Tropical Storm Gita took us all by surprise. My best friend from back home came to American Samoa for a four day visit. We had spent most of our time indoors due to a monsoon that had hit us on Tuesday night. The rain was so heavy that they had cancelled school for the rest of the week. On my walk to school Wednesday morning I had to walk through calf deep water to get to school. Once arriving at school they informed me that it would be cancelled for the day. I was more than thrilled because that meant I got to spend the whole day with Karlee instead of just half of the day. The rain had just continued to fall until Thursday. When I was listening to the radio on Thursday they had said the island had gotten 16.4 inches of rain since Monday. I have never seen it rain like that before. While driving to town to go do some sight seeing we took one of locals along to drop them off at work. She continued to tell us in Samoan that they think a tropical storm might be coming and the flight could get delayed on Friday. This isn’t the first time that I had heard of a tropical storm and been warned of this so we just shrugged it off because hadn’t even heard about it on the radio yet. As we were heading back to our small little island on Thursday night we had another person warn us of the weather that was coming in but I was still skeptical because I hadn’t heard it on the radio and only two people had warned us. To put Karlee at ease we decided to just play it safe and go stay at a hotel for the night. Little did we know that was going to be a very smart decision. After gathering clothes for the night and all of Karlee’s belongings we traveled back across the ocean. The sea was anything but calm and it was down pouring so we were all wet by the time we had gotten off of the boat. We had headed to the hotel that was in a bay and were far away from the open ocean. When we got to the hotel I checked in and was handed a paper that had said tropical storm to hit American Samoa Friday morning. I still had very little concern for the storm. I then decided to text my family and tell them what was going on so they were aware of what was happening. I also told my brother Jared because he loves watching the weather. All of them were already asleep so they wouldn’t receive the messages until the morning. At around 1:30 am local time I get a call from brother saying he was concerned of the weather and I should be prepared for what is about to happen. I assured him we were fine and that we had the supplies needed to keep us safe. The winds came in the middle of the night and did not stop until around 5 that evening. All the roads were flooded due to all the rain that we had been receiving. Power lines were down everywhere. Trees were snapped in half and roofs were torn off of homes. It was a mess. We ended up being stuck at the hotel until Sunday morning. When Karlee was finally cleared to fly out. We were fortunate enough to have power and very little water. Most of the locals lost power on Friday morning and did not get it back until Sunday afternoon. It is now Tuesday and I have yet to have power at my house and some villages are also still out of power. School has been cancelled for the week due to the damages they have sustained. On island there are lots of trees that have fallen down. We also had our internet tower fall down on a house thankfully no one in the house was hurt. Also no one in all of American Samoa had been killed in this storm. Many people were very unprepared or unaware of the storm coming and it took us all by surprise.
Love, Abby
