Mid-Vows at a Hawaii Beach Wedding, the Ocean Pulled Back. Then the Tsunami Siren Started
During vows at a Hawaii beach wedding, the shoreline suddenly retreated and a tsunami siren began. The groom carried his bride uphill as the wave came in.
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Ashley Morgan, 29, had dreamed of a beach wedding since she was ten. When she and her fiancé, Kenji Tanaka, 31, finally booked a small resort on Hawaii’s Big Island, she said it was the only part of the planning she never second-guessed. Golden hour. Bare feet in the sand. Forty guests in white chairs facing the water.
Their videographer was filming on a gimbal for the first half of the ceremony. By the end, he was running with a shaky handheld camera, and his footage became one of the most talked-about wedding videos ever shared.
The Shoreline Moves
The ceremony was halfway through when guests in the front row started murmuring. Ashley, in her lace gown, was reading her vows to Kenji, in a pale linen suit, when she noticed people looking past her toward the water.
The ocean was leaving.
In the video, the shoreline slides backward, quickly and silently, exposing hundreds of yards of wet, glistening sand and black lava rock that should have been underwater. Coral heads appear. Fish are flopping helplessly in the shallow pools left behind. A few guests stand up to take pictures. A little boy starts to run toward the exposed beach to look at the fish, and his father grabs him by the collar.
Then the siren starts.
Run
Hawaii’s tsunami warning sirens are tested on the first working day of every month, and every local knows the sound. This was not the first of the month. Kenji’s uncle, who grew up in Hilo, was the first person to start shouting. “Get uphill! Everybody uphill, now! Don’t stop!”
An undersea earthquake had struck off the coast minutes earlier. The ocean pulling back was the trough of the wave. It was coming back.
The video becomes chaos. White chairs topple. Guests kick off their shoes and run for the road. Kenji does not wait for Ashley to gather her dress. He scoops her up in his arms and runs, her veil streaming behind them in the wind. On the horizon behind them, the camera catches a gray line rising, wider than the bay.
“Don’t look back,” Kenji shouts. “Just run!”
The Rooftop
The resort’s main building was a four-story concrete structure a few hundred yards uphill, and the staff had already propped open the stairwell doors. The wedding party poured up the stairs and out onto the roof as the wave hit the beach below.
The footage from the rooftop is hard to watch. The water comes through the palm trees not like a breaking wave but like a fast, rising river, brown and churning, carrying the white chairs, the flower arch, a golf cart, and pieces of the beach bar. It surges up against the first floor of the building, through the lobby, and past the pool.
People on the roof are crying and hugging. Kenji sets Ashley down and they count heads.
“Where’s Grandma?”
That is when Ashley realized her grandmother was not there.
June Morgan, 84, had been sitting in the front row in a wheelchair. In the panic, everyone assumed someone else had grabbed her. Ashley ran to the edge of the roof, screaming her name. Her mother collapsed onto the gravel.
Then a groomsman pointed down at the churning water in what used to be the resort’s lawn.
Floating there, slowly turning in the current, was the wedding cake table. It was a heavy wooden banquet table that had flipped upside down, its legs pointing up like a raft. Sitting in the middle of it, soaking wet, holding on to two of the legs, was Grandma June.
She was waving.
The Rescue
The table drifted into a stand of trees at the edge of the property and lodged there as the water began to drain back toward the sea. Two resort staff members and Kenji’s cousin waded out, waist-deep, and carried June up the hill. She had a cut on her arm and had lost one shoe. Otherwise she was fine.
According to June, when the wave came, she had grabbed the edge of the cake table because it was closest. When it flipped, she climbed on. “I raised five kids,” she said. “You learn to hold on to whatever floats.”
After the Wave
The tsunami caused heavy damage along that stretch of coast, but because the siren system worked and people moved uphill, there were no deaths at the resort. The wedding cake, for the record, was never found.
Ashley and Kenji finished their vows three days later, in the parking lot of a church in Hilo, with every one of their guests present. Grandma June sat in the front row with her arm in a bandage. When the pastor asked if anyone objected, she raised her hand and said, “Just keep it short this time.”
More Stories Like This
If this one kept you on the edge of your seat, read our stories about the family trapped in an elevator during a San Francisco earthquake, the mom who outran a wedge tornado to a storm cellar, and the meteor that crashed a birthday party in Arizona.
