An update from Dunja

When Dunja and Jose left us in PR, they headed for Maui where they are staying in a friend's beachhouse. In the aftermath of the horribly devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Dunja sent us this first-hand account of the tsunami n Hawaii:

"We are fine on Maui, but yesterday it was kind of adventure. At 10 the siren started to haul and all the people living by the beach (we're living very very close) had to move upcountry, because the tsunami was expected to hit hawaii around 3 o'clock in the night. Not a lot of sleep and watching tv all night long in a friends house, we finally returned in the morning to our house to have a look what happened.

The tsunami took everything around our beachhouse away. Washingmachine, dryer, outside-shower, hotpot, tables everything floated away or was damaged. But we had a lot of luck that the house is still here. The sea level was arising 6 feet higher then hightide and our place was one of the worst on the whole island. So today we spent the whole day with cleaning and we carried all the rubish together.But finally no people, no animals are hurt, and everybody is happy. All people here helped and I cooked a big pot of spaghetti.

Today we will sleep again in the beachhouse. But I'm not very relaxed. Right now, the water is just 10 feet away from our veranda and the wind is blowin! But all the people around us told this is fine; no pasa nada....

aloha"

Watching the videos of the tsunami in Japan give us pause. We are 330 yards (measured by a golfer friend's rangefinder) from the ocean. We live in a fault zone. There are small (2.3-3.5 magnitude) earthquakes around us every day. They are so small and usually far enough away we don't even feel them. In the last year local officials have put up signs about the tsunami danger zones along the coast. When officials came by a year or so ago passing out information literature, their advice to us was "if you see a tsunami, run very fast up the hill."



Which kind of point outs how pointless such advice is. How would we know if there was a tsunami approaching? I don't know how we would get the kind of warning time our friends in Maui got. I have not seen or heard warning sirens here. By the time we saw a tsunami it would be pretty late to "run very fast up the hill."

In October, 1918, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake rocked the ocean floor about 15 kilometers (less than 10 miles) west of Puerto Rico in the Mona Passage. The quake destroyed buildings in Mayaguez. Just moments after the quake, a 12-foot high wall of water devastated Aguadilla, killing 40 people. The greatest wave height, 20 feet, hit Punta Boriquen, the beach area just below the cliff where the golf course is today. That tsunami destroyed the Spanish lighthouse whose ruins can still be seen along the road back to Wilderness Beach.

From Ola Lola's Garden Bar

Punta Borinquen was the hardest hit area in the 1918 tsunami.



Like many things in Nature, the possibility of a tsunami is something we are aware of but don't live in fear of. We just hope those little shocks keep releasing enough pressure between the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates so there isn't a big quake and a tsunami.