Being born and raised in the midwest, all we had to worry about is tornado's. We'd have tornado drills in schools, everyone had basements, so when the sirens went off the family would head down to the basement. I was lucky grow up in a house with a finished basement. Fireplace, tv, toys, pool table..etc, so waiting out a tornado warning was easy.
When we were planning on moving to SW Washington state, I thought about natural disasters. Mt. St. Helen's is only 65 miles north east of here - so we have a volcano in our back yard. Also, being on the pacific rim, there are occasional earth quakes - VERY odd being asked if we'd like to add earthquake insurance onto the house policy. Plus it rains like 388 of the 365 days of the year....ok, exaggerating just a bit, but flooding does occur too. Along with mud slides. Are you keeping up? That's 4 natural disasters right there alone. WHO KNEW that in the 4 years I've lived here, we'd also have 2 tornado's!!!???!!! Ding - 5!!
On Friday morning, 1am, my phone starts ringing. OMG!! My first thought is, who's hurt or who died? Hey, I live 2000 miles away from my family, so it's going to be a phone call that I do get and REALLY who else would be calling at 1am on a weekday? No, it wasn't family, it was my friend, Cris. He was watching the news and heard about the Japan 8.9 earthquake that had happened a few hours earlier, that had triggered a tsunami. The earthquake was devistating enough, but it also triggered a tsunami which hit the Japan coast with a 26 foot wave. The quake also triggered a tsunami which was heading to hit the west coast. At that time, they were predicting the tsunami to hit northern Oregon southwest Washington area. Apparently, the news had stated that Clark County (the county I live in) would be affected, so Cris was calling his friends to warn them. Ok, we live 70 miles from the coast - yes, we're on the Columbia river, but most of Vancouver is uphill from the river. If we did get hit with a large tsunami, it can affect the water levels of the river, but I'm guessing that it would have to be a 100 foot wave to crash into the coast to have any effect on the area I live in.
Well, being that we're now awake, we decided to get out of bed and watch the news. We went to every station trying to find out what they were talking about regarding a tsunami hitting Clark County. Couldn't find ANYTHING!! All we heard was the earthquake/tsunami crisis in Japan and that the tsunami will be hitting Hawaii around 5am our time. Seeing that I didn't have to work on Friday, C nominated me to get up and watch the news on how large the impact would be on Hawaii. Better to be safe than sorry, right?
I got up at 5:30 and saw that the tsunami waves on Hawaii were only 5-6 feet, so I knew that it wouldn't be that terrible on the OR/WA coast. They were estimating that it would be hitting the west coast starting around 7:15am. Back to bed I went.
Friday morning brought only news coverage of the tsunami hitting our coastline. The larger impact happened in southern OR/northern CA. However, a tsunami is pretty cool to watch. As one newscaster stated, it was like watching HI/LO tide on steroids. VERY TRUE! The waves would start to come in higher and higher, within 20 min they would be high on the beach and violent. Then within 20 min, they would retreat lower than low tide. This would be the trough of the tsunami - there are generally 8-10 sets of tsunami waves/troughs. And a tsunami isn't just one giant wave, no, a tsunami lasts 1-3 hours.
My thoughts are with those people suffering in Japan. Not only have they had a massive earthquake and large tsunami, but now several nuclear reactors are on the verge of a complete meltdown.
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