Earthquake!

We were woken up this morning by the earthquatke centered just off the Big Island’s NW Kohala coast. The house shook gently for maybe 10 seconds, the wall hangings banged, one cupboard swung open, but nothing fell or broke. As I was waking up, I thought it was maybe a strong wind buffeting the house but then I realized there was no wind sound. There were actually two earthquakes, we felt the first at 7:11am the second weaker at 7:23am. Those times are approximate, but they are definitely delayed from the “official” times (which I don’t have offhand). We are located 260 miles (415 km) from the epicenter.

Source: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Maps/special/Hawaii.php

After the first one, we got up, figured there was no danger and went back to bed—since we sleep in on Sundays. I wasn’t quite asleep when I felt what I thought was a tiny aftershock: just a jitter and the neighbor dogs barked once. I told my wife there was an aftershock, and a few seconds later the house shook a little bit for about 5 seconds, much less than the first time. We didn’t feel any of the true aftershocks, and none of them rattled the wall hangings.

Unless there was some strange localized effects, I doubt there was any damage on Kauai. The electricity never went out, so it was a normal day for us. Maybe some rocks fell somewhere, loosened by the recent rains, but we’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to find out. All the local TV stations from Oahu were not broadcasting at first due to a complete power outage on all the other islands. CNN and Fox news had around the clock coverage at first, but not much to say until reporters from KITV (channel 4) on Oahu were back on the air.

So far, there are reports of rock slides on the Big Island, some bridges out on Maui isolating the town of Hana, and a 100 year-old chimney falling on Oahu, but no deaths. Lots of food spoiled and dishes were broken on the Big Island, bug significant damage was limited to a hospital building, some big roofs on stores, and a few blocked or cracked roads. There were a lot of dry rock walls (no mortar, just stacked rocks) and retaining walls that collapsed, damaging some houses and cars. KITV has more of the story and lots of photos on their website.

We’re not really worried about earthquakes here on Kauai, we know they happen at least every decade on the Big Island because of the volcanism, but like today’s they are not felt stronly here. I think they have tiny quakes on Kauai probably due to the island settling, but I think we have nothing to worry about. Of course, a tsunami is always a threat, but we bought our house uphill about 150′ (50 m) and a mile (1.6 km) from the ocean, on purpose.

Just as an aside, I wonder how long it will take FEMA to update their website:

Source: fema.gov, 14 hours after today’s earthquake

Lonomea Adventure

Back in October, I led a Sierra Club hike to Lonomea, in the Waimea Canyon, and we had quite an unplanned adventure to get home. Lonomea is a hunter’s camp at the end of the maintained trail up Koaie Canyon, which is one of the side canyons of the Waimea River. To get there, we hiked down the Kukui Trail, crossed the Waimea River further upstream, and hiked up the Koaie Canyon trail, for a total of about 6 miles one way.

It had been raining off and on that week, and while there was rain predicted in Lihue the day of the hike, there was only a chance of showers on the West side. Knowing that it is drier in the Canyon, I did not want to cancel the hike. Sure enough, after some mist and a rainbow at the beginning of the hike, we had sunny blue sky the rest of the day. Crossing the river was easy, some people even made it hopping across with their shoes on. I was actually surprised the river was so low, give it had rained earlier in the week.

Photo credit: Scott Pierce

As we hiked up Koaie Canyon, I thought I could hear the stream quite loudly, much louder than usual. However, there aren’t any places until Lonomea Camp where the trail gets close enough to the stream to get a good look. We were all hot from hiking and looking forward to the swimming hole there, but we got a surprise instead. The river was obviously running very high with muddy water, far too dangerous for swimming. In this next picture, you’ll notice that the sky is still blue, even looking inland toward the Alaka’i Swamp where the stream originates:

At this point, I knew we would have trouble getting back across the Waimea River, but given it was so low before, I thought it would still be crossable. This was wishful thinking because the river was about 2 feet higher when we got back to the crossing. I waded out into the current to see how strong it was, but I could barely keep my balace once the water went above my hips. It would not have been so deep if I could stand on the rocks again, but they were impossible to find in the muddy water:

Photo credit: Scott Pierce

We marked the high water line with a stick and searched for another way across. Where there were larger rocks, there were also rapids that were much more dangerous, and nowhere was the river wide and shallow enough. After about an hour, the water hadn’t even started to go down and we were wondering if we would have to spend the night. Looking again, we found a place right near the confluence of the Koaie Stream where we could swim across. This place was actually deeper so there were less rocks and it was far upstream from the nearest rapids.

We made a plan for the strongest swimmers to go across first and signal to the rest how they felt about it. Then, if the weaker swimmers still preferred to camp overnight and wait for the river to go down, at least somebody could hike out and notify our families. As it turned out, the strong swimmers signalled that it wasn’t difficult, and one by one, we all made it across, with the first ones reaching out to help catch the next ones.

We left half our gear before crossing, and some of us had to hike up the 2,200 feet to the rim in our water shoes. We sent the strong hikers ahead to call our worried families, and the rest of the group made it back to the cars by 8pm, with the help of 2 flashlights. Everyone was still a bit wet, some people got a bit cold hiking out, others did not make it to their concert that night, but everyone got home safely. We even felt that the teamwork needed to get across the river had been an empowering experience.

Hawaii Decal

Local Kauaians are usually proud to be Hawaiian, even when they are not ethnically Polynesian. The usual way to show pride in the place you live, regardless of ethnicity, would be to show your flag, However, the Hawaiian flag is really old fashioned and not very Hawaiian looking with it’s horizontal bars and Union Jack:

While the flag is used, you often see a geographical representation of the state instead, in other words, a map. Stylized as it may be, the outline of the islands is still recognizable, especially in Hawaii. I’ve even seen Hawaiian map tatoos. Of course, each island also uses its own outline to further show their local pride. The other day, I saw this window decal on a pickup truck, using a very distorted outline in a clever way:

A Foot of Rain

The storm that gave us a an inch of rain near the east shore dumped 11 inches (28 cm) at the summit of Waialeale, and slightly more in Wainiha, an inhabited valley on the North Shore. When it gets to be that much, I would start worrying about water leaking into the house because the drainage in our yard isn’t that good.

If you like to track such things, the NOAA provides the 24-hr hydrology map for Kauai, updated every 3 hours as far as I can tell.

Mount Waialeale is known as the wettest place on earth, but as with all such claims, it depends on how you count. I have heard of other places that had more rain in a year than Waialeale has ever had, but I think that it has the highest yearly average. Here are some of the best photos of the summit that I’ve seen.

Another Map

The cool thing about this one is that I made it. Rather, I used freely available software and data from the State of Hawaii, and then I tinkered with the settings.

What’s even more interesting is that I figured out how to customize the map by importing locations from my GPS. So this map shows the exact location of the swimming hole pictured earlier.

I must admit that I cheated and used a photo editor to create the ocean. The map had a solid background, and I thought the island looked better with an outline “halo” and gradient ocean shading. The land portion, however, is exactly the output of the map utility.