My best friend from Junior High and High school would have been 13 then and was looking out the window of his hotel room at the tide going out and all the people going way out into the ocean getting fish. He said he wondered why the ocean went out what seemed to him almost a mile or something. But, the next moment all the people who had gone out to gather the jumping fish on the bare sand were running and screaming for shore and 61 didn't make it that day. They were taken over by the Tsunami on Hawaii. I didn't see this I was 12 years old in California then.
When was Hawaii last hit by a tsunami?
A
tsunami caused by an earthquake off the coast of Chile travels across
the Pacific Ocean and kills 61 people in Hilo, Hawaii, on this day in 1960. The massive 8.5-magnitude quake had killed thousands in Chile the previous day.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tsunami-hits-hawaii
Disaster
1960
Tsunami hits Hawaii
A tsunami caused by an earthquake off the coast of Chile
travels across the Pacific Ocean
and kills 61 people in Hilo, Hawaii, on
this day in 1960. The massive 8.5-magnitude quake
had killed thousands
in Chile the previous day.
The earthquake, involving a severe plate shift, caused a large
displacement of water
off the coast of southern Chile at 3:11 p.m.
Traveling at speeds in excess of 400 miles per hour,
the tsunami moved
west and north. On the west coast of the United States, the waves
caused an
estimated $1 million in damages, but were not deadly.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning System, established in 1948 in response
to another deadly tsunami,
worked properly and warnings were issued to
Hawaiians six hours before the wave’s expected
arrival. Some people
ignored the warnings, however, and others actually headed to the coast
in
order to view the wave. Arriving only a minute after predicted, the
tsunami destroyed Hilo Bay
on the island of Hawaii. Thirty-five-foot
waves bent parking meters to the ground and wiped
away most buildings. A
10-ton tractor was swept out to sea. Reports indicate that the 20-ton
boulders making up the sea wall were moved 500 feet. Sixty-one people
died in Hilo,
the worst-hit area of the island chain.
The tsunami continued to race further west across the Pacific.
Ten
thousand miles away from the earthquake’s epicenter, Japan, despite
ample warning time,
was not able to warn the people in harm’s way. At
about 6 p.m., more than a day after the
earthquake, the tsunami struck
the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido.
The crushing wave killed
180 people, left 50,000 more homeless and caused $400 million
in
damages.
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