Big Island Earthquake

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

An unedited report from Don & Kerrill (pronounced Carol), who live in South Kohala, about 10 feet from the epicenter of Sunday's Big Island quake.

You can book a week or two at their five bedroom five bathroom ocean view rental home here.

At about 7:00 this morning we were heading out the door for our morning walk when a loud "BANG" hit the house, as if a large truck had struck the other side.   This would normally be the point at which we would look at each other and say, "Hey, was that an earthquake?";  but this time in less time quicker than we could draw a second breath it crescendoed into a savage fury unlike anything I have ever felt on the mainland.  Then it got worse.  And then it kept going.   The framing of the house creaked and rattled like the Clappets riding their old pickup down a rough dirt road, and we could hear shattering glass, crashes and bangs from every part of the house.   We stared at each other wide-eyed, both thinking "Is this really happening?"   Kerrill hung onto the wall to keep from being knocked down.  I don't remember exactly what I did.

Virgil's peacocks were calling in the moments after the quake, but otherwise the whole neighborhood was eerily silent.  (Unlike the cacophony of car alarms and barking dogs that usually follow a temblor on the mainland.)  Clouds of rust-colored dust wafted up from what later turned out to be small landslides along the highway. We were just starting to get our thoughts organized, when a second aftershock hit that seemed to us just as strong as the original. 

It is a peculiarity of the human psyche that large problems often seem less formidible than small ones, so at this point there was nothing to do but put one foot in front of the other.   We made a quick sweep through the house to check for water leaks, gas leaks, smouldering electrical fires, or the like.  The house was a complete shambles, with broken glass and fallen shelving in every room.   (See sample photos below.)   The power was out.  The phones were out.  Lots of cracks in the drywall and stucco.   So far, nothing that couldn't wait. 

We then walked down to the lower house to check on our renters that had just arrived last night.   Being from the midwest,  this was the first earthquake that any of them had experienced.   The rental house had broken glass in almost every room, but overall it was in better shape than we expected.  Kerrill and I spent about an hour and a half picking up glass, sweeping, and doing as much as we could without electricity.  The renters pitched in where they could. 

At this point we had no way of knowing if we had just experienced a moderately large earthquake with an epicenter right under our house, or if we were on the edge of some more massivie regional cataclysm.    The truth turned out to lie somewhere in betweeen, but it took us several more hours to discover it.  For the moment even the cell phones and the local radio stations were knocked off the air.

It looked like the electricity might be out for quite some time to come, so I manually disconnected one of the garage door openers and took the Toyota down to Kawaihae in hopes of buying some ice.  The normally 5-minute trip down there was an eye-opener.   Large boulders had tumbled off the embankments onto the highway in several areas, narrowing the road to barely one lane.   A lone policewoman had just arrived and begun setting up detours with red highway fuses.  A huge crack extended across the highway just past the Honokoa bridge.  The wholesale liquor store turned out to be closed (and probably will be for at least a week or two, for obvious reasons) but they were selling bags of ice for cash off the loading dock.   I brought back 200 lbs to share between our house and the renters.

By the time I got back some of the cell phones seemed to be working again, so I left a quick message with Donna to let her know what was going on.    Kerrill called Jeff and asked him to pass along the basic info to the rest of the family.

Peter Dollman from Australia was house-sitting for Bill Paul across the street, and he reported that he was rapidly losing water pressure.   Thinking that this was not a good sign, Kerrill and I put liners in four large trash barrels and filled them with water to be used for flushing toilets and bathing if the water supply quit.  We didn't know it then, but Bill's house lost its water when their neighbor (Ken Riff's housesitter) turned off their water at the street because of a broken PVC pipe.  (Bill's and Ken's houses share the same water meter.)   Not our problem, as it later turned out.

By about 9:00 or so we felt enough in control to begin damage control on our own house.  Virtually every room was a shambles, and many still are as I write this.  We began with our bathrooms, which only had the contents of the medicine chests scattered on the floor.  We then moved into the kitchen, which had huge quantities of broken glass, shelving down form the walls, etc.   Hours of work.   In the early afternoon, our neighbors Mike & Becky and a friend of theirs came up to check in on us, and stayed to help several hours.  They were a huge help, particularly with some of the heavy pieces of furniture that we couldn't lift on our own. 

The power came back on mid-afternoon.

Aftershocks have been arriving sporadically all day.

We discovered a few odd things that must have happened during the quake:

1. A Hawaiian war club, made of some peculiarly dense hardwood, plummeted off its perch high on the wall and scored a direct hit on the glass case enclosing the HMS Beagle model.  Miraculously, the ship model itself escaped unscathed.
2. Volume VII of Ellis'  "History of our Country"  fell off the top shelf of a bookcase and somehow re-inserted itself into a now-vacant slot on the shelf below.
3. Mike and Becky's German shepheard dog, far from exhibiting an uncanny premoniting of this disaster, slept through it.
4. At least three dozen of Kerrill's coffee mugs were shattered, but one escaped unbroken at the bottom of the pile.

After being on our feet for over 12 hours straight, we are going to sit down and get something to eat.  The rest of the cleanup will have to wait until tomorrow