Waiting for the Tsunami

I found the large earthquake last week in Chile and subsequent tsunami warning in the Pacific to be a very stressful event.  It surprised me, as I don't recall having similar stress in past events.  I guess it must be a result of having watched in horror when the Japanese event caused such horrendous devastation.  The previous major tsunami events in Thailand and Indonesia had been horrific, but unfolded mostly after the fact in the news.

I'm currently sitting in Montreal, and was certainly not directly threatened by the Chile event, though I do have a boat in the Vancouver area, and family too.  The risk there was virtually nil from this event though.

But the fact that the tsunami warning was in place in the Pacific region for many many hours really drained me. I worried for those potentially in its path.  This is not typical of me... I'm not overly empathetic by nature.

What this waiting did for me, though, was recalled an event years back when I was directly affected by a tsunami warning.  I figured I'd recout it here, since I found the situation interesting and quite surprising at the time.

This was close to the middle of 1996, and I was on a sea voyage, travelling in French Polynesia.  The 30' boat I was on was anchored in a bay on the north shore of Nuku Hiva, the most populous of the Marquesas Islands, and located about 1000 miles northeast of Tahiti.  It was a beautiful anchorage off a small village in a lovely valley, with a sand beach, good holding for the anchor, and protection from the open sea.

About the second night we were anchored there, we were awoken about 1am by someone knocking on the boat's hull.  When we scrambled up on deck, another cruiser was alongside, and stayed just long enough to pass an urgent message, before moving on to the next boat in the anchorage.

The message had been relayed from a villager, who had been kind enough to come out in a boat and wake the anchored yachts.  There was a tsunami warning in effect, and the village was to be evacuated to higher ground. All boats needed to leave the harbour within the hour, in order to ensure they were in deep water at the time the tsunami would arrive, as we would all be crushed on the beach if we stayed in the anchorage.

Thankfully we were in an anchorage with a straight forward exit which could be navigated in the dark.  I feel for those who might have been anchored behind a reef and unable to flee until daylight.  As it was, we got into deep water in less than an hour, and spent the rest of the night sailing 5 miles off the north shore of the island, landing in a new harbour the next morning.  Other than having left that paradise anchorage a day or two earlier than planned, we were none the worse off.

The unbelievable thing to me at the time was that this tsunami warning had been caused by a 7.9 earthquake in Alaska.  We were in the southern hemisphere, and I couldn't believe a wave could possibly reach us.  These days, we know more about the destructive power of these waves, and I'm thankful that this remote village had a good tsunami warning system in place way back then.

Thankfully, the Chile earthquake this week does not seem to have caused any widespread damage from waves. The lifting of the tsunami warning lifted my spirits, but got me thinking more about my trip to paradise.