Tsunami Warning

8pm. The alarms just went off.  High pitched; after dark here. This is our first tsunami warning since we arrived here in Hawai'i. I checked quickly online and there was a 7.7 magnitude quake off the coast of British Columbia and buoys indicated a tsunami for Hawai'i (link). 

We are on high ground so there is no immediate threat for us.

Then our internet connection quickly slowed to a standstill and we couldn't connect to other news pages (it took me several tries to save this blog post; I kept getting connection problems and ended up saving most of it as a local text file to finish posting later.)  I turned on a radio and picked up some communication on the ham radio 2 meter band (146.885 MHz) stating a 7.7 quake centered on Queen Charlotte Island (8:05pm), with a wave expected at 10:28 pm.  Some people are reporting in that the alarm has not gone off in parts of the island.  An emergency network is supposed to take over the frequency in 15-20 minutes. 

8:11 pm the alarm went off again.

At 8:30 people checked in for the emergency tsunami ham radio network.  There was some communication about evacuating an area in Kailua; telling people to go to a district park or to a church that are both designated tsunami refuges.  The alarm went off a few more times.  

I like having a ham radio as a backup.  I used it when the power went out to see what people in the area were talking about regarding the power outage.  I have it charged from our off-the-grid solar panel/car battery system so we could be completely without power for weeks and it would still work fine. 

Update:  The wave arrived on time but was smaller than expected.  This report puts it at a 2 1/2 foot swell.