Our hotel, the Mauna Lani resort, was only about 10 miles from the epicenter of the 6.7 earthquake that shook Hawaii on Oct 15. It felt much stronger to me than the Loma Prieta quake. It felt like several inches of wavelike side-to-side & up-down motion that shook for a long time and was accompanied by a very loud rumbling noise.
Jami and I were up and had just gotten dressed for breakfast when the quake hit. We immediately knew it was a quake and we took shelter by the doorway. I figured we’d just wait it out, thinking it’d be brief, but the shaking kept going and we started to hear things breaking in the rooms around us. The Mauna Lani hotel has a lot of big glass panes built into the rooms (big mirrors, sliding glass doors, etc.) and I was kinda nervous about this stuff breaking around us.
So we opened the door and peeked down the hallway. The ceiling looked OK, so we ran down the hall and down a flight of stairs (we were on the 2nd story) to the exit. The shaking continued the whole time, not stopping until we were out on the lawn in back of the hotel. Some other folks were out on the lawn, too, mostly other guests that had been at breakfast at the outdoor cafe.
A few minutes later, a big secondary quake hit (it was also a 6.0 magnitude quake) and we were all shaken again. This time we could hear screaming from inside the hotel. I think a lot of folks were jarred awake when the first one hit and when the second one came, people started streaming out of the hotel. Many of them were in PJs or bathrobes with bare feet. As it turns out I forgot my own flipflops in the room, so I had been running around in barefeet too.
So the hotel guests all emptied out onto the lawn and hotel employees began shepherding us up to higher ground. We all walked through the Mauna Lani golf course up to the clubhouse and gallery area which is up on a high hill overlooking the hotel and oceanfront area. We waited there for about an hour and a half while the tsunami threat was evaluated.
Jami, 5 months pregnant, was starving by this time. So we were stoked when the hotel staffers started emptying out the clubhouse kitchen supplies and giving snacks, candy, drinks, and sandwiches to the guests. Jami snagged us a turkey sandwich, a granola bar, and I got us some water bottles so we were all set.
After a while, a hotel manager announced that the tsunami threat was all clear, but they were still evaluating the hotel structure for possible damage, so no one was allowed back into the hotel. Jami and I quickly walked back down the golf course and we were among the first few guests back at the hotel. We were able to sneak in through the side entrance nearest our room and grab some key belongings, books, and water.
After that we were pretty much “forced” to sit out at the beach all day long. We set up one of the Mauna Lani’s nice blue shade pods and spent the day relaxing there, watching the sea turtles calmly graze on algae/plants growing on volcanic rocks. It felt kinda odd for us to be so relaxed while this huge crisis was going on, but there really wasn’t much else for us to do except just sit, read, and chill. So that’s what we did.
The photo of the sea turtle was the first photo we took that day.
