Earthquake in Hawaii Shows We Are Still Not Prepared for a Disaster
Hawaii survived Oct. 15's 6.7 earthquake, but the immediate aftermath was a reminder of how vulnerable our modern world is to disasters of all kinds.
by Melvin Rhodes
I will always remember the exact time! It was 7:07 a.m. when the earthquake struck. That was the time on the clock, and it will stay in my mind forever.
It's not every day that you get to experience an earthquake. When you do, you don't forget where or when it happened or how you felt at the time.
My first thought was to move to somewhere safe while calling for my wife to make sure she was OK. She was. Our first shared thought after that was wondering if a tsunami would follow.
We were only a few yards away from a narrow strip of beach and the Pacific Ocean on the Hawaiian island of Maui. It was Sunday, Oct. 15, and the 50th state had just been struck by the third worst earthquake in its history, 6.7 on the Richter scale.
Remembering the devastation of the tsunami in December 2004, naturally this was a concern. We weren't the only ones concerned. Dozens of people came out of their accommodations looking out to sea, trying to decide what to do.
When the quake struck, the power went off. That meant there was no television so we could not turn on the news to see what was happening. The only radio station I could find on my battery-operated radio was broadcasting prerecorded rock music from the big island and didn't seem inclined to give us much news. We were in the dark—relying on secondhand reports that might only be rumor!
We did hear that the power was off all over the island. It would be five hours before power would be restored to our hotel. Five hours! When the power goes off in Ghana, a developing country, good hotels switch to their own generators within a couple of minutes. Clearly, hotels on Maui were unprepared for an earthquake.
