T-Minus 2 Hours (HST)

And boy, am I pissed. The sirens started blaring at 8 PM tonight, however when I checked with the Hawaii Civil Defense website, the latest printout already stated that the 5pm British Columbia earthquake HAD already been upgraded to a WARNING at 7 PM. What may I ask is the reason for an entire hour's delay between the 7pm upgrade to sounding the sirens at 8. Mind you, this is for a 10:28pm tsunami arrival. This past June, Hawaii had been experiencing sporadic siren malfunctions due to an electronic signal somewhere in the mainland inadvertantly setting off sirens in a few local communities because those particular local sirens were using the same software programs as their mainland counterparts and when the mainland people ran tests on the mainland sirens, the same test signals remotely triggered the local sirens all the way in the middle of the Pacific. So, I thought perhaps the previous malfunction issue hadn't been fully resolved. But this isn't so.

This is a Saturday night with hordes of local people spending the evening in low lying Waikiki thusly an extra hour is crucial for the non-tourist evacuation. As we speak, there's a huge traffic jam on the Ala Wai Blvd. which has the least number of stoplights. Even when the traffic light turns green, there's no room on the other side of the intersection for the cars to move up. Ridiculous. My bikes are parked in a below sea level parking basement a mere 50-feet across the street from the Ala Wai canal with no higher level parking floors. The canal empties into the ocean downstream about 1½-miles from where I live along the Ala Wai so should a wave traveling up the Ala Wai overflow the banks across the street from me then water will pour into our below sea level parking basement. It is too late to move my two bikes to higher land with all the traffic, I have to walk back home for the second bike, and that's even without being picky about finding a vacant but safe parking stalls, and splitting lanes high tailing it over to the higher elevation. Most likely the forecasted tsunami will have a subtle impact. We'll see.