In case you didn’t see his comment on the previous post, our intrepid Pacific correspondent Burl Burlingame (Radford HS Class of ’71) has checked in with this report:
Man, that bullet we dodged on Oahu parted our hair. The surges on Maui and the Big Island were pretty bad, but at least they weren’t carrying that tumbling wall of debris that flattened communities in Japan. We got feet-wet on the neighbor islands — looks like more than a 12-foot surge in Kailua-Kona. The roads there are broken up.
Lots of small-boat and wharf damage on Oahu, but that’s about it. And we’re all sleepy as hell. The critical period was 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. when you had to be ready to run for it.
Good to hear that Oahu escaped unscathed. And I’m sorry that I carelessly speculated earlier that, given the hour of the earthquake, Burl might have slept through the crisis. Of COURSE he was on deck and attending to duty; we should have expected no less of him.
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I am just reading this in June of 2017.
When the tsunami hit Hawaii I had a friend in Honolulu whose live-upon boat was grabbed out of the marina at Sand Island and washed into the harbor along with a portion of the dock it was tied to. He could get it back but with a lot of damage. Smartly (or not?) he now lives on land in Florida. I need to ask him about his hurricane insurance.
Here in Tokyo we’ve had a few jots every so often but the worst seems to be behind us … knock knock!
Hunter