First Trip to the Beach after the Tsunami

 This is the beach I often go to surfing, walking with Kona, and for bonfires… it is 5 minutes from base… the closest one to base. It was the first place we went to see what kind of destruction was left in the wake of the tsunami. From what I know of this stretch of beach there were no people living here but there were a lot of fishing boats and shacks with supplies up behind the sea wall…  This tangle of rubble is maybe 300 feet from the ocean… finding a glass float just wasn’t the same with all this behind it…

Here is where the water rushed over the sea wall taking out part of the wall as it went… just ripping through steel and concrete!

A little further down the sea wall this is where the biggest shack on the beach stood. You can’t even tell anything used to be there except for the lack of trees… there is a before picture below this one…

After

Before

This is where we would drive our cars out onto the beach to surf or have bonfires… now it is a 6-foot drop off in some places

Back up in the trees… here is a boat that was left up in a tree, 15 feet off the ground…

And that shack I showed you that just disappeared… well I found it… 100 feet away…

If this is what it is like here… where these were no people and only small fishing shacks it hurts me to think about super populated areas and villages right on the sea that were just demolished…