Tsunami Paranoia

Last night around 6:30 one of our students came breathlessly into my office announcing that the Cayman Islands were under a Tsunami warning because of the Haitian Earthquake. We quickly let him know that in fact there was never a tsunami warning only a tsunami watch and that it had only applied to eastern Cuba and the Island of Hispaniola (on which sit Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Further it had expired over an hour earlier. Never the less, for the rest of the night we had to assure restless students who came in after getting texts from friends, that we weren't all going to be washed away by a giant wave. It is amazing how quickly rumors fly on a small island. It was a reminder though that while tsunami's are rare in the Caribbean they are not impossible and with the Cayman Trench a mere hundred or so miles from Grand Cayman a magnitude 7 earthquake there would pretty much wipe out the Cayman Islands. We morbidly joked for the rest of the night that our tsunami evacuation plan involved two bottles of rum and kissing our rear ends goodbye as there really is no high ground on this Island (besides the trash dump). Oh well, another day in paradise.