@postaday71; #postaday2011
Yes, lucky we live Hawaii. But the magnitude of the earthquake in Japan, the span of its resulting tsunami, the scope of the damage that continues to mount, are yet to be quantified.
I am waiting at home for Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle to sound the all clear so I can drive to work. I hope he does soon. We have a department meeting at 9 a.m. and those are my favorite! Keehi Lagoon, near Honolulu International Airport, got beaten up. It sounds like Kahului Harbor on Maui took the brunt of the tsunami waves, but that’s still to be determined.
Our home is on a street that is several blocks above the inundation zone. We don’t kid ourselves. If a tsunami wanted to wash over us it would. There is no line in the sand we dare it to cross.
Last night when the quake first hit in Japan, some of us who follow @Monchalee on Twitter saw this:
It wasn’t for another two hours that we heard from her again:
Schools did emergency evacuations. 8.9 mag. Aftershocks still occurring.
#fb
She used to work at MetroMix when it was at The Honolulu Advertiser. I had met her a few times and it was always a joy to talk to her. She’s teaching English as a Learned Language in Japan. Remember English as a Second Language? Well, ELL is politically correct.
Thanks to Twitter, I follow some people in Japan, such as @Yoshikocat, who often sends a daily greeting to many of us in Hawaii. I was happy to see some updates from her today as well.
Last night when the 8.9 earthquake hit, I thought about what I needed to do. John was at work at the newspaper, and possibly would stay longer as he often does when news breaks. I put the girls to bed and tweeted:
Expect we’ll be above inundation zone but I feel like the mom on the Titanic who just kissed her Littles goodnight.
#HITsunami #FB
And then I saw my friends @scrivener and @logieo guffaw a little bit when my horriblescope tweet showed up:
Yes, I’m often caught up or washed over by waves of one sort or another.
I got a text message from a September1999Mommie who lives in Rhode Island at 3:16 this morning. I had been sleeping soundly. I didn’t respond, but I got up, got dressed and hung out in front of the house, listening to the Coast Guard helicopter over Koko Marina and along the south-east shoreline. I went back to bed after feeding the cats. No, I didn’t work out.
I am lucky. I didn’t have to wake the girls and get their groggy butts to an emergency shelter. I now have time to put in order those things that I should have ready to grab the next time something catastrophic occurs. Perhaps many of us in Hawaii will consider putting together a packet of important docs, review lists of what they might need to grab at a moment’s notice, even what to wear when leaving a home that might not be there when the all clear is sounded. This was our second tsunami in about a year.
It looks like we are now under an advisory. I think I’ll try to get myself to work now.
Mahalo to my many friends beyond Hawaii on Twitter and Facebook for inquiring about me and @AlohaJohn: I much prefer the wave of social media love to that of disaster! Some very cool tweets for this Follow Friday: @laylaBohm, @RunKerrieRun, @blueallez, @axellrocks, @shitcyclistsays, @dauphin87, @CThongklin, @seashoremarge, @kelownagirl.
Time to hit the road. Yo, @HMSAIslandScene! I’m on my way!
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