We're still all sorting out what went wrong with Oahu's emergency response during the quake and it appears there was plenty (even though the quake did no real damage on Oahu). On that day, someone in my family was ill and needed medical attention. We could not get through to Physcian's Exchange -- lines were busy all day. Apparently, the outage took down these systems for a good chunk of the day. Of course, we couldn't reach our physician because she did not have a listed home number so we sucked it up as I had heard from a physician friend that the ER's were insane. Apparently, it was worse than that. This is totally a rumor but something I heard from a reputable friend -- a number or ERs around the island were closed due to the blackout. The Honolulu Advertiser may well have covered this -- their search function is so dismal that I get very wierd results, but I couldn't find it. Bad enough if physicians exchange, which is supposed to divert people from ERs, went down. If the ERs themselves went down then what does that say about Oahu's disaster response capabilities and its ability to care for tourists if, say, a tsunami hit? Will be checking on this today. Again, is a RUMOR -- not confirmed. The Physicians Exchange part we experienced ourselves so can vouch for that.

—Alex, 10/19/06