Heavy rain across Kauai prompts rescues from floodwater

HONOLULU– Several people on the Hawaiian island of Kauai had to be rescued from the water during heavy rain, authorities said Friday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.

Heavy rains that began Thursday afternoon led to the closure of Kauai public schools and the opening of shelters on Friday. Crews worked Friday to reopen several roads closed by landslides, leaning utility poles and overflowing creek water.

Firefighters were busy Thursday night rescuing people, mostly in the communities of Koloa and Wailua, said Elton Ushio, Kauai’s emergency management administrator. He could not yet estimate how many people needed to be rescued or evacuated. But he noted that at least one home had four feet of water.

“And these are residential areas where the water first began to rise, and then it began to approach, you know, in several cases it reached to the lower level of the houses, went up and entered the houses themselves, where people were in need to, you know, be taken out of those houses,” he said.

Kauai residents are used to rain, and this event was not as bad as the 2018 rain storms that set a national 24-hour rainfall record, Ushio said.

Kauai is “one of the wettest places on Earth, in terms of annual rainfall,” he said. “All our lush valleys, deep gorges… that’s because of the rain we get.”

The intensity of the rain was from 6 p.m. Thursday to 6 a.m. Friday, with several locations seeing more than 25.4 centimeters (10 inches), according to the National Weather Service.

Rainfall at Lihue Airport — the island’s only official recording station — broke a 1996 record Thursday with 3.65 inches (9.27 centimeters), said Derek Wroe, a meteorologist with the weather service’s office in Honolulu.

That record was likely to be broken again Friday, based on the more than 11 inches (27.94 centimeters) measured during the 12-hour period from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. at Lihue airport, Wroe said.

Rain subsided after dawn on Friday, but heavy showers were expected from Saturday night to Sunday morning, raising the threat of flooding, he said.