The Tamba Island

I’m always intrigued by the variety of stickers you see plastered on signs around Kauai, a sort of local graffiti. They’re usually surf-related, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what they mean. This one was self-explanatory, but very cleverly placed:

Tamba is a small surf shop on the main highway, north of downtown Kapaa in the same plaza as the Kojima store. I first noticed it when they celebrated surfer Andy Irons’s world championship victory with a window painting that said “Andy, you da man!” (I wish I’d gotten my picture with it). I didn’t know anything more about it until I read an article in this week’s Kauai People weekly. Apparently, Tamba is the owner’s middle name, originally the name of a tribal chief in Kenya.

By the way, the Kauai People weekly paper is a great source of local news. It is owned by the Honolulu Advertiser, but they have local journalists, for example Kauai Eclectic blog writer Joan Conrow is a frequent contributor and wrote the Tamba article. They always have stories about 2 or 3 local people, usually small-business owners, volunteers, and other people who make a difference on the island, as well as local events and festivals. Residents get the paper in their mailbox every week, but it’s also available online.

I Made the Front Page

Source: The Garden Island newspaper (I hope it’s not considered bad form to lift the newspaper’s masthead–I won’t do it again).

Sorry for the lack of posting here, I’ve been busy with other projects. One of those came to fruition in a big way yesterday, if you consider being quoted on the front page of the Garden Island newspaper “big.” Here’s a link to the story, and here are the photos and their captions as they appeared in the print edition:

Source: Nathan Eagle, the Garden Island newspaper (2008/02/10) “Some hikers say a state-registered historic coastal trail at Moloa’a Bay, pictured here Friday, was inaccurately mapped. They claim the landowner, Moloa’a Bay Ranch, has created a new path that runs more makai—at times along a rocky slope instead of grassy meadows.” “Andy Kass, an avid hiker from Kapa’a, uses a GPS device Friday to determine where the traditional path skirting Moloa’a Bay is located…”

Source: Nathan Eagle, the Garden Island newspaper (2008/02/10)

In another post, I’ll give some more background about the historical coastal trail and my maps.

Accident Scene

I happened to drive by this accident scene yesterday soon after it happened. Since I had my camera, I slowed down and got a lucky shot (apologies to the drivers behind me). You can see the base of the pole in front of the white stick, and you can just feel the tension on the hanging wires:

I resisted blogging about it because I don’t feel the need be a local reporter, nor do I have the time. Accidents are mostly of interest to locals, and while I’d love to reach out to them, the newspaper does it better. Except when it doesn’t:

Source: kauaiworld.com on Nov 2, 2006, photo by Adam Harju. Poor quality is due to enlargement.

Next time I’ll call them up and ask if they take submissions.

Wailapa Dam Break Photos 2

Floods are thought of as acts of nature and many of the people affected by this tragedy want it to be known that its origin is man made, so it is now being called a “dam break” or “dam breach.” However you look at it, the effects are impressive. Wailapa Road just east of the stream is reopened, and I was finally able to go back in the area for some more photos. This is the Wailapa stream bed further downstream of my previous photos, next to the dirt road to Rock Quarry Beach (Kahili Beach). Here, the stream leaves the flat agricultural (now residential) land and cascades down 200 feet (60 meters) to Kilauea Stream near sea level.

The picture above is the stream seen from the road. It arrives from the upper-left through a wide area that I believe is a man-made pond, curves around out of sight to the lower left, and then crosses right to some falls in the next pictures. During the flood, much water went straight over at the top of the picture, washing away a driveway that used to be behind the trunk in the center. You can see branches piled up in front a tree that withstood the flow and some building material washed up in the trees in the foreground.

There were some homemade signs and some printed Dam Mad signs posted in this area asking for an independant investigation of the disaster.

Source: Matt Reifslager via Julian Miller

These photos show the waterfall, from the road-side above, and after crossing where the driveway used to be below. I never knew this waterfall was here, or even the stream for that matter. It was a small stream before the dam broke, and the vegetation hid the terrain. A friend refers to it as Bette Midler’s falls, so maybe she owns the property around here. In additions to all the erosion, there is a lot of re-bar in the middle of the falls and you can see a cement and stone wall below. I wonder if there was some sort of construction here that was totally destroyed. I’d be interested in seeing photos of this area before.

These photos show the extent of the erosion all down the stream bed. Above is looking down from the falls. Below is from another place on the bluff looking at where Wailapa stream meets Kilauea stream. It’s hard to get a sense of scale on this last one, the current stream is the brown flow at the right of the alluvial deposits, and those are tree trunks on the opposite bank.

There are more photos of the devastation on The Garden Island website: page 1, page 2. They have some pictures of the reservoirs from helicopters, which I will probably never get to fly in.

Wailapa Flood Photos

You may have heard about the flood tragedy on Kauai where a dam broke after heavy rains and washed an entire valley out to the ocean. Two people have been found dead and 5 more are missing, all from a house that was completely swept away by the wall of water and debris. Here’s one article about it in the newspaper.

I haven’t had time to blog about the circumstances of the dam break yet, but I went with a friend to take some pictures that I want to post ASAP (as soon as possible–for the non-English speakers). We took these photos about half a mile makai (towards the ocean) from where the flood crossed (and damaged) the main highway. The large versions of these photos are slightly larger and higher quality than usual.

Here is the property where we walked down to the Wailapa stream-bed. It’s at a bend in the stream near a reforested area, so the flood create a log-jam here and spread out onto several properties. The debris in the foreground is the high-water mark, the pile in the background is the log-jam:

Here is the log-jam made up of huge piles of broken tree trunks and branches. There were some pieces of housing material here and there. The further pile is about 30 feet (10 m) high. The house on the other side of the flooding was spared.

This is looking upstream, the flood-waters came directly towards this position. The reservoir is still draining, or they are pumping it out because normally this stream does not run. The main damage of the flood was that it uprooted trees which then caught on more trees, eventually ripping up small forests on its 3 mile run to the ocean.

This photo is looking downstream, where you can see the stream bends to the right, and the replanted forest straight ahead was leveled.