Survivors recall tsunami of '46

By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Big Island Bureau

HILO, Hawai'i — For Kathryn Vierra, the images of devastation and misery caused by a tsunami in South Asia have stirred her own old memories.

Masuo Kino never saw how high the wave got that battered Laupa-hoehoe in 1946. He was too busy under water, fighting for his life. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

For Kane'ohe resident Masuo Kino, the memories are of running at Laupahoehoe Point in 1946, being battered by the ocean and forced below the surface, gasping back to the surface, and being forced down again.

As he watched television footage this week of curious spectators hurrying to the shoreline to stare at the peculiar behavior of the ocean just before the tsunami arrived, Kino said he was reminded of himself and his friends in Laupahoehoe 58 years ago.

"I saw some people just kind of watching the waves and the ocean — that's not the time to do that. But they were like us in 1946. We just didn't know what a tsunami was," said Kino, 75. "By the time they decided it was dangerous, it was too late for some of us, and of course for thousands of them."

Vierra, who now lives in Puna, recalled similar confusion as a 15-year-old, when she and her sister prepared to meet the school bus on the morning of April 1, 1946. They were startled to see that the road along the ocean and through Keaukaha was gone, completely covered by the ocean surge.

There was no other road out, so everyone was stranded, and the neighbors began to mill around in confusion. After alerting her parents, Vierra and her sister started down a rocky jungle trail to the beach to see what was happening. They didn't make it far, she said.

"There was water streaming in, and we turned and fled because this was scary," she said. Vierra's family and her neighbors gathered on the porch of a house on a small rise across the street from the ocean, she said.

"We had no place else to go, and this was only a slight rise, very slight," she said. "We just stood there and heard the wave coming — you could hear it first, that crashing, deafening sound, and the churning ocean."

The wave turned and missed the house, and the group began cutting through the jungle to try to reach higher ground. Vierra, 74, said all but a handful of homes on the makai side of the road were demolished. Her family's rented house was flooded, but remained standing.

She dreamed of the tsunami for years afterward, seeing the dirty water rushing toward her when she closed her eyes. She said many of those memories re-awakened when she saw news accounts of the disaster in the Indian Ocean.

"I recalled the sound and the enormity of the tidal wave experience that I went through, and not knowing that this is what's happening," she said. "It's even more amazing with all the communications available today that all these people had to go through it without having a notion of what was coming upon them."

Kino's school bus had almost reached Laupahoehoe High School that morning in 1946, and the students were fascinated by the exposed reefs they saw out the bus windows and the bizarre behavior of the receding ocean. Two county workers boarded the bus and warned the driver to be careful, that something didn't look right.

"That just made us more curious," said Kino, who was an 11th-grader at the time. "Upon reaching the school, a bunch of us, mostly boys, took off for the beach and the ocean."

As the water receded, Kino and other youths walked out to look at the exposed ocean bottom. He returned to a small knoll above the water line and joined a couple dozen other students there, and the water began to rise.

"That's when we took off. Some outran the wave. I was not fortunate; I fell into the long grass and bushes, and I hung on to the grass but the wave just flipped me over and practically smashed me against the stone wall that encircled the school," he said. "I was under the water for probably 30 yards, and I popped out, and I went down again, and popped out, and by then I was clear across the Laupahoehoe peninsula and going to the sea."

Kino grabbed at the tops of guava trees, and most of the branches broke, but one finally held. "My friend who outran the wave said it was about 50 or 60 feet high. I don't know. I was under the water with the rocks and everything so I never saw the height of the wave."

In all, 26 teachers and students were killed at Laupahoehoe that day, and 159 died statewide. Since then, Kino said life has seemed like a "bonus."

"If I sit and concentrate, I can almost imagine myself in the waves, in the water — that's how vivid it still is," Kino said.

As for the tragedy in Asia, "I can imagine. They were unprepared in terms of the warning system, and there's all the low-lying fishing villages and seaside villages — they were hit very hard. ... They just got it."

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 935-3916.