Hilo 1946

Star-Bulletin file photo
This picture shows the Hilo waterfront after the 1946 Tsunami.

Two model builders are re-creating
downtown Hilo as it looked before
devastating waves hit in 1946

By Rod Thompson
Star-Bulletin

HILO -- Eighteen-year-old Laura Chock, dressed in her pajamas, stood shin-deep in water flooding her family's downtown Hilo business, the Hawaii Chicken Store.

The first wave of the April 1, 1946, tsunami had hit at 7 a.m. while she slept.

Suddenly a second wave 5 feet high crashed through the front of the store, sending her and other family members scrambling upstairs to their living quarters.

The building survived in 1946, but collapsed in the 1960 tsunami, trapping her parents inside. They survived. Today the old building is being reconstructed.

Retired drafting teacher Tom Hiramoto, 58, and former contractor Glenn Leaman, 45, are rebuilding it and the rest of 1946 downtown Hilo in miniature on a table top at the Pacific Tsunami Museum.

By Rod Thompson, Star-Bulletin
Model builder Tom Hiramoto works on a city block of
downtown Hilo as it appeared before the 1946 tsunami.

The real Hilo has become a city where broad parks replaced buildings leveled by tsunamis, museum director Donna Saiki noted.

"It's so hard to envision what Hilo looked like. We have all this park and open space," she said.

The model will reveal the old appearance, complete with a tiny but functioning "Z" scale model train representing the sugar trains that ran along Hilo Bay.

The tsunami museum opened in 1998 in a former First Hawaiian Bank building. "It bridges the gap between the scientific population and the general population," Saiki said.

Hiramoto and Leaman started the model in September, using tax maps and old photographs.

They found that not a single building in the town is square. "We had problems trying to make a Dutch gable on a building that's askew," Hiramoto said. Even the masonry building housing the museum is not square.

By Rod Thompson, Star-Bulletin
Model builders Glenn Leaman and Tom Hiramoto look over
the model they are building of Hilo as it looked in 1946
before a tsunami hit. Gray areas are city
blocks not yet constructed.

Beyond the well-known stories of the 1946 and 1960 tsunamis, the museum begins with the 1837 tsunami that struck just as missionary Titus Coan finished a sermon in which he called upon God to show Hawaiians his power.

It includes a lesser-known 1922 tsunami, and the one in 1923 in which volcano scientist Thomas Jaggar was warned by seismic instruments. He called the Hilo harbor master, who sent night watchmen through the streets of Hilo ringing cowbells and shouting, "Tsunami, tsunami."

Laura Chock and others had no such warning in 1946.

When she got out of bed, she heard children screaming gleefully in water-filled Mamo Street. "It was like Venice," she said.

Then the second wave rushed into the family chicken shop, drowning live chickens in lower cages, sparing the upper ones.

When the water receded, her family ran down into the street. Children were still screaming. "This time it was fear," she said.

Her father and mother held each other, people around them, struggling inland as the water rushed back to Hilo Bay.

Chock carried her 5-year-old sister while two others held onto her. The water tore off her shoes and a pajama leg.

Finally, two blocks inland, they reached high ground on Kinoole Street. People drove by staring, unaware a tsunami had struck.

As recently as a 1986 tsunami watch, people drove to Hilo Bay to look instead of going to high ground, Saiki said.

Walt Dudley, in charge of museum exhibits, said, "Unless people understand the threat and what it can do, it will all be for nothing."