I dont know if this is relevant to the OP, but I recall seeing some news footage from the 2011 Japan tsunami when it hit Oregon and NorCal - they were showing a small beach with a cliff behind it getting inundated in a matter of minutes. Of course, the cliff was OK since we had the footage (the camera was on top of the cliff). It seemed like the water rose and fell like a bathtub against the cliff - it was not a wall of water crashing against it - wave face against cliff face. That would be spectacular to witness, but likely more destructive. The beach was wrecked, but the cliff and cliff-top were OK.
I think the orientation of the beach and cliff and local bottom conditions, and tides, all play a factor, so no telling if the same thing applies for the OP. Granted, the footage showed what looked like about a 10 foot sudden rise in the ocean, not 60 feet.
I think also the footage of the destructive waves we are familiar with rolling across the Japan countryside came in across nearly level coastal plain - they did not roll over a 60 foot cliff before heading inland.
Now, if a 60+ foot rise in the ocean were to happen suddenly, I could see it breaching the cliff top, and then you would have a problem. Probably many problems.
Not really wilderness. The homesite is 7 miles north of Hilo, the second largest city in Hawaii, pop. 45,000+. We’re less than a mile off the main north-south highway.
The lack of infrastructure is because only a few years back the entire area was sugar cane fields.
December 26, 2004: A catastrophic earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia (with a magnitude of between 9.1 and 9.3) generated tsunami waves of up to 100 feet that swept across the Indian Ocean, killing nearly 230,000 people in 14countries.
The height of a wave at landfall is highly dependent on the coastal bathymetry. A tsunami wave traveling across the deep-water ocean might only be a few inches tall with a very long period. If you had a hypothetical, very long 60’ cliff that went straight down another 2000’ underwater the wave would arrive at just the same height it was crossing the ocean.
It’s only when it gets into shallow water that a wave “feels the bottom” and builds in height.
But by the time it reached Ceylon and south India, it was only 10 to 12 feet deep. Even in Aceh the flooding did not appear to reach those on the second floor of concrete buildings. By the Maldives(?) the rise was a few feet, which meant however it went through almost everything.
What I was sking - don’t most of these quakes happen in the Pacific Rim,thouands of miles from Hawaii itself? Therefore the location would have to have extremely optimal contours to aggravate the tsunami height, and would still need to be an exceptionally huge quake.
The news reports I google say the Japan tsunami was 7 feet when it hit Hawaii, 6 feet in some areas of California.
One such quake, the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile, sent waves across the Pacific, striking Hilo and killing 61 people. The waves were 35 ft in Japan and the Phillippines.
The waves at Hilo bay from the 1960 Chile quake were said to be 35 feet (vs. 17 feet elsewhere on the islands). I assume there’s some surf-and-focus effects there?
I was wrong, apparently there are local quakes too…
