SALT LAKE CITY -- People in Hawaii braced for a possible tsunami along with residents along the U.S. west coast. Utahns in Hawaii contacted KSL to describe the scene there.

Rob Andrews, from Highland, is staying at a hotel on Kaanapali Beach on the island of Maui with his wife, three children and his brother-in-law. He told KSL Friday morning that the tsunami warning sirens started going off every 30 minutes around 9 p.m. Thursday.

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Tsunami waves hit Hawaii, sweep across islands

Tsunami waves about 3 feet high hit Hawaii in the early morning hours Friday and were sweeping through the island chain after an earthquake in Japan sparked evacuations throughout the Pacific and as far as the U.S. western coast.

Andrews told us he had just returned to his hotel from the store, where he waited an hour and a half to get food and water.

"(It was) a little crazy. People are trying to get filled up on gas, trying to get groceries; looks like people are trying to get to higher ground. We're actually just staying here at the hotel," he said.

Andrews and his family are staying on the fifth floor of their hotel, so he thought they would be OK when the tsunami hit the island.

Andrews said he is trying to get a flight back to the mainland but everything is booked. The earliest his family can fly out is Sunday.

A family from Salt Lake City staying in a hotel looking over Waikiki Beach in downtown Honolulu told us they were supposed to fly home today. But around 1 a.m. the airport shut down and officials told them to stay at their hotel.

Doug Archibald said, "They told everybody to stay in the hotel rooms, anybody below the third floor move up. Luckily we were on the sixth floor, so we should be OK," he said.

Archibald said after the first tsunami warning, he immediately ran to the store and bought bottled water, peanut butter and jelly, and bread so that if his family got stuck in the hotel for a few days they would have something to eat.

He watched Honolulu harbor from his window all morning. He said a police plane flew along the beach and hundreds of boats tried to make it out to sea.

"There is a line of boats trying to make it out to deep water. They're stretched out for miles. They've been leaving since 10 p.m., for the past three hours. There is just a line of boats trying to get out to sea," he said.

Archibald watched the water rise as the first tsunami wave came ashore. "There were about six people on the pier right down from our hotel and one guy carried a surf board," he said.

He said the water came up the beach higher than normal but it did not reach the boardwalk or any of the hotels. He could see water coming out of storm drains as the water flowed the wrong direction.

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Written with contributions from Shara Park and Randall Jeppesen.

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