As I previously mentioned, my blog has been down and I have been unable to post, so this is from March 9, 2012.
WET & WILD HAWAI’I is a water theme park here in Hawai’i. Today it was the description for the entire Hawai’ian Islands.
I woke up shortly after five-dark-thirty, as Lennie use to say, to the sound of what sounded like hammering or rapid gunfire on the roof. The sound was deafening, as if we were under seige. I listened for a few minutes before my friend Debbie came running into my bedroom, drenched from the rain. “Kathryn, you have to get up and see this! We will never see it again in our lifetime!”
Debbie had been out in the garage/lanai having her early morning coffee and cigarette when the storm hit. She was soaked from having run the 10 feet to the front door. When I looked at the ground in the still darkness, I could see hundreds of mis-shapen golf balls of ice. We were having a hail storm in Hawai’i. Most of the people that have lived here all their lives have never seen hail. And most of the people from the northern part of the mainland see it rarely. It is one of the oddities of nature and does not occur unless conditions are perfect. We turned on the morning news to see what it was like on the rest of the island. On the windward side we were getting the brunt of it. The marine corps base just 4 minutes from here had to be closed down due to flooded out roads. The base sits on a penninsula, forming a breakwall between the ocean and Kaneohe Bay. They were being hit hard.
It has rained for almost the entire month of February and now into March, but this was the worst of it as two storms of different pressures met. Off the coast of Lanikai, which is just 2 miles down the road, someone shot a video of a funnel cloud – something that has not occurred in the Hawai’ian Islands for over 100 years. This was likely responsible for the 60+ mile per hour winds that whirled the rain and hail around the house. At one point you could not tell where the wind was coming from. It sucked empty pails and containers out of the garage and the already water logged ground could not take in the water fast enough. It started to rise above ground level and flooded the side apartment. When Debbie later phoned friends in Honolulu they told her that the rain came down the mountain so fast that there was 2 feet of water running through the beautiful hill-side studio that she had previously lived in. When the worst of it was over, there were about 1,000 families in this area without power. The funnel cloud had briefly touched land before dissipating and one house in Lanikai had been destroyed, along with any trees that had been in its path. There were mud slides and thousands of evacuations. During the pre-storm when it was just heavy rain, one of our neighbors had climbed onto their house and covered the roof with a tarp and sandbags. No one in Hawai’i has ever seen anything like this. Oh, and the temperature was 6 degrees above New York at a chilly 60 F.
February and March seem to be the worst months to visit Hawai’i. It was almost this same date last year that the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan and everyone in Hawai’i was being evacuated. I remember Lennie and I driving to the higher ground of the upper house in Kaneohe. I am guessing that we have had maybe 5 or 6 sunny days since I arrived here, and most of those were just days of partial sun. You have to feel bad for the people on vacation when you see everyone wearing polar fleece hoodies. Right now I am in the house – a house that has no heat and louvered panels of glass in the windows that normally would let in the balmy Hawai’ian breezes. I am wearing a faux sheepskin jacket and yoga pants. I am dressed in grey and black. It feels much like being up north in a cottage during a not-so-nice summer. Many of the restaurants here are open to the beach and the elements, not use to having anything like this kind of weather. All activities are centered around the outdoor beauty of Hawai’i. Even the famous Ala Moana Shopping Center is open to the sky on all floors with strategic bits of roofing to cover escalators and mostly for architectural esthetics. My friend Debbie and I went there one day last week, just to get away from the rain and the cold on this side of the island, only to find flooded streets in Honolulu and dozens of people with brooms trying to sweep back the rain from the store entrances at the Ala Moana. Patrons gingerly walked along the walls, not wanting to step away from the 12 inch overhang that afforded them slight cover on the slippery stone floors. Later we raced back to Kailua so that Debbie could watch American Idol, only to have the power go out due to another windy storm. We had only been in the house for about 2 minutes – just long enough to turn on the lights and the TV when a power line went down, setting the entire hillside on fire.
So everyone here has had enough of the rain, wind, clouds and cold temperatures. And by the way, did I mention the vog (volcanic organic gases)?
Kathryn