island earthquake oct 15, 2006

posted below is a recap of my first personal encounter of an earthquake hit on Oct 15, 2006 written by my roommate Mayee. epi center was 6 mi from NW of the Big Island. enjoy!

The first quake woke up Yeung, my roommate who's a graduate student from Hong Kong. She walked out sleepy and confused into the living room where I was already braced under a doorway with Nina Bear and Coco next to me. I told her it was an earthquake and said, "Go stand in a doorway frame, it's safer there". When the second quake hit, still confused she started heading towards me intending to crowd in with me and the two dogs. I had to wave her towards her bedroom door (which was closest to her anyways) and told her to, " Go stand in the freakin' doorway already!". I reached over to my second roommate's door (Lori's a grad student from the Philippines) and opened it, calling out "Lori! Wake up, it's an earthquake. Go stand in a doorway!" Lori's bed was empty and I heard a voice calling out, "I'm already under the desk!" - this provided a bit of unintentional comic relief and we were sure to remind her of it a few more times throughout the day. Then we waited out the second quake and the smaller aftershock that followed. When the electricity went out about 5 minutes after the last apparent aftershock, I could hear a collective scream of surprise and horror from the street outside. Adults and kids. Seems it was a little too much for the two Polynesian families across the street. As for Mark, his first thought upon feeling the tremors was that Nina Bear was scratching herself vigorously by the bed. Then his next thought, after the earthquakes passed, was to forgo the cold shower he usually takes in the morning and take a really hot shower because who knew how long we would have hot water? As it turns out, the water -hot and cold- stayed available all day. Which was a real blessing, because no electricity is merely an inconvenience, but no water could be really bad news.

Without power, we couldn't do much. No working on the computer, no internet, no tv. Because all the intersection lights were out, we didn't want to drive anywhere - where would you want to drive to anyways when the power was down island-wide? We didn't want to go to the beach because, even though my emergency weather radio said that no tsunamis were anticipated, who wanted to take the chance? And I couldn't do any field work because there was a flood watch for all the islands. So we stayed in the apartment and alternated reading (form Yeung, Lori, and me it was journal articles; for Mark, business magazines) and lots of napping. And making fun of all the pidgin folks calling into the radio station. One guy asked if Heco (our local power company) was going to reimburse him for all the food that was going bad in his fridge. Kids kept calling in to ask if they had to go to school the next day. Stuff like that.

When evening came and we still had no electricity, all four of us took to the streets to see if we could find restaurants that were open. There were lots of other roving bands of hungry people. There was a run on fried rice and fried noodles. We ended up at Magoo's; a bar that caters to the local UH crowd. They had a generator and had it hooked up to the essentials: juke box, neon beer signs, beer pumps. I was impressed; they managed to keep the beer cold and the music going. Some undergrads from the dorms were down there, people from the neighborhoods were there. The place was packed. When the power came on at about 10pm, people cheered and then booed because they wanted the party to keep going.

So that's what happened to us the day the earthquake hit Hawaii.