At least one person died in a storm-related vehicle crash on Hawaii’s Big Island after Hurricane Lala slammed the state late Saturday night.
Gov. Josh Green confirmed the fatality and said the powerful storm tore roofs from 19 buildings, calling Lala an “enormous storm.”
As Lala moved slowly past the Big Island, heavy surf battered the shoreline, fierce winds bent palm trees, and swollen waterways carried fast-moving runoff from relentless rain that was driven almost sideways.
By Sunday morning, the National Hurricane Center said Lala had weakened from a hurricane to a tropical storm.
More than 130,000 customers were without electricity Sunday morning across Hawaii’s three largest islands, according to the outage tracker poweroutage.us. Green said at least three hospitals had switched to generator power.
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A search-and-rescue operation involving Civil Defense, the National Guard and the Coast Guard was launched after flash flooding appeared to sweep several occupied homes off their foundations in the coastal communities of Na’alehu and Wai’ohinu, near the southern tip of the Big Island, Hawaii County Mayor Kimo Alameda said early Sunday.
“What makes this very challenging is that there’s rushing water, there’s debris, and there’s boulders on the road and it’s dark,” Alameda said.
As of 2 a.m. Sunday in Hawaii, Lala was centered about 105 miles (170 kilometers) west-northwest of Kailua-Kona and roughly 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Honolulu. Tropical-storm-force winds extended up to 175 miles (280 kilometers) from the storm’s center.
Lala was sustaining top winds of 70 mph (110 kph) and moving northwest at about 15 mph (24 kmh). Forecasters expect it to regain hurricane strength midweek once it’s well west of the island chain.
By the time Lala’s completely gone, some higher-altitude places on the Big Island, dominated by the towering Mauna Kea volcano, will have been hit with as much as 35 inches (89 centimeters) of rain, forecasters said, enough to loosen steep slopes where some of the 210,000 islanders live off the grid in improvised housing.
