As recovery efforts continue throughout Japan, thousands are picking-up the pieces on the big island of Hawaii as well.

Three rounds of four foot waves came crashing to shore early Friday in the coastal city of Kona; just part of a ripple effect created by the tsunami in Japan.

NewsCenter 16 talked to a former Elkhart couple that lives close to where the water started rushing inland.

Jim and Joni Lebiedzinski moved to Hawaii for sunsets and beaches, two things they couldn’t find on the front page of Kona’s Saturday paper. Instead, there were pictures of destruction taken along the city’s main shopping district.

"We’ve been there. We eat there. We go down there all the time and it's really sad that these people are in this position. It's also very scary,” Joni Lebiedzinski said via Skype.

The water pushed debris onto streets and later pulled an entire home out to sea; a fate a handful of cars saw as well.

By Saturday the U.S. Coast Guard condemned the city’s main pier, the only place suitable for large cruise ships. With no pier, locals fear a huge decline in tourism revenue.

“This is a very small community where everybody knows everybody. So everyone is impacted when something like this happens,” Lebiedzinski added.

Luckily for these Elkhart natives, their home is nestled six-hundred feet above sea level, two miles from the coastline. Even so, they’ve still had to endure the impact of hurricanes, earthquakes, volcano warnings and now a tsunami.

“My girlfriend called and asked if we were ready to move back to Indiana. I told her no. Right now this is where we’re at and this is where we’re staying,” Lebiedzinski concluded.

So far the cost of the damage from the waves in Hawaii is not clear, but officials predict they will be in the millions of dollars.