Storm Lala sweeps 100 Big Island homes off foundations

Highway collapse cuts off Pahala, the region’s only hospital

Tropical Storm Lala moved past Hawaii’s Big Island on Sunday, leaving more than 100 homes off their foundations, several bridges damaged, and parts of a major highway collapsed, as state officials continued searching for possible storm-related casualties.

Governor Josh Green said cleanup had begun across the state and that investigators were still working to determine whether any deaths could be attributed to the storm. “We’re praying that there are essentially no fatalities. The question is a difficult one to answer in some ways,” Green told reporters. He estimated the storm caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage statewide.

Hawaii Emergency Management Director Randy Collins cautioned that the danger had not ended with the storm’s passage. “Many casualties often happen after the disaster,” Collins told reporters. “As people are cleaning things up, they’re working with heavy equipment, chainsaws, generators. They’re working around downed power lines and so forth. That’s when the casualties come.”

According to the New York Times, parts of a major highway in the Big Island’s southeast collapsed overnight, cutting off road access to Pahala, the only town in the region with a hospital. U.S. Representative Jeanne Kapela, who represents the area, described the conditions there to Honolulu Civil Beat. “It’s complete and utter devastation. Families have lost their homes; the entire community is impacted,” Kapela said.

Damage extended to Oahu, where the Honolulu Fire Department received more than 600 weather-related responses by noon local time Sunday. The city reported 147 downed-tree calls, roofs blown off, downed power lines and one swimmer who required rescue.

The National Hurricane Center warned that Lala could become a hurricane again by Wednesday, even after being downgraded over the weekend.

The storm arrived as federal climate scientists tracked a powerful El Niño forming in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean. NOAA projected a 69% chance of what the agency described as “a historic event that would exceed the strength of previous El Niño events dating back to 1950” when the pattern peaks between October and December. El Niño conditions tend to promote hurricane activity in the Pacific while suppressing it in the Atlantic, and the human-caused climate crisis can amplify the pattern’s impacts by increasing the ocean and atmospheric energy available to extreme weather, according to NOAA.

Green’s estimate of “hundreds of millions of dollars in damage” placed Lala below the scale of Hurricane Iniki, the last major hurricane to strike Hawaii. Iniki reached Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale when it hit in 1992, killing at least six people and causing billions of dollars in damage. Last month, Hurricane Fausto menaced the islands before weakening and passing north of the chain.