Tsunami Story: Steve

Steve Atwell: World Teach Volunteer, Elementary School Teacher, Village of Vatia

 

It’s been an interesting two days here in American Samoa. I spent a good portion of the day remarking how strange it is to be in such a small portion of the world that is suddenly rocketed to international recognition, especially given the circumstance.

 

For the past two weeks, I’ve been working on a unit on plate tectonics with my science classes. For my fifth graders, we have been talking about volcanoes, but for seventh and eighth, we have been discussing earthquakes and tsunamis.

 

Yesterday morning, I was sitting in my living room, eating a bowl of LIFE cereal on our surfboard, turned make-shift table, and looking over the answers to an earthquake crossword puzzle that I had given to my students the previous day. I started for feel low vibrations shake the house. The bus driver lives behind our house and usually leaves for work about this time and I assumed that he had the bass turned up unusually loud this morning.

 

As the vibrations continued and intensified, I looked down at my worksheet, over at my textbook and realized that this was too forceful to coming from the bus’ subwoofer. I went to the front door and opened it to look out into the yard. I watched some high school kids stop in the street and look around the village. My roommate, Alex, came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway as we watched our neighbors dog stammer around the front yard both confused and scared.

 

As the earthquake continued to shake the house, we watched as the papers on our table began to slide to the floor, water in our dish basic sloshed from side to side and a plastic vase fell off the shelf and onto the floor. The earthquake lasted for what felt like a minute, and then things settled back to normal. Not sure what to make of things, Alex headed to school and I continued to ready myself for the day.

 

I had just put on my uniform when Alex returned triumphantly to the house to inform me that school had been cancelled. He had been informed by one of the student teachers that school was cancelled due to the earthquake. Not sure what to do and failing to recognize the full magnitude of the situation, we watched from the front door as students streamed down the street and back into their houses.

 

About five minutes later, the town elders began to ring the bells and the call was echoed throughout the village. Alex and I walked to the front yard and began to sense a degree of panic in the air. The pre-kindergarten teacher yelled from her front yard that we were in danger and needed to get to higher ground. At this point, we began to hear an audible slurping sound and watched as the water level in the bay in front of our house began to go down. We scuttled to pack our belongings not sure of what to expect – lap top, iPod, camera, electric toothbrush. Alex ran out the door toward a pick-up truck about 200 feet down the street and I grabbed a fistful of T-shirts.

 

I stepped from the front porch – the slurping sound had become nearly deafening – and people screamed from the back of the truck to run as fast as I could. I slammed the front door and ran full speed for the truck – still clutching the t-shirts in one hand. I got to the truck and hoisted myself headfirst into its bed.

 

The driver accelerated out of town as a wave began to rush against the sea wall and cover the road behind us. As we raced up the mountain, we looked over our shoulders to see the road fully submerged and the water beginning to spill into our front yard.

 

We got to the top of the mountain and found half the village perched on top and looking down over the bay. Together, we spent the morning watching the bay drain and swell and wondering what was left of our village.  With limited access to news information, misinformation on the mountain ran rampant with conflicting stories and a wide range of reports regarding the degree of the destruction in our village. There were reports of widespread damage, that the earthquake had destroyed Hawaii, and that there might be impending food shortages. However, despite the news, we felt comforted seeing the smiling faces of our students and hoping that the ones we didn’t see had made it to higher ground elsewhere.

 

By lunchtime, Alex and I were parched and needed food. We hiked to the next village up the mountain and watched as 25 cases of SPAM, 100 loaves of bread, bag after bag of chips, and countless bottles of water were being loaded into pick-up trucks. We were informed that the Tsunami had hit both sides of the island – our side had received less of the damage – and that there were approximately 1000 people taking refuge in the mountains.

 

This was the first time we were able to recognize the scope of the disaster. We were informed that 10 people had been killed in Pago Pago and that nearly all of the territories capital had been flattened. Worst yet, there were reports that a larger wave had yet to arrive.

 

Upon hearing the news, we decided to return to the mountain top with the rest of village and await word that it was safe to return home. During this time, I borrowed Alex’s cell phone – I had left mine on the table – and finally got a signal to call my sister in Hawaii and my mom back in Virginia.

 

We spent the afternoon, eating Oreo’s and playing with the kids of our village, before returning home to survey the damage. In the end, we were very lucky and damage was limited to a muddy living room and standing water in our kitchen. Pago Pago had is much worse.

 

Without power or potable drinking water, we sat on the front steps of our neighbor’s house and caught our breath after a long day and were sitting there when the pulled up. I spoke with one of the volunteers who lived further inland and found out that she still had electricity and running water. We caught a ride with our neighbors and headed in that direction. Having heard of total destruction in Pago Pago, we braced ourselves for the worst.

 

We drove through town and saw mangled cars, overturned buses, torn apart buildings, stone walls reduced to rubble, fences shredded and mangled soccer goals. Numerous small ships had been pushed hundreds of feet inland. Whole stores were gutted, cars pushed horizontally up against buildings, and one drainage ditch was filled with the scraps of dismantled cars. We watched people load bags and bags of buns from the local McDonalds- it had been boarded up – and we stared in awe a forklift slowly made its way down the street.

 

Alex and I spent the night in relative comfort last night and will shortly begin the trek back through Pago Pago to help repair our village, comfort our students and find ways we can help the clean-up effort in the coming weeks. It was quite a humbling day.