We're OK for now

Hi, everyone. Oddly enough, I had just created this blog a few days ago, but hadn't posted anything yet. Little did I know that the first post would be about something like this.

Wow. I mean, what can I say? Katrina and I are OK right now, and we feel very lucky and blessed. It is absolutely crazy here, though. A few parts of the island aren't too bad, actually, and some places have power and water. The village where Katrina and I live, Alega, is not one of them. We don't have power or water currently. It's not quite yet summer here, so it is not insanely (as in equatorial) hot right now, but we're already having some hot days, so who knows what it's going to be like today. Our house itself is in great shape, though. No flooding at all.

The main "city" (I use the term "city" very loosely here), Pago Pago, is just destroyed. I mean, we went to a small grocery store on Monday for a few things, and yesterday, that store was completely trashed. Everything destroyed. There are a lot of buildings that are just not *there* anymore--they were totally washed away. There are large boats lying upside down on the other side of tall buildings. No idea how they even got there. Smashed buses, wrecked cars flipped over, you name it. Rubble and thick dust everywhere. I don't know what the news networks are showing back in the States, but it's sort of like a managed chaos here, if that makes any sense. Katrina and I are at the hospital right now. She's working in the ER and in the morgue. Right now there are 26 people dead, but they've just repaired a bridge going past the village of Leone, and I think there may be more dead arriving from that part of the island today. There's also a dive team being flown in from the US, and I imagine they will recover some bodies, as well. I'm sure that some people got swept out to sea when the tsunami itself started hitting. They brought in a couple big refrigeration units yesterday to start storing the dead bodies, but as is typical here, no one realized they needed to plug the units in until this morning, so there is definitely some decomposition going on.

I was helping yesterday doing "missing persons" stuff. We were set up in the hospital chapel taking names, descriptions, clothing, distinguishing marks, etc. of missing family members, neighbors, etc. The missing persons stuff is not actually too bad right now. We've now got it down to 2 missing people, in fact, but I don't have much hope for those cases.

Probably one of the big overarching things here is that the island was quite simply not prepared for anything like this. And we all knew it. That's the really sad part. There was no warning system in place, there are no real sirens throughout most of the island, no police cars driving up and down the streets telling people to evacuate, etc. Nothing. The earthquake itself hit a little before 7am Tuesday morning. It was intense, and it was *long*. I mean, it lasted a little over two minutes. If that doesn't seem long to you, try looking down at your watch and saying, "go!" Then wait for 2 minutes + and imagine your house shaking, stuff falling, dishes and lamps rattling, etc. Then tell me that 2 minutes doesn't seem very long. It was big. After it was over, there was nothing for maybe five minutes. The radio station was literally telling people, "no need to worry--there will not be a tsunami. Go about your business." So some people down in Pago went out into the streets. We didn't have a radio handy, so we didn't hear any of that nonsense. Then our dog started barking like crazy. Katrina ran outside, and waves were crashing over the road in front of our house. We threw some water and food in a bag fast and ran out the door. At that point, the first wave had receded, and you could see almost the entire coral reef right in front of our house, so we knew another wave was coming. We ran down the road toward a path that goes straight up into the mountains behind our house, and there was someone driving a pickup truck down the road. We hopped in the back of the pickup, and rode down to the path. Our whole village is actually a little better organized than some--it's pretty neighborly. So everyone from the village was hiking it up the mountain. Still, there was almost no communication. No official word from the government or anything. The governor was off-island in Hawaii, so who knows what he knew about it. We all waited at the top of the mountain for maybe 45 minutes, and then we got some kind of word that all was clear. So we hiked back down to our house. Our home backs right up against the mountain, so our next fear was of falling rocks. It seems like we're OK there, though.

The part of the Tongan trench where the epicenter of the earthquake was located is probably about 80-100 miles away, and the tsunami hit here within 15 minutes. Man, that is a *fast* wave. I mean, that's what, almost 400mph? Amazing. We had another tremor this morning about 4am, but no tsunami from it. Who knows what will come over the next couple days. I know it's certainly not unusual to have more aftershocks even several days later, so we'll just have to keep an eye on things.

Katrina and I were supposed to leave the island tomorrow (Thursday) to head back to the States for a month. Not sure yet if we'll be able to leave then. The next flight out would be on Sunday (there are only two flights per week in/out of here). We heard two big planes coming in this morning, so that's a very good sign. Regardless of what you may have heard back in the States, the airport had a lot of debris on the runway, and has taken some effort to get cleaned up. SO, planes may be able to get in/out of here now, but the flights might be taken up with injuries needing to get to the hospital in Honolulu. We won't know for sure on that until a bit later. Hopefully we'll know today, though.

Katrina took a bunch of great pictures yesterday, but we walked out the door without the cable to hook it up to the computer here at the hospital, so I can't upload those yet. Keep checking back in here, though, and I'll hopefully get some shots up soon.

Thanks so much to you all back home who are thinking of and praying for us here. There will be many dark days ahead for the people of American Samoa. And apparently, the nation of Samoa (or Western Samoa, as it used to be known) got hit harder than we did. The capital of Samoa is Apia, and we've heard some bad stories from there so far. Katrina and I had visited (Western) Samoa back in July, so we can imagine very much how disastrous it could all be there. Most of Apia is at sea level, and many of the villages are low-lying.

Right now, the hospital here in American Samoa is under more control than you would think. There are enough workers and everything. Inexplicably, the supplies division decided to shut down to do inventory, though. People will be coming in with more respiratory problems soon from all the dust, but we can't give out any masks because the supplies department shut themselves down. Crazy, I know.

I'll be making updates here as often as I can.
Please spread the link to this blog around to everyone you can think of that might want to know what's going on here. We can't access Facebook, for instance, so please post this link on Katrina's Facebook page. I may be the only person with a US area code who does not have a Facebook page, so just let people know via email or whatever about this blog. Some people may not be able to get in touch with us, and I'd love to know that word is getting around to folks back home.

Thanks again, and I'll be in touch.
Don't hesitate to email, though I may not be able to get back to you anytime soon. Just keep checking the blog. You can leave comments here, as well, and they are much appreciated.

Peace to you all,

Mark