05/25/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1BmJCsJhdN/?mibextid=wwXIfr
There is a clock in Hilo that nobody is allowed to fix. It stopped at 1:04 in the morning on May 23, 1960. Its hands have not moved since.
Fifteen hours earlier, the seafloor had ripped open off the coast of Chile. Magnitude 9.5. The most powerful earthquake EVER recorded on Earth. The wave it threw crossed the entire Pacific in the dark, at the speed of a jetliner, aimed straight at Hawaii.
The sirens went off in Hilo just after dark. The town had heard them before. In 1946, a tsunami had hit the same coast, and the Waiakea side had come through it almost untouched. So the people of Hilo remembered the wrong lesson. They decided Waiakea was safe. Some packed the kids in the car and drove uphill. Many others walked down toward the bay to watch the water come in.
Jim Camp didn't watch.
He was a county liquor inspector that night, a former cop. When the warning sounded he helped a restaurant owner haul pinball machines to high ground, then helped the fishermen tie down their boats. Plain errands, while the ocean quietly pulled itself back from the shore. Then he saw the Canario children. Five of them, alone. He loaded all five into his car and pointed it up the old Volcano Highway. He told the oldest boy one thing: if the water comes, don't stop, keep driving toward the volcano.
The first wave came. Then the second. The crowd on the bridge relaxed. Just like '46.
At 1:04 a.m., the third wave came.
It stood 35 feet tall. Survivors said it arrived with a roar of ripping metal and the booming of transformers blowing out one after another in the dark. One man watched the water lift whole buildings off their foundations. He never forgot the smell of it - the ocean being dug up from the bottom. The wall of water went straight through downtown Hilo, and it took houses with families still INSIDE them.
A young man named Takayoshi Kanda had gone down to the Suisan fish market that night, with his friends, to watch the waves roll in.
His father stayed home.
The wave carried their house into the street with his father still inside it. They found him two days later, when they finally pulled the wreckage apart.
Sixty-one people died in Hilo that night. The lesson that spared the town in 1946 is the same lesson that killed it in 1960.
Jim Camp got his five children to the volcano road. Then he turned the car around and drove back down to the water. He spent the rest of that night at the Wailoa bridge, pulling people out of the wreckage as it floated past - some already gone, some, somehow, still breathing. He could carry five kids up a mountain. He could not carry the crowd off that bridge.
Weeks later, the Canario family sent a note to the newspaper. "Without his timely presence and calmness," it read, "we would have lost them."
And the clock. Workers dug it out of the rubble of the Waiakea settlement building, its hands frozen at 1:04. Someone was going to throw it on the scrap heap. Instead the town stood it back up on Kamehameha Avenue, exactly as the wave had left it.
For decades, Takayoshi Kanda took care of that clock himself. He raked the grass around it. He bought the flowers out of his own pocket. He always left two bouquets there, never one.
"One would be lonely," he said.
He did it for his father. And for the other sixty he had never even met.
The clock is still standing today. This month, 66 years later, the state finally set aside money to move it somewhere people can actually stop, and stand, and read what happened here.
A clock is built to move forward. This one refused. Its hands still point to 1:04 in the morning, so that the next time the sirens sound over Hilo, nobody stays to watch.
