With this weekend’s small tsunami behind us, we thought it would be worth taking a look back at some of the other tidal waves that have hit Hawai’i over the past 200 years.
According to Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis’s in-depth tsunami page, a major, destructive tidal wave hits Hawai’i once every twelve years. So when the news media kept saying on Saturday that we are overdue for a “big” tsunami, they weren’t kidding. It’s been 50 years since the destructive 9.5 magnitude Chilean earthquake that created the tsunami that devastated Hilo – statistically, we should have had at least three or four destructive tidal waves since then.
(In 1975, a 7.2 earthquake off the coast of the Big Island generated a tsunami that swamped the Keauhou Landing area of the Puna coast of Hawai’i, killing two people, but the majority of destructive tsunamis are not locally produced. Most come from South America or Alaska.)
A number of minor tsunamis have also reached the islands since 1812 (the first historically recorded tidal wave), but since 1964, those have been relatively rare as well. Why the long drought (so to speak)? Does it mean we really are overdue for a cataclysmic tidal wave? Considering how many earthquakes happen each month around the so-called “ring of fire” in the Pacific, it does seem like it is only a matter of time until a major wave hits the islands. While things went well this weekend, let's hope that state and local agencies take a hard look at Saturday's evacuations and make the necessary changes to the system to ensure even greater compliance when the real thing eventually happens.
Another resource we found is the University of Hawai’i’s Center for Oral History. Check out their “ Tsunamis in Maui County: Oral Histories” page, which is full of reminiscences of the 1946 tsunami – generated by an earthquake in the Aleutian Islands – that slammed in the north shore of Maui and affected the island from Lahaina to Hamoa Bay. The memories of the survivors of that tsunami serve as a cautionary tale; as Barbara Cannon told the interviewers in 1999:
According to Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis’s in-depth tsunami page, a major, destructive tidal wave hits Hawai’i once every twelve years. So when the news media kept saying on Saturday that we are overdue for a “big” tsunami, they weren’t kidding. It’s been 50 years since the destructive 9.5 magnitude Chilean earthquake that created the tsunami that devastated Hilo – statistically, we should have had at least three or four destructive tidal waves since then.
(In 1975, a 7.2 earthquake off the coast of the Big Island generated a tsunami that swamped the Keauhou Landing area of the Puna coast of Hawai’i, killing two people, but the majority of destructive tsunamis are not locally produced. Most come from South America or Alaska.)
A number of minor tsunamis have also reached the islands since 1812 (the first historically recorded tidal wave), but since 1964, those have been relatively rare as well. Why the long drought (so to speak)? Does it mean we really are overdue for a cataclysmic tidal wave? Considering how many earthquakes happen each month around the so-called “ring of fire” in the Pacific, it does seem like it is only a matter of time until a major wave hits the islands. While things went well this weekend, let's hope that state and local agencies take a hard look at Saturday's evacuations and make the necessary changes to the system to ensure even greater compliance when the real thing eventually happens.
Another resource we found is the University of Hawai’i’s Center for Oral History. Check out their “ Tsunamis in Maui County: Oral Histories” page, which is full of reminiscences of the 1946 tsunami – generated by an earthquake in the Aleutian Islands – that slammed in the north shore of Maui and affected the island from Lahaina to Hamoa Bay. The memories of the survivors of that tsunami serve as a cautionary tale; as Barbara Cannon told the interviewers in 1999:
“On the horizon was like a big wall of water. We got in the car and we drove . . . we were caught between our home and the nurse’s cottage, when the car began to float. I said, ‘Willie, let’s leave, let’s get out, let’s get out,’ and he tried to open the door and he couldn’t. We kept bobbing along. And he said, ‘I can’t open the door.’ But as he said that he opened the window, and it released the pressure, so he was able to open the door, so we swam from the car.”
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