Jimmy Kimmel Recounts Evacuation Following Tsunami Warning In Tahiti

Jimmy Kimmel has revealed that his evacuation in Bora Bora last week, after the now officially 9.0 earthquake in Japan sent a tsunami warning across the Pacific, was the realization of one of his worst nightmares come true.

In a new blog entry for The Huffington Post, lightly spruced with his signature jovial tone (yet not making fun of the gravity of the situation), the “Jimmy Kimmel Live” host revealed that as a child, he had one “dream” that “stuck with” him “through thin and thick. Tidal wave.”

While a tsunami did not end up affecting the late night host and his girlfriend, Molly, while they were vacationing on the Tahitian island, he revealed it was a dramatic experience that began with him joking about tidal waves, before the earthquake even struck.

“I knew we’d be fine because I operate under the (logical) presumption that tsunamis never strike while one is talking about them or even soon after. So, to keep us safe, from the moment we touched down in Tahiti, I talked about tsunamis non-stop,” Jimmy wrote.

Later though, after the devastating earthquake rocked Japan and sent the tsunami warning across the sea, Jimmy said he tried to keep his family members calm in the wake of the news.

“I spent the next 8 hours lying to my family via email (everything is fine! No, we’re not in the path at all), watching the news, tweeting, googling every nine seconds, screaming ‘where the f*** is Wolf Blitzer?!’ at the television, packing, and calling the guy at the front desk,” Jimmy wrote.

The next morning, however, Jimmy said he woke with a start.

“At 4:30am, the phone in my hut rang and the guy wasn’t laughing. We were to be evacuated immediately,” he revealed.

“The men were in life jackets,” Jimmy noted of the group that amassed. “The women were in hell. The first man, a terrified-looking Indian, said nothing.”

The group evacuated to another Tahitian island where they had to “hike to the top of a hill, and wait it out.”

However, Jimmy said the evacuation was pleasant enough.

“Higher ground was a dirty cement slab, the foundation of a house that wasn’t meant to stand,” he wrote. “But [my hotel staff from the] Four Seasons… was there and then, so was a table with a table cloth, water, coffee, trays of warm banana and walnut breads, even linen napkins.”

Eventually though, the situation passed without incident.

“At 7:30, a ripple roughly the size of a peanut M&M was identified as the wave we’d been waiting for. We had to wait for the follow-up waves before getting the all-clear to boat back. The second wave was even smaller. A third wave never came. The ordeal was over.”

To read the rest of Jimmy’s blog, click HERE.