The third night into the birth of our 24/7 newsroom, overnight reporter Dave Dondoneau had one of the busiest nights of his career.

Dondoneau, a North Dakota native, didn't know much about tsunamis, but that all changed with an Associated Press news alert at 1:37 a.m. Wednesday that an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck an area along northern Japan's Pacific Coast and a 6 1/2-foot tsunami was expected to hit Japan. He had the news posted at 1:53 a.m., worked his way to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center site and had televisions tuned to CNN and Fox news. He posted the news that Hawai'i was under a tsunami advisory and then, minutes later, a tsunami watch.

If a tsunami hit here, it would do so at 7:20 a.m. at the earliest. Dondoneau had some time, but he needed to let editors know what was happening, text-messaging City Editor Fernando Pizarro, who called other editors between 2 and 3 a.m. A television reporter from Philadelphia called to find out what was happening, but Dondoneau was too busy to talk.

Dondoneau phoned Ray Lovell of state Civil Defense, who said that if the tsunami watch turned into a warning, sirens would sound and the Emergency Alert System would start. That was posted at 3:08 a.m. Minutes later, he learned that a 16-inch tsunami — not a 6 1/2-foot wave — would hit Japan and there was a measure of relief. At 3:13 a.m., Dave posted that news and then it was time to put together a special breaking-news section with all the information he had. That went on the site at 3:48 a.m. Earlier stories were posted under it.

The tsunami watch was lifted at 5:04 a.m. and various editors, including me, were calling Dondoneau to get something posted. I told him to ignore the calls and make sure we posted the news everyone wanted to see. Just as he was posting, he received word of a 5:30 a.m. press conference at Civil Defense in Diamond Head and woke reporter Mike Gordon up at 5:20 a.m. to drive in from Hawai'i Kai. Gordon arrived just as the press conference was ending but still conducted interviews and gathered information for 45 minutes.

In all, Dondoneau posted eight stories and nine updates. He also posted 12 other stories unrelated to the quake. Reporter David Waite took over from there and continued to update the news throughout the day.

The result?

Taking all the stories and updates together, we drew 118,831 page views and of those, 27,600 were the early-morning posts and updates that went on the site prior to the tsunami watch being canceled at about 5 a.m. The top ranking headlines were "Second surge sweeps Kaua'i parking lot" (15,900 page views), "Receding Waikiki waters leave visitor with knee injury" (15,802 page views) and "5-foot recession of Hale'iwa waters, followed by surge" (14,352 page views).

The multimedia and interactive features associated with our tsunami story were even more impressive. Our photo gallery of the tsunami generated one of our strongest responses ever, with almost 25,000 page views. A graphic illustrating ocean surges drew 8,431 hits and a pair of videos showing tsunami surges drew more than 6,000 views.

What's this all mean? That readers like you are increasingly looking for fresh news, especially on days when a big news story is breaking and the earlier we can get to it, the better. Even though the tsunami did no damage, the appetite for the stories, photos, graphics and videos exceeded the total for the Ala Wai sewage and Kaloko dam stories in March and the Tantalus shooting in July.

As for Dave Dondoneau, once his shift was over, the day was just starting. He still had plenty of time for the golf course.