Tsunami Alert!

It's 9 am, I'm sitting at the break room with the surgeon, waiting for the first case of the day - an arthroscopy. A nurse walks in and asks casually, "Did you hear about the earthquake off of Solomon Islands? Now there's a tsunami warning for all of Australia's east coast."

Wow, tsunami warning for all of the east coast. That's a pretty big deal. Hervey Bay is right on the coast - the beach is only a twenty-minute walk from where I live. So if a tsunami hits, Hervey Bay will definitely get some serious damage, and the hospital will definitely see some serious action. Luckily Fraser Island just off the coast will take some of the blunt if one comes our way. If an underwater earthquake happens in the Pacific, a tsunami may hit California too. But I'm sure my family in Fresno, being 200 miles inland, will be safe and sound.

So we go through the day like usual. The nurses update us on the news in between cases. At the end, it turns out to be nothing. For Australia anyway. People in the Solomon Islands are not so lucky. They did get hit by a tsunami, with a death toll of twenty people now.