Feb 26th:Tsuami warning: 7.0 EQ/Japan in am: 8.8 Chile in pm.

We are way over due for a Tsunami. So on Feb 26th, I opened my email to have a tsunami bulletin that there had been a 7.0 Earthquake in the Pacific ocean off Japan. No tsunami generated whew! At 3pm when a ticker tape across the bottom of the TV said 8.8 Earthquake in Chile I was wondering Uh OH" is there was a tsunami headed our way. We would have 16+ hours to prepare. Historically we had a fairly big tsunami from Chile in 1960. I was at work so we received word the night before that the sirens would be activated at 6am the next morning. This was very helpful in planning our response to the potential disaster. Sure enough at 8am the calls started coming in. People who needed assistance evacuating. People who could not get to the clinic's as they are all in the inundation zone and had closed. The road would close at 10am for a 11:19am tsunami arrival.
We brought in another rig to the west side and suspended responding to calls in the inundation zone at 11am. Fortunately no one called after 11am. People patiently waited in the hot sun in their cars or watched the events unfold on TV with live feed of Hilo harbor. You could see the water suck out and then come back in. They said Kahului harbor was more dramatic as it has a narrow opening, but there were no photo's of that. At 2pm the all clear was given. We had dogged the bullet. A few meters higher and it would have been a different story.

http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/chile/chileem.jpg Great energy model of Tsunami path across the Pacific from the Chilean EQ.


Info about history of Tsunami's - interesting charts:
http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/about/tsustats.pdf

Remember: If you are close to any coast and you feel a Earthquake - Don't delay -RUN for high ground. A Local tsunami can arrive in minutes to 1 hour. In Chili, family's living on the coast felt the shaking but remained at home waiting for a Tsunami warning. A hour later a huge wall of water swept in sweeping their homes away. Many lost their lives and many managed to hold onto tree limbs and debris to tell their tale.
The Tsunami may also not be preceded by water being sucked out. 50% of the time it might just be a tidal bore.
The 1st wave is also not the biggest. The duration between waves can be over a hour or just minutes. In the past, many people evacuated Hilo, but returned a few hours later to their homes before the largest wave had struck and were killed.

Interesting reading about the 1964 EQ and Tsunami in Alaska.: http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/about/64quake.htm

The earth went up 30 feet in Kodiak. In Seward 1000m of oceanfront slid into Resurrection bay. The Tsunami in Valdez inlet was 67m high X3= 201 feet high