"To give you a sense of perspective," Dr. Aspen said, "the two buildings you see directly in front of us are single-story wooden structures roughly 15 feet in height. I would estimate that the shoreline is about 500 yards away. That is about as far as we could get from the ocean and still find a strong building. I'd be quite surprised if the water even got this far inland."
Another indistinct mumbling in the background.
"Brent thought he spotted a wave on the horizon, but it was just another big breaker on the reef."
"Dr. Aspen," Kai said, "it's likely that the first thing you'll see is the water receding from the shore."
"Right. We'll keep on the lookout… Wait a tic. I think I see what you're talking about."
A second later, Kai could see it. The ocean had started to noticeably recede from the beach, visible even with the poor video. He had seen similar video and pictures from other tsunamis, particularly the Asia tsunami, but seeing it in real time was literally breathtaking.
"It's a spectacular sight, really," Aspen said. "It's like no ebb tide I've ever seen."
Kai watched in wide-eyed wonder as the water went out. By the time it had withdrawn a couple of hundred yards, he expected the tide to start reversing and come back. But to his astonishment, it kept going out.
"Sweet Jesus," said Reggie. "It's happening."
Dr. Aspen continued to cheerfully report what he was observing.
"I'd guess the water has gone out 1000 yards by now. Is this the kind of behavior you were expecting, Dr. Tanaka?"
All Kai could croak was, "No." This was beyond his wildest nightmares. Until that point, he thought Dr. Aspen's retreat to the rooftop would provide all the protection he needed. Now Kai clearly saw that the situation was dire, but he didn't know what to tell Aspen. There was nowhere else for him to go.
"The water has stopped receding, I believe."
The video confirmed his words. The extreme ebb tide bubbled out past the reef. With better camera resolution, Kai would have expected to see thousands of fish flopping around on the newly exposed ocean bottom.
"My word, look at the birds."
That got Kai's attention. It seemed like an odd thing to say considering everything else clamoring for attention. "Excuse me, Dr. Aspen?"
"I've never seen anything like it, really. All the birds on the island seemed to have taken flight simultaneously. I hope the pilot notices and steers clear of them."
A yell in the background.
"Brent just noticed that the water is starting to come back. At an alarming pace, too, I'm afraid."
In the distance, a frothy white line stretched across the horizon and out of the field of view of the camera. After a few seconds, the white froth had risen visibly and seemed to be racing for the camera.
Kai tried to keep a sense of panic out of his voice. "Dr. Aspen, you need to find something to tie yourselves to. Anything permanently affixed to the structure."
"We have no rope."
"Use your belts, nylon from a backpack, anything."
"I'm afraid the best we can do is to wrap our arms around a metal ladder bolted into the side of the building. Excuse me while we do so."
The wave now approached the beach. The froth looked to be 30 feet high and still rising. A growing roar threatened to drown out Dr. Aspen's voice.
"As you can hear," Dr. Aspen shouted, straining to make himself audible, "we are listening to what sounds like 15 approaching freight trains. How big is this tsunami going to get, Dr. Tanaka?"
He deserved the truth. "I don't know, Dr. Aspen. Maybe too big."
A pause. He knew what Kai meant.
"Well, Dr. Tanaka," Aspen yelled over the din, "it seems Brent and I may not get to enjoy that cup of tea after all."
As he said that, a wall of water smashed into the palm trees closest to the beach, completely engulfing them, and the wave finally showed signs that it was about to curl over. Kai could only watch in shock as the tsunami collapsed and drove itself into the first building it encountered, shattering it.
Whole trees and the debris from the building were driven forward by a wave that had to be at least 100 feet high. As it approached each building in its path, the structure was engulfed and disappeared. None were even half the height of the wave. It was as if the world's largest dam had burst.
The howl of crashing water coming from the phone now made it almost impossible to hear what Aspen was saying.
"My Lord! Hold on, Brent!" Then a scream from Brent in the background, and that was all Kai could make out before the phone went dead.
At the same time, the tsunami commanded the entire area of the screen. It looked like watching through the window of a washing machine, water boiling and churning, with indistinct bits of detritus writhing around within it.
The camera pitched backward, probably from the force of air pushed in front of it by the wave. For a fraction of a second, all Kai could see was blue sky. Then a shadow loomed over the lens, and the image was gone.
Kai, Brad, and Reggie all stood in stunned silence. Nobody could muster the words to comment on what they had just seen. But they knew the implications. In less than an hour, Hawaii was going to experience a catastrophe of epic proportions.
Chapter 19
10:24 AM
58 minutes to Wave Arrival Time
The horror of watching the death of Dr. Aspen and Brent Featherstone confirmed Kai's nightmare scenario. He shivered involuntarily from the chill that ran up his spine.
"What the hell is going on?" Brad said. Then he pointed at Kai with an accusing finger. "How did you know the tsunami would be so big?"
"I didn't know," Kai said. "It was just a guess. About an hour ago, I saw on Headline News that a TransPac jet went down somewhere over the Pacific. I didn't give it another thought. But ten minutes ago, I saw the same story. This time, they showed a graphic of the plane going down in the exact same location as the earthquake."
"So?"
"Given what we just saw, I don't think that it's a coincidence. Brad, since it's just me and Reggie here, I'm going to need your help. Call the FAA and find out exactly what the latitude and longitude was where they lost contact. And see if there were any other planes in the area. And don't take no for an answer."
"Why?"
"I'll explain when you're off the phone."
"But who do I call? It's a holiday."
"I don't know. There's got to be an emergency number. Here." Kai gave him the number for Hawaii Civil Defense. "Call Brian Renfro at HCD. Get the number from him. Tell him you're my brother."
Brad looked dubious, but he saw that Kai was serious and went into the other room to make the call.
"Kai," Reggie said, "do you know what the chances are of this happening?"
"I don't know. A million to one? But Reggie, what if it did happen? We've got no scenarios for dealing with it."
"If we're wrong about this and word gets out, we are going to be the laughingstock of the seismic community."
"I know, Reggie, but…" Kai tapped his watch. He didn't have to tell Reggie the clock was ticking. "I'm going to get on the phone to NASA and find out if they have any satellite data or photos from the site of our earthquake."
"And me?"
"Start doing a search of relevant papers in the Science of Tsunami Hazards. See if you can find that formula from Crawford and Mader."
"Gotcha."
Kai dialed Hawaii Civil Defense. Although the PTWC notified many different organizations throughout the Pacific about tsunami hazards, NASA was not one of them. Kai had no emergency number for them.
Brian Renfro picked up the phone on the other end.
"Brian, it's Kai Tanaka."
"Kai, what is going on? You're brother just called me asking for the number for the FAA."
"You gave it to him, right?"
"Sure, but that's a little weird, don't you think?"
"It's going to get weirder. Who would we call to get emergency satellite imagery?"
&n
bsp; "Satellite imagery. Why do you need that?"
"I think the situation may be worse than we first imagined."
"Worse than a tsunami? Is there a hurricane coming, too?"
Brad came back in holding a slip of paper.
"Hold on, Brian" Kai said. To Brad, "That was fast."
"While I was on the phone, I looked at CNN's web site. They already had the latitude and longitude reported in the story."
He gave Kai the slip of paper with the coordinates. Kai gave it to Reggie, who took a red dot from the container and stuck it on the map at the indicated coordinates. It overlapped with the dot of the earthquake.
"Jesus!" said Reggie. "You've got to be kidding me."
"What do you think?" Kai said.
"I think I'm wrong about the seamount."
"Brian," Kai said. "It's worse than a hurricane." He told Renfro about the video of the disaster at Johnston Island.
"And Christmas Island?" Renfro said.
"It's probably completely wiped out. Brian, the reason I wanted Brad to call the FAA was to see if that TransPac flight went down at the same location as the earthquake."
"Why do you want to know that?"
Kai took a deep breath. It was the first time he'd said it out loud. "Because I think that we've had a meteor impact in the middle of the Pacific."
Renfro laughed. "Yeah, right." When Kai didn't laugh with him, he became silent. "You're serious?"
"That's the only explanation I can think of."
"You think satellite imagery can confirm it?"
"Right. Who is the best to call? NASA? They operate LANDSAT. How about NESDIS?" NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service operated the GOES weather satellites that were used for all of the nation's hurricane forecasting.
"They're a good place to start," Renfro said. "I'll patch you in when I get someone on the line."
With that, he hung up.
"Wait a minute!" Brad said. "What did you just say? A meteor?"
"Actually, if you want to be technically accurate," said Reggie, "if it hit the earth, it's a meteorite."
"What are you?" said Brad. "The language police? Who cares?" He turned to Kai. "Come on! If a meteor or meteorite or asteroid or whatever was heading toward us, it would have been big news all over the TV for months."
"Not if no one saw it coming," Kai said. Occasionally, they talked about tsunamis from asteroids in an off-hand way in the same way that other people might talk about the possibility of getting struck by lightning. It was a statistical possibility, but they didn't expect it to happen, not in their lifetimes. The conversations provided a good diversion and a few chuckles. Kai didn't think it was so funny now.
"I've read a few papers about it," Reggie said. "Interesting subject, actually. Did you know astronomers estimate that they've only found about 75 % of the asteroids in our solar system that are over one kilometer in diameter?"
"You mean, they might have missed an asteroid half a mile wide? I'd like to know who's in charge of that screw-up."
"First of all," Kai said, "we don't know it's an asteroid. However, that's the only tsunami source that fits our current situation. Second, even if it was an impact, we don't know how big the resulting tsunami would be. Asteroid impacts move water in a way completely different from earthquakes. That's why we need to get some data. Reggie's looking to see if he can find Crawford and Mader's latest projections."
Kai could see that Brad was confused, so he explained. It also helped him to wrap his brain around the scenario.
"Crawford and Mader are researchers at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. They wrote a series of papers about computer models they had developed predicting how big tsunamis from an asteroid impact would be. Of course, they had to make a lot of assumptions, like material density, velocity of the asteroid, and angle of impact. But part of their research estimated how big the tsunamis would be as a function of the distance from the impact point and the diameter of the asteroid."
"But if they didn't detect the asteroid before now, how can you know how big it is?" Brad was quick.
"Because we know how big the earthquake was and how deep the water is in that part of the ocean," Kai said. "They developed a formula that would tell you how big the resulting earthquake would be depending on the size of the asteroid. We'll just solve the formula in reverse based on the size of the quake. From that, we can estimate how big the waves would be at various distances from the impact zone."
"Fine," Brad said. "But how do you know they're right?"
"We don't," said Reggie. "We've never gotten seismic readings from an asteroid impact. There have been a lot of different papers written about asteroid-generated tsunamis, and the estimates are all over the map. At best, we can get a size range until we get some real data."
"Like from the DART buoy," Kai said. "That should give us a fairly accurate reading."
"So until then," Brad said, "you're guessing."
"Educated guessing. It's better than nothing."
"So if it is an asteroid, what do we do?"
Kai honestly didn't know. The PTWC had been founded to warn against tsunamis generated by earthquakes, the most frequent cause of Pacific-wide tsunamis that were a threat to Hawaii. Most of the dangerous quakes were centered in Alaska, Japan, or Chile, but tsunamis could also be generated locally by volcanic quakes and landslides. Tsunamis originating from the Pacific Rim would take five hours or more to get to the islands, leaving plenty of time to evacuate the coastline, even if it was extremely costly and time-consuming. Locally-generated tsunamis could arrive in a matter of minutes and were therefore much more dangerous. In either case, evacuation routes and procedures had been carefully planned out based on the size of tsunamis that those sources would generate.
But there were no procedures for dealing with an asteroid-generated tsunami. No evacuation routes. No civil defense plans. It was just too unlikely to spend the PTWC's limited time and resources on.
"I've got the formula," said Reggie. He started tapping it into Mathematica, a powerful computer program they used for these kinds of calculations. "So let's see. We registered an earthquake of 6.9. What's the depth of the ocean at that location?"
Using a map of the Pacific Ocean floor, Kai sounded out each digit to make sure Reggie understood. "4925."
"Got it." Reggie continued typing. "And now I just type in how far we are from the epicenter, and that should give us a ballpark height of the biggest wave."
When he was finished, he leaned forward and looked confused. Then his eyes widened suddenly, and he pulled his hands back from the keyboard as if it were hot.
"What is it?" Brad said.
"Maybe I did the calculation wrong." Reggie started over and typed all of the numbers in again. When he saw the results, he leaned back and shook his head.
"Oh man," Reggie said, his tone thick with sarcasm, "you are going to love this."
"How big?" Kai asked, already knowing that it was beyond his worst fears.
Reggie let out a heavy sigh. "At least 70."
"Holy shit!" Brad said. There was fear in his eyes, but he also had the slightest smile. Kai could understand the mixture of dread and excitement he was feeling. Despite the terrible devastation from the massive waves, despite the danger, despite the illogic of it, Kai had always wanted to see a tsunami in person. Now he was going to get his chance.
"The Asia tsunami didn't get bigger than 30 feet high, did it?" Brad asked.
Reggie shook his head. "There are some estimates that it got at least twice that high in Banda Aceh."
"So 70 feet will be huge," he said.
Kai put his hand on Brad's shoulder. He didn't get it.
"Brad, all of our figures are in metric units. Meters, not feet. 70 meters. The wave is going to be over 200 feet high."
Chapter 20
10:28 AM
54 minutes to Wave Arrival Time
The prospect of a 200-foot-high wall of water heading for Hawaii thr
eatened to overwhelm Kai. A wave that size hitting a populated coastline was unmatched in recorded civilization. The biggest tsunami to hit any kind of populated area was the monster wave that resulted from the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. The 100-foot-high wave wiped out entire villages in the Sunda Strait of Indonesia, killing 36,000 people.
Now they were facing the possibility of a wave at least twice that big hitting one of the most densely populated coastlines in the world.
The phone rang, and Kai picked it up slowly, his mind reeling.
"Tanaka," he said.
"Dr. Tanaka, this is Jeanette Leslie from CNN. I have some questions about the tsunami warning that was issued a few minutes ago."
"Ms. Leslie, I'm sorry, but I'm very busy right now. I don't have time to answer questions."
"But Dr. Tanaka, you…"
Before she could get any further, Kai hung up. Within moments, the phone rang again.
"It's started," Reggie said.
"The phone's going to be ringing off the hook." Without a receptionist to field the calls, just answering the phone would take up all of their time. Kai turned to Brad.
"I need your help again."
"Answer the phones?"
"Yes. Reggie and I have too much to do."
"But what do I say? I don't know anything."
"Actually, you know a lot. Maybe too much. I can't have you giving out quotes to the media. Just tell them we will issue an official statement in…" Kai glanced at his watch. "Ten minutes. Until then, no comment."
Dealing with the media was a double-edged sword. On one hand, fielding their calls would take precious time away from their work in assessing the danger from the tsunami. On the other hand, giving them statements could be a powerful tool to warning the public to get to high ground. But Kai couldn't blindside Hawaii Civil Defense. He needed to confer with them first. And it would definitely help if they had some confirmation from NASA.
"What about the meteor impact?" Brad said. "Don't you think we should mention that?"
"Look, Kai," said Reggie, "I'm buying into your theory. We've got a big tsunami coming. But I think talking about a meteorite impact at this point is premature."
Rogue Wave Page 10
