I'm getting a "connection refused" notice from Firefox when I click the link. I wonder if that means Metafilter has been swamped.

Heh. I thought I was going to give you links, via waxy.org, to even more videos at archive.org -- but apparently demand for them exceeded even their bandwidth. Instead, if you do BitTorrent and are interested, you can find some firsthand footage (apparently 6 vids, approximately 50MB) from the tracker at http://waxy.org/bt/.

Caution: These vids are impressive, and not at all fluffy bunny stuff.

Oh, God. That story hit me hard, possibly even harder because my husband had just started playing Johnny Cash's version of Bridge Over Troubled Water before I started reading.

Those people. Those poor, poor people. The survivor's guilt must be awful.

That was a terrifying thing to read.

This time I got there. Wow.

Let me plug my Jump Bag inventory lists.

It occurs to me that I've been through a minor version of this -- minor mostly because of two things: 1) we had warning, and 2) Guam, at the time, was primarily US military and the natives.

In 1963, Karen, the worst typhoon in recorded history, hit Guam. There was plenty of warning so the planes had moved to Japan and the ships were out to sea. Most people had prepared for the storm. We had a family of civilians come stay with us in our concrete block home on the base, which turned out to be a good thing because after the typhoon, there was only the foundation left of their house. This happened to lots of people. Boats were moved up the side of the mountains, my mother's giant old wood desk was found a mile away from her school, the beach area was destroyed, a helicopter rotor from a repair shop 1.5 miles away landed in our front lawn.

We didn't get clean water for two weeks (Dad and I rigged a Quonset-hut-panel water collector on the roof, and then I helped neighbors do it, so we'd have relatively-clean water, we still boiled it for drinking) and no electricity for six weeks. It was over a holiday, Thanksgiving, I think, and the Navy and Air Force just fed everybody on the island from the cafeterias for several weeks. The schools mostly became shelter for the many people (mostly natives) who lost their homes (my mother's school was due to be abandoned the next year, they were building a new school of concrete block, the old school was Quonset material and had been abandoned by the Navy as unsafe after WWII, so of course, it became a school).

People were back in new houses, businesses back up, and kids in school six months later. Only five people had died (they took shelter in a concrete block building right at the water's edge and the surge dropped the wall right on them), although a lot of people were hurt.

I think it's clear that the warning and having the military already in place is what kept the typhoon from becoming more of a disaster.

This is going to sound weird, but the videos seemed strangely nonviolent. No towering wall of water ala "Deep Impact." Rather, it seemed like the entire ocean just said, "Right, I want to be over there now," and then went there, in the middle of everything, before I really knew what was happening.

I also get vaguely pissed off at amateur disaster videos where there are people getting swept away and possibly hurt, and the guy with the camera just keeps filming.

Carrie, the way a tsunami comes ashore is dependent on a variety of factors, especially the shape and depth of the shoreline -- they are unlike in both wavelength and speed the usual sort of ocean swells and behave quite differently. In this case it looked much more like a repeated storm swell from a hurricane or a flood. On the other hand, the megatsunami concentrated in a narrow inlet in Alaska after a 7.5 earthquake in 1958 was estimated to be 520 meters high and knocked down trees 200 meters up the sides of the fjord. And there is always the chance that a huge landslide in the Canaries (warning: a pdf) can result in 25 meter waves in Florida.

Concerning the videos, I wonder how much of that is an unconscious attempt to distance themselves from what is going on. In some cases it is clear that the camera is still running, but the person holding it is concerntrating on something else -- personal survival.

Unless the camera operator was trained in swift-water rescue, there's not a lot most of them could have done.

In at least one location the water that came ashore did so in a ten-meter wave.

James, where was that -- Aceh, perhaps?

My getting pissed off may also be an expression of my own inability to do anything about it. And the voyeuristic guilt at watching disasters happen while sitting dry and safe at work.

Marilee, I lived on Guam in 1969-1970 (Turner Road), and Karen was still on people's minds. We went through a much smaller typhoon that year, and the talk afterwards was the "That? You call that a typhoon? Ha!" variety.

I know we went through five typhoons in the two years we were in Guam, but I only remember Karen. We kids were floating on a foot of water on air mattresses while the grownups bailed. My mother always made that kind of thing an adventure, instead of a disaster.

Ernie and I made a donation through the Quakers for the relief effort. That first person account is harrowing.

*shudders*

Kate

Those who don't want to make up their own emergency kits: These pre-made kits look pretty good.

Modify 'em for your own situation, of course.

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