As Hurricane Lane inched toward Hawaii on Friday, its outer bands bringing landslides, floods and power failures to parts of the archipelago, the mayor of Maui found himself hoping for the last thing he expected to want this weekend: rain.
Three fires had broken out in West Maui, he said, possibly caused by downed power lines and likely stoked by the whipping winds.
By the afternoon, two fires were contained but still burning, and the third, affecting about 1,500 acres, was about 40 percent contained.
“We were expecting flooding, high winds, big surf — we weren’t expecting very little rain, heavy winds and a big fire,” Mayor Alan Arakawa said. “We’re hoping for just enough rain to put out the fires, not enough rain to have mudslides after that.”
But officials caught a break amid the chaos: By late afternoon, the National Weather Service had downgraded Lane to a tropical storm, an intense downshift from the Category 3 hurricane it had been just 24 hours earlier.
The storm, which was traveling only a few miles per hour, was expected to continue weakening. But the agency warned that the storm would continue to pose a risk for flooding and could still hurl winds of up to 70 mph.
“We dodged a bullet,” Mayor Kirk Caldwell of Honolulu said at a news conference. But he added that “doesn’t mean it’s over.”
Forecasters expected the storm to keep moving north before making a westward turn Saturday, and it was expected to pass close to the central islands by Friday night.
Lane’s slow speed means that it is likely to dump large amounts of rain. Lingering hurricanes can cause devastating flooding and billions of dollars of damage, as Texans learned last year when Hurricane Harvey stalled over the state.
On Maui, the fires left one woman burned and in need of an air evacuation to Oahu. Officials said more than 900 people were taking shelter in the county, although at one point, a hurricane shelter had to be evacuated because of flames in the area.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
from pulse.ng - Nigeria's entertainment & lifestyle platform online
from LexxyTech Corporation https://ift.tt/2PCliCY
0 Comments