The 6.6 Richter Scale Wakeup
It was a normal morning on sunday. My fiance and I were sleeping, our 31st floor hole in the wall condo in Waikiki was as muggy as it had been all week with the trade winds not around. Then suddenly we were both startled awake by the fact that the room and everything in it was moving back and forth a foot or two. Literally! I truly mean the building was moving more than a foot from side to side The paintings on the walls were rattling, it sounded like a jet was flying by and king kong was pushing the place back and forth like a slinky.
Although I prefer a good cup of coffee in the morning, being woken up my a 6.6 earthquake will also do the trick. Thankfully those wonderful engineers decided to allow the building to sway or I feel as though it would have snapped off! It was darn near the freakiest thing I’ve expereinced.
The earthquake happened about 10 miles off the west coast of the Big Island (the one with the active volcano) and we are about 150 miles north west of that. The earthquake knocked out power to the hole state, 6 seperate islands, Kauai, Maui, Oahu, Molokai, Lanai, and the Big Island. We live on Oahu with about 1 million other people and the whole island was without power. Nothing. We live in the tourist mecca of Waikiki and even the hotels were running on limited generator power. The town sounded like one big diesel truck was running.
On top of that it was a rainy day, and there were flash flood warnings on select parts of the island. It would have been a great day to sit inside and watch TV. But instead my fiance and I found ourselves cruzing the town looking for any place that was open. (I should also mention that all street lights were out, not even back-up flashing reds were going, police were everywhere.)
Most stores were closed but those that were open would only let in a few people at a time. Being a tourist town, everyone was stocking up like they weren’t going to eat for weeks. ABC Stores, the local chain that is like a 7 eleven everywhere else without the gas had lines around the corner. And there are about 20 in the 10 blocks that make up Waikiki. We figured that we were going to get power in a little bit so why not take advantage of the situation and get the ice cream they were selling for half-off. Breakfast of champions, half-frozen icea cream bars.
After wondering, walking and driving around some more, we began to wonder what we did without TV on rainy days, did people really just sit and talk?
Nah, instead I took a nap while she finished her paper for class (silly law students.)
By 6 pm no one around us had power, and we were hearing only a few spots on the west side of the island had juice so we thought we would wonder the town again. After figuring out that walking in the rain wasn’t any fun we decided we would drive around some more in the dark. We used to live in the country, no lights doesn’t really matter, but I don’t think half the people in this town have ever driven without street lights before.
We happened upon the only place in town that had power, a two block stretch that included the wonderful and hot food of Jack in the Box. We figured since we had nothing else to do, and our apartment was blacked out why not wait 20 minutes in line at jack and then wait another 45 minutes for the food. It was delightful though.
We finally decided to head back and discuss our feelings by candle light.
However, as we rounded the corner into Waikiki we noticed that a third of the buildings had lights on and crossed our fingers that ours was one of the chosen few. IT WAS!
So we finished off our day by laying back on our couch watch the 45 minutes of Desperate Housewives that Tivo picked up with the lights out 