Tourists lined the lanais of high-rise hotels and sightseers clustered along Hawaii's cliffside highways to take in the spectacle of a potentially destructive tsunami that turned out to be more like an undulating tide.
Roused by sirens at 6 a.m. yesterday, people across the state scrambled for supplies and cleared out of evacuation zones before the 11:20 a.m. arrival of the tsunami, triggered by a 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile.
Most people outside the inundation zones heeded warnings and stayed home after a rush to buy supplies. By late morning, urban streets were deserted and the sands and surf of Waikiki Beach returned to their natural splendor, without tourists or beach umbrellas.
Most people took in the event from their living rooms, watching live television footage of the ocean rising and falling in places like Hilo Bay, where it churned back and forth several times.
"We clearly had a tsunami in the water and we had to evacuate," said Gerard Fryer, a geophysicist with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach. "I think we dodged a bullet."
The center issued a tsunami warning at 12:46 a.m. Five hours later, it forecast the first waves would reach Hilo at 11:19 a.m. and Honolulu at 11:52 a.m. At 10 a.m., the center predicted Hilo could be hit by the largest waves, as high as 8 feet.
The tsunami arrived on time, reaching Hawaii at 11:20 a.m. but it proved much smaller than expected. Wave heights rose 2 feet 10 inches in Hilo Bay and 3 feet 1 inch in Kahului, the highest surge in the state. In Honolulu, the water rose 10 inches at 12:20 p.m.
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