What If There Were No Earthquakes These Days? Part I

During the closing pageant at the Polynesian Cultural Center on our last full day in Hawaii this past October, a lady stepped onto the stage to interrupt the program with an urgent announcement.  There had been a major (6.3) earthquake in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, and the Hawaiian Islands were in the direct path of its expected tsunami.  The announcer urged the audience to return to our vehicles and flee.  Due to heavy traffic, it took considerable time before we even left the parking lot.  For the same reason, our bus crawled along the entire 30 mile journey right at ocean level just a few feet away, before we gained elevation to cross over the mountain spine.  News from peoples’ “Smart” cell phones announced that the expected time of arrival was 10:28 pm.  Once we dropped down the mountain pass and approached Honolulu we overheard the radio dispatcher warn all busses not to go down to the waterfront at Waikiki.  Nevertheless, our driver entered the “evacuation zone” (over a hundred thousand people had been evacuated, we later learned) and proceeded to drop off passengers at the first hotel.   By the time we reached the 2^nd hotel (we were to be the 5^th stop) the time was 10:25pm.  I said to Ann, “We’re getting out right now!”  The streets were completely abandoned and we were found ourselves all alone.  But we managed to find a parking garage where we rushed our way up to the top (8^th) floor.  There, with a handful of other people, we listened to a hand-crank emergency radio while waiting for the approaching waves expected to flood the streets directly below us.

The dreaded waves, however, never arrived.  We actually spent our last night in bed sleeping soundly.  In Waikiki the following morning the streets were again filled with people, going about their lives as though nothing had happened the night before.  What we had feared hours before (recalling the carnage from tsunamis in Thailand and Japan) did not come true for us.  Our dreaded experience of a tsunami was entirely a matter of anticipation, nothing more.  Yet as I begin my blog this morning I hear on the news of a significant earthquake in the Solomon Islands that resulted in a damaging tsunami.  And I see videos from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia of four separate volcanoes within a span of a hundred miles that were explosively erupting massive amounts of lava.  

Tsunamis turn my stomach.  They’re nothing I ever want to see.  Volcanos, on the other hand, are another matter.  I love to see flowing lava.  If a mountain explodes lava into the sky, it is all the more exciting to watch.  I have had the privilege standing on top of Mount St. Helens which, just a few years earlier, had been reduced in height 1,500 feet because of such an event.  While the movement of the earth can be scary, such as when I saw our backyard lawn ripple from a damaging earthquake a number of years ago, it does fill my heart with reverential awe.  Yet does the benefit of powerful natural events end with the visual display?  Is there a redemptive point to volcanos and earthquakes?

To be continued…