An 1890s-era plantation dam has failed in the rugged hills above northern Kauai, sending water and mud surging through two homes and wiping out the only highway. Searchers have found one person dead and are looking for at least seven others, some of them children who have not been seen since the deluge.
Continuing rain is hampering the search and road-clearing efforts, and officials are worried that other old earthen dams in the area may have been catastrophically weakened by days of heavy rain, state Senator Gary L Hooser said on Wednesday.
The water released on Tuesday cut off access to and from thousands of rural houses and luxury condominiums along Kauai’s north shore.
”[It] sounded like a 747 jet crashing here in the valley, all the trees popping and snapping and everything,” said John Hawthorne. ”It was just a horrendous sound, and it never quit.”
Search crews recovered the body of an unidentified man, and area residents said one family whose home was swept away was missing several children.
”To my knowledge, there was no warning whatsoever,” Hooser told ABC’s Good Morning America. ”We’re still hopeful that we’ll find some of the missing.”
Governor Linda Lingle, who planned to tour the area on Wednesday, extended state disaster programmes and services on Tuesday to the residents affected by recent rains and flooding. She also made loans available to people whose homes or businesses were damaged and authorised the use of National Guard troops to help with disaster relief.
State officials are assessing the safety of other dams in the island’s steep hills. Ed Teixeira, state vice-director of civil defence, said officials are worried about erosion.
”I would characterise this as a growing crisis on Kauai,” he said.
Nearly all of Hawaii’s dams were built early in the past century before federal standards existed or the advent of the state’s programme for assessing dam and levee safety, according to Edwin Matsuda, an engineer who heads the state’s safety programmes.
The 12m-high Kaloko Reservoir dam, which captured run-off from small streams, gave way about an hour before dawn on Tuesday. Authorities estimated that more than 1,7-million cubic metres of water poured out of the reservoir.
Late on Tuesday, road crews began clearing mud, trees and other debris from the highway by the truckload until work was stopped so water could be released from a reservoir located downstream from Kaloko, state transportation spokesperson Scott Ishikawa said.
Roy Matsuda, lead forecaster at the Honolulu office of the National Weather Service, said on Tuesday that a storm had dumped 13cm to 15cm of rain on Kauai in 24 hours. — Sapa-AP
Associated Press writer Tara Godvin in Honolulu contributed to this report