A large blue box was spotted just offshore of the Makai pier on Tuesday morning.
Michael Nedbal of Makai Ocean Engineering, "Looked through the spotting scope and actually saw the company name on the box. So we did some searching on the internet and found that the name was actually a Japanese company. So we did a little more searching and found out that the company was in a tsunami zone, and they got wiped out from the tsunami."
The large blue fish bin, sitting upright, teaming with wildlife was eventually hauled to shore by the folks at the Hawaii Underwater Research Laboratory(HURL).
HURL Operations Director Terry Kerby says, "If any sea conditions tried to blow this over, this counterweight, which was just getting heavier as these organisms got heavier, and then water got inside, made it stable."
"The mussels on there and those gooseneck barnacles were all still alive. So they had gotten into tropical waters and they were thriving pretty well. Even when they were sitting here they were still going through their feeding motions, even while it was sitting out here on the pier."
But not everything onboard survived, including sea birds.
"Three of them were dead, and there was one that was still barely moving. And there was one standing on top of that one that immediately took off when we got him out of there," said Kerby.
Soon after the discovery they notified the state, which has taken possesion of the blue box…Kerby and Nedbal don’t think it would be unusual for other things to get spotted in the near future.
"A lot of debris has come up on the west coast. So, it doesn’t surprise me that we’re starting to see debris now," said Nedbal.
Kerby says, "So any debris that is on it’s way to Hawaii, anything that has windage like that is going to get here a lot sooner because the wind is going to move it along."
State and federal agencies are still working to confirm if the bin is in fact a piece of tsunami debris.
See the original article at: KHON2 Local News
