In The Thursday, March 10 Sun Newspaper, the Sidewalk Talk question asked “Do you worry about a major earthquake around here?”
In what seemed serendipitous, by early Friday morning calls and e-mails started to come into the Sun Newspaper office on Main Street in Seal Beach, a couple hundred yards from the ocean, from concerned colleagues and family members suggesting that anyone in the office “head for the hills,” or at least a higher elevation.
“The warnings were the offspring of a tsunami advisory that came on the heels of the major earthquake and aftershocks in Japan, thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, that by press time had killed upwards of 10,000 people.
While the advisory was significantly less than an official tsunami warning, the concern was enough to cause a stir.
The effect of the earthquake in Japan was expected to arrive along the Seal Beach and Sunset Beach coasts at about 8:45 a.m.
By 8 a.m. curious onlookers, TV crews and public safety officials flooded the areas near the beaches that had been closed to public access. Many of the spectators seemed almost disappointed that not much occurred that could be related to the quake in Japan.
There was very little of the telltale ocean’s receding that would point to a pending rush of seawater known as a tsunami. While the devastation in Japan played out in front of the eyes of the world, the event proved to be not much more than a benign wake up call for the coastal areas of west Orange County.
There were, however, some signs of the Japan quake having an effect locally.
“I noticed as I was crossing the Anaheim Bay Bridge on Pacific Coast Highway on Friday morning that the current, which should have been coming in from an 8 a.m. low tide was going out at 9:30 a.m.,” according to local resident Alan Johnson. “In addition, when I was sailing out of Alamitos Bay on Saturday morning, I noticed that most of the channel buoys were n
to in their normal locations, some as much 200 yards from before.”
While California was spared any major effects, Japan’s plight continued to be beamed on television sets and the Internet all week. Locally, a handful of groups, organizations and individuals organized homegrown relief efforts and vigils to commemorate the plight of the Japanese people.
