Saturday, February 27, 2010

Waiting for the Tsunami
























As most of you know, there was an 8.8 earthquake in Chile this weekend. I knew that because I get notices on my email of all quakes in the Pacific. For example, there was a 7.3 quake off Japan earlier in the week. I bet none of you heard about that..becasue every decimal point means a 10X increment in the strength of a quake...so 7.3 in Japan is not that serious for us here.

The 1964 Easter Friday quake south of Anchorage was the strongest one in recorded history in the Western Hemisphere at 9.4. That one created tsunami waves of over 30 feet in Kodiak and destroyed the marinas and downtown. So we take tsunamis seriously. For example, every Wednesday at 2 PM tsunami alarm horns are tested throughout the city. One recent Thursday they went off by mistake. That appereantly created allot of calls to the radio and police stations by scared people.

But we knew this one from Chile was coming We knew it would be tiny. And the city did not even set off the alarms. But what did we do? Only in Kodiak do we go out in a snow storm to see a tsunami wave come in.

So off we went on a 30+ mile drive to the end of the road, and then a 2 mile hike to the end of a point to watch the event. Sure it was only supposed to be 2 -3 feet above mean sea level, but we chose to stay on a cliff about 100 feet above sea level and watch it form there. After a while we decided to drive back and watch it's effect on the smaller bays.

It is now 11: 30 PM and the tsunami advisory has officially just been cancelled. We got only a 1.4 foot rise in mean sea level. But in reality, it does shows that we are connected to what happens on the other side of the world....even if it affects us only a little. And we had fun going a road trip.

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