Our crazy night started soon after we went to bed on Friday night. Our dog, who is always a good sleeper at night just couldn’t sleep. He was restless and antsy all night. At midnight he was running around. We kept telling him to shut it down and go to sleep. The phone rang at 1 am and we were too sleepy to answer it but I have a google voicemail application that puts the voice message into a text message. When I squinted at my blackberry to see the message alert it read “a salami is coming.” I told my wife what it said and we muttered something about nonsensical messages and went back to sleep. A little before 3 am someone pounded on our door. We woke up wondering why this night was so weird and I answered the door to our neighbor who said a tsunami was coming and everyone was evacuating. We immediately started packing up our van with essential items. We had a decent 72 hour kit and we threw more stuff in, including our equipment. I packed up computer hard drive and back up photo files and my wife grabbed her video equipment for work. After we packed and called our families to say hi we woke up the kids and got them ready. We piled into the van with our dog. By 5:15 am we had settled into a spot in our church’s parking lot up on higher ground behind our house. The evacuation alarm sounded for the first time at 6 am, by then the parking lot was about full. After an hour of hanging out up there we decided to go back down to the house since we had time before the wave was coming. We got some breakfast and parked our other car on higher ground before heading back to the parking lot where we hung out until about 1 pm when we saw that we weren’t going to have a tsunami. We were tired and relieved. If anything it was a good test run for being ready to run out the door if we have to. We had very mild discomfort compared to all the people suffering from recent earthquakes.
Photos below are of our dog, who we love, the Saturday sunrise and our parking lot camp. The last picture in the lower right corner is of the people we could see hiking up the mountains behind our house to get a view of everything.
Glad to hear the family is safe and you have somewhere to go back to. Being woken up in the middle of the night to news like that would get my heart pumping. I think Maunakea deserves a little treat (I remember him liking chocolate).
This is the first instance of the animal alert that I have read. Those are the best indications. How did he do the rest of the day??? I wonder if there are more stories out there because that is what I kept checking for (signs from my neighbors cat) and everything here was normal. I had already researched it with Norm and another friend half the night and had decided the evidence was good enough to stay home. I think I was the only house in the entire neighborhood that did not evacuate.
good on ya for shooting this. seriously. and i agree, GREAT dry run in the case that something like that ever REALLY happens…
and i’m sooooo glad you guys are safe man.
we were worried about you guys. luckily nothing happened, but man, what was that?!?!
funny enough our dog was crazy until early afternoon. really out of character. he was crazy before we were giving stress vibes. he slept like a rock last night.
Oh my, that was just too scary! The relief was palpable once we heard the “all clear” had been given. We hope you all “slept like a rock” last night.
Love you,
mum
Hello! I LOVE your work! You have such a great, creative eye 🙂
I was linked to your work through the Paperie Boutique blog, via Leah Stimmel.
I used to live in Hawaii (for a short time), and your photos really capture the essence! The dog photo on this post is especially great, and the photo of Lizzy underwater with the rainbow above- very cool! Keep up the great work 🙂