empty room.
Is there damage? I haven't heard of any damage, so I assume not. One of the scant reports I saw said a boat ramp on Maui got covered in water.
I guess no tourists were swept away because it got dark and/or they got bored before the tsunami waves came to sweep them away. Lucky them.
As I finished writing this, we got a high surf weather advisory. At least it doesn't make my phone buzz and beep like it's about to take off.
It was still just a Tsunami Watch when I clocked off work (meaning: hey, watch out there could be a tsunami), and my dad queried if I still wanted to swim, because I'd expressed interest in Sunday. I demurred, because I could see a report of a much taller than expected wave coming in, and there being a mass-panic to get out of Poipu. And about then the Tsunami Watch turned into a Tsunami Warning. Our emergency sirens, which usually test on the first workday of the month, went off for real for maybe the second time since we moved if (I think they also went off once for the hurricane that didn't happen), though the real message came through on our phones about 2 seconds later. There was definitely a tsunami coming our way, with the estimate being that the waves would be 3-9 feet tall.
Northern quakes can genuinely cause big problems in Hawaii. There were Aleutian earthquakes in 1946 and 1957 that did. The 1946 quake, which was 8.6, was said to cause waves up to 45 feet in Hawaii and resulted in over 150 deaths. The 1957 quake, which was an 8.3, apparently caused more damage by fiscal count but only resulted in a couple of deaths.
Mind you, I was also aware of a tsunami warning either just after my folks moved here or just before we did (I can't place when it was exactly any more, I just know I was paying more attention to the islands for one reason or the other) and after hours of speculation and concern, a teeny wave hit the islands. So not every big northern quake translates to big waves here in Hawaii.
Kimberly and I went out to the golf course after I finished work and played a game of Harmonies there and finished reading "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula Le Guin (adore her novels, but the short stories are mostly just OK to good so far). Around 4.10 we got another siren and warning: the first waves were now three hours away.
Then I walked the perimeter of the course with my dad. Honestly, despite the two emergency sirens, I wasn't thinking about the tsunami that much by this point because we're way up on a ridge line (our house is at about 750 ft altitude) and a mile and a half back from the coast. We're unlikely to be affected by even a really big tsunami except indirectly in problems with goods and services.
When my dad and I walk the golf course, part of the walk is along some tree-covered paths that run right alongside one of the streets our corner house is on. (You can actually see our house as you turn a corner on the path; we're literally across the street from that corner of the golf course.) As we did that last night, we saw bumper-to-bumper cars on the street right alongside our back yard. Yikes! They were clearly backed up the couple of blocks to the stoplight onto the highway. That was just a few minutes after the two-hours-left emergency siren went off.
I was a little shocked. What was up with this mass exodus from high ground? We figured people should be hunkering down, but that's absolutely not what was going on. FB reports said this thing was going on all over the island. The highways were all clogged as people were in what some news reports described as a "panic", trying to get from one arbitrary place to another. I'm sure many were trying to get to family, to ensure they'd be OK, but it became increasingly obvious over the course of the evening that there were a lot of gawkers too, who were trying to get some place to see what they thought would be big waves.
The golf course was actually mostly quiet. I walk there with my dad maybe three or four days a week on average, and so there's a community of walkers, runners, and dog walkers (mostly dog walkers) who we casually know. But they mostly weren't about. Then we got to the highest parking lot in the golf course, which is by the clubhouse and overlooks the southwest corner of the island from probably 800 or 850 feet (it's slightly above our house), we found it jammed with 20 or 30 people, mostly families (which suggests they were mostly tourists, since island tourists move about in clumps of 4-6 family members most of the time).
I momentarily thought that the golf course's upper parking lot might have been designated as an evacuation area, as an evacuation order had gone out for the island's tsunami inundation zones by this point. But, no, as I looked around, these people were mainly gathered to look down at the coastline. I decided that they were rubber neckers, hoping to see the tsunami.
As my dad and I walked further, we started hearing messages on the golf course intercom. Well, we didn't really hear them, because their intercom system is awful, but from the words we made out, we were pretty sure that they were telling the people they had to get outside of the golf course, because they were going to be locking the gates, which they do every night around 6.30. (Because we couldn't really make out the message, my dad and I also cut our walk short, in case they were actually saying they were closing the gates earlier than usual so that the golf-course workers could get home.)
Afterward, Kimberly and I were able to get home OK. The back-up by then had receded to just beyond where we need to turn to get home. We later heard the community center and the local restaurant right beyond that turn were totally jammed, both presumably by evacuees.
We had some dinner when we got home and watched some TV. (We've recently started season one of Succession.) Alarms went off at an hour before the first predicted tsunami strike and 30 minutes out while we ate. There somewhat surprisingly wasn't an alarm for when the waves might start hitting. I guess they figured people were out or not by then.
We turned on some news after Succession, by which time it was after 7.10pm, which was the first predicted time for the waves. We were flabbergasted by the shot of a beach on Oahu where tourists were sitting out, waiting to see the waves. HOW STUPID ARE YOU? (Pretty stupid.) Throughout the coverage, we saw people wandering beaches, but no waves.
The tsunami was a nothing burger. It finally arrived maybe an hour later than expected, which meant it was dark by that time, totally disappointing the huge numbers of rubber neckers. The first waves we heard of were 8 or 12 inches. Apparently some hit as high as 4 or 6 feet sometime overnight, and there was some flooding.
Oh, did I mention Twitter's Grok AI was lying about the tsunami warnings? Yep. It's crazy this isn't front-page news everywhere, but it's only on some lesser known (but trustworthy) papers. Grok incorrectly asserted that the warnings had been canceled. People don't yet understand that AIs don't know anything and don't understand anything. They just regurgitate words that algorithmically sound good together. And because people don't understand that AIs aren't a source of truth (quite the opposite), this type of shit will get people killed. (And might have, if the tsunami waves didn't turn out to be pretty minor.)
Predictably, there are people this morning claiming the tsunami center cried wolf. And to be fair, we get a ridiculous number of weather alerts in Hawaii. Flash flood and areal flood alerts come in every month or two. (Funny story, both K. and I thought that "areal" flood was flooding from the air, before we realized it was about AREA floods.) I've been out and about during one of them, and I got an alert every five minutes, when I passed into a new census area that was under alert. We were woken twice in the middle of the night our first year here due to tornado alerts(!). (Apparently there's a strip of land about five miles west of us that's a tornado alley.) And of course we got the hurricane alerts maybe our second year here, when the hurricane missed the island. So, there's something to be said that the alert systems are creating complacency by alerting constantly. (With that said, at least a few of the rainfalls were quite serious.) But much as with the hurricane, they really couldn't predict with this tsunami. There was an abundance of caution, which seems fair for an unusual, extreme weather event.
Today, news on the tsunami fell right off the cliff. Most of the reporting stopped last night when the warning dropped to an advisory. The advisory then ending this morning, but it was a silent event in an empty room.
Is there damage? I haven't heard of any damage, so I assume not. One of the scant reports I saw said a boat ramp on Maui got covered in water.
I guess no tourists were swept away because it got dark and/or they got bored before the tsunami waves came to sweep them away. Lucky them.
As I finished writing this, we got a high surf weather advisory. At least it doesn't make my phone buzz and beep like it's about to take off.