Tsunami?

Today was quite an eventful day here on our island, around 10am we got a red alert Tsunami warning, there was a siren that went off and everything! However it was not until some time after 11am that we actually got confirmation of the potential tsunami danger......there had been a reasonable sized earthquake in Samoa earlier in the morning (Samoa was the region worst hit, with a 4m wave and about 100 dead). It's a funny kind of feeling waiting for the wave to come, it was only expected to be in the region of 90cm here in Rurutu, but still we weren't quite sure whether we should pack our bags and head for the hills! My mother in law was most concerned about the bikes left out front of the house! I didn't really know what to do, my first impulse was to go down on to the beach to wait and try to take pictures. Matotea got sent home from school...
...not quite sure why, maybe so we could spend our last few moments together as a family, or for liability. Anyway as it turned out there wasn't too much to see and by 3pm we were in the clear. But it does make you wonder what you really could have done, if it had been a big one. Actually the chances are pretty slim that we'd get anything much over a couple of meters, being as we are slap bang in the middle of a fairly flat piece of ocean floor. And we can count our blessings - at least we don't live in the Tuamotus where even a 2m tsunami could be enough to cause some serious trouble. The only advice offered to those folks living on an atoll was to find the highest point possible and pray, short of shimmying up a coconut palm (which might be more hazardous than braving the tsunami) you'd be pretty hard pressed to escape......living on an island is kind of funny like that, there really is no escape, so you might just as well relax and take life as it comes!