HAWAI'I LIFEMaui Tsunami Update – Kahului Harbor Gets a Wash Down
This morning, as soon as the police opened up the Kahului Harbor, I walked down from my office to check to see if my daughter Brianna’s six-man canoe had floated out to sea and if my 2-man canoe was broken up. We have paddled for many years with Na Kai Ewalu Canoe Club in Kahului and store the canoes there. Fortunately, all of the canoes at the harbor were intact including those from neighboring Hawaiian Canoe Club. Club members must have done the midnight run to move the canoes because they had all either been moved, or stored in the canoe hales.
Brianna had worked all night because she is a Maui police officer and she had been directing the evacuation of the Kihei coastline all night, so I wanted to have good news for her when she woke up. Her canoe “Brianna Malia” is still intact and ready to paddle the waves with her friends.
Walking along the beach was spooky though because still, at 10:30 AM, the water was rising and falling a couple feet in just a couple of minutes. After my encounter this morning at Maliko Bay with the real thing, I was wary of a quick drop in the water.
The beach was littered with all kinds of trash, coconuts, gas cans, and even an oar from somebody’s dinghy
Within a period of two minutes, the jetty that all the paddlers call “the first jetty†went from about the equivalent of a minus 3 foot tide (which we don’t actually ever get that low), to a about a zero tide. Even the paddlers favorite “green bouy†which marks the harbor entry was gone. You can now see it bobbing offshore with the turtles outside the harbor.
Idling offshore were a couple of ships and a Young Brothers Barge waiting to dock. The Harbormaster still has them outside the harbor waiting for the ocean to stabilize. All ships had departed during the night and the harbor is empty. At least none ended up on the rocks.
It has been a very weird and crazy day here on Maui, here is a video of a turtle being rescued off the side of the road in Kahului.
The phones are dead quiet as AT&T is down, so now maybe I can get some of my long delinquent broker price opinions done so Jeremy, and I can get some more foreclosure listings to sell. Speaking of which, check out our latest, Not in MLS Yet – Maui Beachfront Foreclosure.
Glad to hear the canoes survived intact :) We all have to count our blessings as things could have been much worse…
Any news of Olowalu? I hope the camp there survived.
Doug,
Olowalu is fine. Lahaina Harbor and Maalaea Harbor got hammered and a few boats sunk. Maui sustained less damage than the Kona coast on the Big Island. Overall, we were lucky.