sirens.

This is a video I stole from youtube of the tsunami warning sirens that went off yesterday. I wouldn't recommend listening to it, however, because it gets REALLY irritating. The view is quite nice though. I went to the play on Friday night, so I got home very late and therefore went to sleep late. As I was enjoying my nice dreams, the sound of a siren woke me up at 6am, much to my irritation. I then found out that our Punahou tennis match was postponed because of the tsunami. My house is like 5 minutes away from the ocean, but my parents did not seemed worried, so I went back to sleep. Then at 9am, sirens woke me up again. ugh. I just stayed up after that and watched the news.

So physics. The sirens produced sound waves that travelled through the air and reached everyone's ears to alert us that there was a potential disaster coming. The frequency of the sound waves was fairly low because the pitch of the sirens was fairly low. The amplitude of the sound waves had to be fairly big for everyone to hear it.

2-27-10 Hawaii Tsunami Warning