DRAPER, Utah (ABC4) — A Draper family vacationing in Hawaii was caught in the chaos of tsunami alerts, evacuations, and gas shortages following the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Russia Tuesday and triggered tsunami warnings and watches for much of the West Coast.
Mitch Plant arrived in Hawaii for vacation with his family on July 23. The family is staying in Oahu by the North Shore in Honolulu.
Plant told ABC4.com that the family had just finished up at the beach when they received the alert about the tsunami warning.
“We’re having a good time, and we’re just grabbing lunch, and then we just all got like an emergency alarm on our phones, and it all went off at the same time,” he said. “Everything kind of just went quiet at that point, and we thought it was going to hit a lot quicker. Luckily, they have a good system in that we had a few hours to prepare and kind of get situated.”
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Plant said that they were at a higher elevation than some other people, but it was still scary for him, as a father with his children.
“Having two littles, a one-year-old and a three-year-old, it definitely made it like a lot more nerve wracking, just kind of watching out for them, so we definitely rushed home quickly and just like got our stuff together that we thought we’d need just in case we needed to evacuate, which luckily where we were, we didn’t have to evacuate because we were higher up, but still definitely scary,” Plant described…