Tsunamis in Hawai'i: Eyewitnesses remember

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer

HILO, Hawai'i — The thing few people know or imagine about a tsunami is the noise.

A stevedore, left, stands helpless as churning water bears down on him, collapsing buildings at Hilo's pier in 1946. Advertiser library photo

Masao Uchima, 72, remembers awakening to terror in the Hilo coastal village of Shinmachi, which was wiped out in 1946 and never rebuilt.

"I was still in bed. My mother woke us up, calling: 'Tsunami! Tsunami!'" Uchima said.

Immediately, there was another noise.

"You could hear the crushing sound. The water was moving under the house. My neighbor was helping his dad in waist-high water, and people were saying there's another wave coming.

"My dad came from Okinawa. He knows what a wave is. I didn't know what it was. I thought the island was sinking," Uchima said.

Yasu Kuwaye, 79, was a trucker headed from his Honoka'a home to Hilo to pick up supplies the morning of April 1, 1946. He stopped at Hakalau after spotting debris from an early wave and seeing a crowd near the Hakalau mill.

"Suddenly, there was the wave coming in. We heard all the rumble and everything," Kuwaye said.

Civil Defense officials fear that it has been so long since a major tsunami that most of the people in the state have no idea what it's like.

"My oldest son is 46 years old, and they really don't know what a tidal wave is," Uchima said.

Those who remember the Hilo tsunamis remember them with a combination of fear and wonder.

Fusayo Ito, 92, ran with her family from the 1946 wave. She remembers the devastation and the death. And she refused to go down to the shore with the crowds on the night the sirens sounded to warn of the 1960 tsunami.

"People were marching down the street to look at the water going down. They wanted to see the bottom of the river. When the tidal wave came, all those people got killed," she said. "At the same time, the powerhouse exploded and the lights came pitch dark."

The tsunami of 1946, generated in the Aleutian Islands, came on an April Fools' Day like today.

Eighty-four-year-old Gabriel Manning remembers it well. He saw the water of the first, smaller waves rising over the river's banks to enter Hilo Iron Works buildings along the Wailoa River.

"I remember, I told Milton McNicoll a wave was coming. He said, 'Yeah, yeah. April fool,' " Manning said. Then McNicoll saw the water and ran home to save his family.

McNicoll succeeded, but many did not. Manning recalls a co-worker who could not get home to warn his family. The entire clan perished, and the man died an early death from drinking too much as a result.

Ninety-six people died at Hilo and 24 at Laupahoehoe. There was also damage, though not as severe, on Maui, O'ahu and Kaua'i. Across the Islands, the official death toll was 159, although that number may be off by one or two as a result of bodies never found, mix-ups in names and similar problems.

Sixty-one people were killed at Hilo in the May 22, 1960, tsunami, which was generated by an earthquake in Chile. Many of those who perished had gone to the shore to see the events, or had concluded the wave was not going to appear.

"The siren blew early that day. A lot of people returned to their homes" as midnight approached, thinking it was a false alarm, Uchima said.

Kuwaye was living three miles from the shore and, despite curiosity, the frightening experience of the 1946 wave kept him home.

"I would have loved to see that wave coming in." But even from so far away, he said, "I could hear the sound of the wave."

The survivors tell stories of heroism and miraculous survival, and stories of tragedy.

"We saw people in the river, floating away, but you couldn't do anything, the current and the debris" were so bad, Uchima said.

Manning, perched atop a Hilo Iron Works crane in 1946, saw a blacksmith crawl onto the roof of his building for protection.

"The wave washed out the posts, and he fell into the water" and was carried away, he said.

Manning also saw an elderly woman clutching a guy wire on a utility pole as a wave approached.

"It carried her right across the Wailoa River and onto the Wailoa Park, and then it died down. She got up and walked away," he said.

Uchima's wife, Millie, was a high school student in her school bus on the way to school that day 55 years ago.

"We saw the wave picking up the buildings on Mamo Street, and it came right toward us. The bus driver drove straight up (the street, to higher elevation) and he got high enough. We didn't even get wet.

"I remember the sound and the smell, the ocean being dug up," she said.

Millie Uchima was a Girl Scout, and within hours she and her troop had been taken from school and put to work preparing care packages for those left homeless by the tsunami.

Her husband remembers the technique for identifying the location of bodies. You would find a pole and stick it into the ground next to a corpse and attach any kind of a cloth or piece of paper to the top of the pole so stretcher teams could find it.

The survivors of the last two big Hawai'i tsunamis said they fear that Hawai'i's present-day residents will make the mistakes many people in Hilo made. The 1946 tsunami had no warning before the first wave hit, but many failed to heed the warnings issued in 1960, they said.

"We have the siren warning. You better bear to that warning and get out fast. When the siren sounds, get out. You don't want to be caught in traffic," Kuwaye said.

The Pacific Tsunami Museum was built to help people remember. Director Donna Saiki said the museum was formed in 1993 and opened at its present site on the Hilo bayfront in 1998.

"I think people just don't know about tsunami, and that's part of our mission," Saiki said.

A tsunami strong enough to have killed people has reached Hawai'i seven times since the first tsunami recorded in 1837. That's about one every quarter-century. The last one, in 1975, was 26 years ago.