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1997 Third Place Winner
Story by Keyralee Moses
Interviewee: Albino Aguil
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In the Path of a Tsunami
Living in the Pacific Basin, we can experience a lot of destruction caused by wind, fire, and water. Water?? Ocean?? My story begins on the wee morning hours of April 1, 1946. A tsunami was about to hit Hilo Harbor. My uncle, Albino Aguil, a retired foreman from Ka′u Sugar remembers that destructive morning vividly, as if it happened just yesterday. At 3:30 A.M. he left Pahala to haul sugar to Hilo Harbor. In those days they had no instruments to detect tidal waves, therefore, no warnings were given to alert the people like we have today. At about 6:30 A.M. as he was unloading the sugar cane, he saw Hilo Bay emptying out leaving the ocean floor bare with fish jumping about. In a second, three sets of waves 50 feet high came rolling in one after another, taking and destroying the Bay Front district, and taking along people who were running to pick up the fish on the ocean floor. He remembers yelling frantically, "TIDAL WAVE!" as he ran between two ballistic tanks and injured his knee. One of the drivers was swept out by a wave and picked up by a fishing boat and taken to Maui. Another driver drowned and was later found on the bottom of the ocean. My Uncle was taken to Hilo Hospital in distress because of what he had witnessed and because of the hole in his knee. There a supervisor from Ka′u Sugar gave him a ride back to Pahala.
Meanwhile my Aunty Lucy got a call requesting that she report to Hilo as soon as possible to identify some dead bodies. They thought my Uncle Bino was killed in the tidal wave. There she saw rows, and rows of bodies: men, women, and children. It was such an emotional experience for her that it still disturbs her today when she talks about it. She could not find my uncle′s body and thought that he was swept out to sea. She did not know that he was home shaken up by the experience he will never forget, even at his age now.
The railroads from Hamakua were completely destroyed. My uncle says it was amazing to see the force of the water and the destruction it leaves behind. Like my aunt, my uncle was emotionally moved by the event especially by the loss of so many lives of school children at Laupahoehoe and the hundreds of people in Hilo.
Six-thirty A.M., April 1, 1946, is a memory forever embedded in the mind of my uncle, as well as, in the minds of the hundreds who witnessed the destruction or loss of loved ones. It will always be in my heart, too, even though I wasn′t living then. By listening to many stories from people such as my Uncle Bino, I feel in my heart for those people. Through these stories I have learned how devastating the force of water known as a "TSUNAMI" can be.
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All materials © Copyright 1996-2007 Pacific Tsunami Museum Inc.
130 Kamehameha Ave Hilo, HI 96720 tel: 808-935-0926 FAX: 808-935-0842
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Last Revised November 2007
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