You know, the lava fountains we have every couple of weeks is exciting, sometimes you get earthquakes or tsunami watches. We get snow on Mauna Kea (probably lots today) and then there is the possibility of a bit of rain.
We have had a Kona Low (kinda a cyclone) here in Hawaii the past few days. How bad can it be? There is a dam on Oahu that may fail and people have been told to pack a “GO BAG”. We have had wind up to 50 MPH gusts or higher at my house, the Kona airport shut down for a while. Up on Mauna Kea there is the storm warning and 125 MPH gusts. As for the rain, so far today (as of 9:30 pm) just about 11 inches. That would not be so bad, but the storm has been going for days and expected to last at least through tomorrow. Now if we could just get the heat of the lava to dry things out.
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I hope you, your family and the rest of the people there remain safe. Please keep us updated.
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So the storm(s) finally passed. About 3 of them.
A tree from my far entrance came down and took out all of South Kona I hear. It took down a high voltage line that really had no business being run on the dead end feeder serving 8 farms, but I digress.
My solar was working and I still had utility power because I am fed from the next street over. I didn’t know the neighbors were out of power. The utility showed up almost instantly because this was a big outage. The next morning everyone else had power but me. High winds took out the line from the adjacent neighbors pole to me. By the way, that power line is still on the ground and I used propane and solar to ride through. I just paid a guy $1,100 to clear trees on my property to that pole. The utility didn’t want to run the line back up the pole until I removed trees that would take it down next storm.
So what was the outcome? One nearby farm had over $10 million dollars. I had no big loss except for some of those garage canopy things from Costco, and all the stuff stored underneath.
So we have massive wind and even more massive rain. My weather station reported 15 inches of rain in a 3 day period! Some ares of the island got 25 to 27 inches in March. Winds gusted 60 to 75 mph but “Highest Recorded Gusts (Big Island): Extremely high wind gusts were recorded nearby at Puu Waawaa (135 mph) and the Mauna Kea Summit (110 mph) during this period.”
SO all in all, I suffered little damage and between solar and propane for the backup generator I did better than many. The overcast and cloudy skies from the storm AND the volcano have hindered seeing the actual blue sky except for short durations.
The only plus has been the semi weekly eruption of Kilauea when liquid rock shoots up into the air.
Then again, there is tonight, May 23rd. About 7 or so miles from me there was a 6.0 quake that lasted perhaps 20 seconds and it was tremendous. Not only felt across the Big Island, but also on Maui and even Oahu. No tsunami was generated but lost of stuff on the floor and we have some land/rock slides across a few of the roads, but no major damage reports yet. I am supposed to give a church tour at 8:30am and then there is supposed to be a wedding just after 9am. Since the attendees for the wedding are local, I am guessing it may be postponed. (It wasn’t and it and the tour went off as scheduled).
Still, we call it Paradise 
Glad to hear you are ok. Haven’t seen too many details on damage but a 6.0 definitely rattles things.
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I honestly don’t know why the network news has been so silent. People here are saying that they feared for their lives. We get quakes and have had a 6.9 that was much more tame than this. Because we live on rock and not soil, we don’t get houses sliding down hills and so on. Still we are used to quakes but the location of the epicenter can make a world of difference. We often have earthquakes, one was 6.9 with a 6.2 shortly thereafter. This one, although less, people said they thought they would be goners.
You probably answered your own question about news coverage. No houses sliding down hills…
I didn’t hear anything on the news. Happy you’re ok
Lavarock, reading bad events last few days on Big Island. Please check in so we know you are ok.
Still OK out here So Thursday I had to go up island to take a friend for a medical appointment. I was just starting the long drive home when I saw a cloud of smoke in the field across from the shopping center. I knew there was a fire station just a few thousand feet away so headed down the road. As I got further away, I saw even more smoke. I was about 20 mile away and the wind was quite strong as it always is, but could smell the smoke. The popup on my phone said the road above my friends house was closed and they were (in an abundance of caution) opened evacuation enters.
I turned around and went back and stayed about 3 hours. The fire headed south from where it started and they brought in some helicopters with water drops because this is not an easily accessible vehicle location. They finally opened the road this morning, but the western road (the only other official road) was open the whole time. Recently they created an evacuation road for that development so that if the main road is blocked, people can still get out.
This is just another day in Paradise as I say. By the way, another lava fountain is expected in the next couple of days. This will be something like the 51st in the past year and a half. At the moment just glowing and smoke from Kilauea. However it is not very impressiv yet as no fountaining (sometimes 1500 feet in the air).
With the exception of the recent 6.0 quake, most all these things are happening far from me.
