about that earthquake...

I've been asked by tons of people about this earthquake in Hawaii the other day, and rather than telling everyone repeatedly what I thought about it, I'll just write it here. On Sunday I got up at 4:30am (sigh) to catch a 7:30am flight to Los Angeles. I was sitting in the waiting lounge as the last group boarding my flight...noticing how windy and rainy it was outside. Suddenly there was a low rumbling and then a huge, sustained jolt for 10-15 seconds that severely rattled all the glass walls in the building. The light fixtures shook violently and several people later claimed there was a lot of broken glass outside further down in the terminal. I did not appreciate it was an earthquake immediately. My first thought as the rumbling started was that the wind from the storm outside had picked up to gale forces, and I thought "fuck...I don't want to fly in this." But the large jolt was so intense that I was briefly convinced that a plane had crashed into the terminal due to the bad weather. Seriously!

Anyway, when it stopped shaking I overheard the ticket counter rep say "What was that? Was that an earthquake?" And then I thought...oh, and earthquake! That makes more sense...ok, lets get on the fucking plane already! :) About 15 minutes later everyone was on board, but we couldn't pull away from the gate because the power was down (which was weird, because for 15 minutes after the quake, the power was fine (they digitally scanned my ticket and everything). I heard on the seat radio that planes were taking off and landing, but we were stuck because they couldn't pull back the jetway (how retarded!). After 90 minutes, the pilot decided to just floor it in reverse and hope for the best (not kidding). And so, around 9am we took off for LAX, apparently one of the last flights out of the Honolulu airport.

When I got to the baggage claim at LAX there were about half a dozen camera crews for various news stations. Some guy interviewed me for the LA news (saw it that night!) and was asking me all about it...I didn't have a lot to say, he probably knew more than I did, since I was on a plane for the last 7 hours. Apparently the quake was upgraded to a 6.7 today...but I'm not sure if I felt the Kona quake or an aftershock that was ~5.8 located offshore of Oahu (24 miles). Either way it made for an interesting morning.

I wish I had more to say, but like I mentioned I got up at 4:30am and was kind of a zombie until this morning, really. As far as I know, everything in Oahu is pretty much fine at this point.