High Anxiety

Hon, we're evacuating the resort. A major earthquake in the Solomon Islands triggered a tsunami that's supposed to arrive in 25 minutes. I have to get all the guests out and I don't know if I'll even be able to get out of here or when I'll be able to call you again...

Grice was safe and sound at her school, along with Elle and me, up nice and high on the mountaintop, but Sarabelle was down there and it would take me 30 minutes to get to the high school if the roads were not jammed with hysterical drivers. And then what? We'd all be swept away in our car?

I called the high school not expecting to get through, but did, remarkably on the first try, and was advised that they were not under orders to evacuate yet, and that they were a regional evacuation center so they should be safe in any case (except, I thought, you're barely above sea level and situated on a major river) but parents were free to pick up their kids.

Jorge got through again and said he was going to get Sarabelle, with maybe a couple panicky Canadian women in tow -- they had asked another couple fleeing the resort if they could ride to higher ground with them in their car, a five-seater, and were told no, there wasn't enough room -- when I heard a news report on the one channel that had any news on about the situation, in between the regular morning show's fashion and cooking segments, that the threat had been downgraded. So we sat tight and waited.

And waited.

And when it became clear we were not going to be subjected to a disaster, I wondered, if the earthquake struck at 6:40 AM (our time) and 15 minutes later the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii issued a warning that is sent out immediately to public safety officials around the world, and we were expecting to feel the effects by 9:55 AM, why were the buses still picking up the children and depositing them at school, why school, which starts at 9:00 AM, had not been cancelled or at least had the buses drive the students back home or evacuated to a safer location, and why was there only one television station intermittently broadcasting the news?


In all things it is better to hope than to despair.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe