Bad flooding on Maui
The water is deep enough that people are kayaking in the streets. However, the storm has been much less fun for a lot of people, including the family of my girlfriend, who live in Kula, a mountain community about 3,000 feet up the Haleakala volcanoes.
Yesterday afternoon, due to heavy rain, her family was faced with what her mom described as a "huge wall of water" that looked something like the one above. A usually-dry riverbed on their property ran wild with water and flooded, destroying part of one of the rental homes her father built, and leaving their basement with about two feet of mud and debris in it. No pictures yet, unfortunately, because power has been out at their house since the storm began.
Some homes below their house were destroyed and the roads are covered with thick mud, and undriveable for the time being.
I lived up there briefly and I can tell you how easy it is to forget that in a neighborhood that is now nearly as crowded with homes as an average suburb, you are really up in a remote spot if road access is blocked and the power is out. There is only one road down to the central areas of the island. A small bridge near Robin's family's driveway was knocked out, and now their neighbors on the other side of it will have to take a roundabout, longer route to get down to the main road until it is fixed.
Kula is a pretty close-knit community... this morning when Robin and I looked over pictures and stories in the local papers, she knew just about every person who was quoted in the paper, and recognized the names of people who had uploaded pictures on to their web sites.
Every time a disaster like this happens somewhere in Hawaii, we both note there is a total lack of coverage in the national news, and if it happens on an outer island, the Honolulu papers are usually slow to react and cover it. The one time I remember seeing a Hawaii weather disaster in the national news was after a Kauai water dam burst last year and killed one person. The one death turns a flooding story from local news to national. In fact, last night, in my google searches for news and photos of Kula, I kept pulling up the year-and-a-half old dam story from Kauai.
On the plus side, nobody in the neighborhood seems to be hurt, and the many cats and dogs that inhabit the three-home property are all alright. The three cats in Robin's family, which normally spend their days hanging around outside, all came back shortly before the flood and asked to be let back into the house.
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