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A hurricane slowly moving toward the Hawaiian islands that has already caused flooding and landslides and led to the rescue of at least 11 people, weakened Friday to a Category 1 storm, forecasters said.
But the Central Pacific Hurricane Center warned that Hurricane Lane, which had maximum sustained winds of 85 mph and which was around 120 miles south of Honolulu, could still bring additional rain and cause “major flash flooding and landslides.”
Military officials and federal and local emergency management authorities said they are prepared for severe effects from the hurricane.
“Just now you heard great news that the storm is weakening as they projected, but we still feel it is very important to have the military be postured to respond to any threats,” Hawaii National Guard Brigadier General Kenneth Hara said at a news conference Friday afternoon. “Our priorities right now is to save human lives.”
Hurricane Lane, which was a Category 4 storm earlier this week before weakening to a Category 2 by Friday morning and then down to a Category 1 later in the day, has dumped more than 30 inches of rain in a few spots of Hawaii’s Big Island, with other areas seeing more than a foot and in some spots more than two feet of rainfall, the National Weather Service said.
On Friday, Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell said, “Lane is in the slow lane and doesn’t want to go away.” He said rain remained a major concern, and that officials were “preparing for the worst and planning and hoping for the best.”
Flooding in the city of Hilo on the Big Island led to waist-deep water in some places. Around 1,980 customers were without power on Oahu on Friday afternoon, utility company Hawaiian Electric tweeted.
Thursday night, the National Guard and firefighters rescued six people who were trapped in a flooded home on the Big Island, the Associated Press reported. There were no injuries. Five tourists from California were rescued from another home.
Also Friday, brush fires in western Maui fueled by high winds had led to the evacuation of around 100 homes, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported. More than 2,300 acres were burned and some homes were damaged, and a woman was injured in the blaze and taken to a hospital for treatment, the station reported.
The hurricane was moving north-northeast at a sluggish 2 miles per hour Friday afternoon, the hurricane center said. Hurricane warnings were in place for the island of Oahu and Maui County, and a tropical storm warning was in place for the Big Island.
Earlier Friday, officials cautioned that the slow speed of the hurricane could prolong rain in parts of the state. Some 1,500 people across the Hawaiian islands were in shelters Thursday night, with around 1,000 on Oahu, where Honolulu is located.
“This is going to be a marathon-based event,” Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Brock Long said at a news conference earlier Friday.
“Bottom line is, we’re going to see torrential rains occur for the next 48 to 72 hours, and we hope that all the citizens within Hawaii are heeding the warnings that local and state officials are putting out,” he said then.
The last Category 5 storm to even come close to Hawaii occurred in 1994 when Hurricane John skirted 345 miles south of the islands. The last severely damaging hurricane was Iniki, a Category 4 storm that killed six people in September 1992.
The hurricane center said in an advisory at 2 p.m. local time (8 p.m. ET) that “Rapid weakening is forecast during the next 48 hours.”
But hurricane conditions were expected in parts of Maui County and Oahu starting Friday night, and rain bands from the storm will still continue to affect the main Hawaiian islands with “excessive rainfall” possible through the weekend, the hurricane center said.
The storm is expected to turn to the west towards open ocean and pick up speed on Saturday but the center of the hurricane will remain close to the central Hawaiian islands through Friday night, forecasters said.
In the brush fires burning in west Maui, Tyler Dreiling, 25, passed out briefly after helping make sure no one was in the houses in an evacuation zone in Lahaina.
“I was just running door-to-door making sure there wasn’t anyone else still in houses,” he said in a phone interview with NBC News. Eventually he went home to find out that his own neighborhood was being evacuated.
“I grabbed a couple of things and walked out and it was pretty close to the main highway when I started to feel dizzy,” Dreiling said. He was staying at Maui High School, which has been made into an emergency shelter.
As the hurricane approached, people rushed to stock up on supplies.
At the Hilton Hawaiian Village, guest Elisabeth Brinson said hotel staff left a notice that rooms would have water and phone service, and a backup generator would power one elevator per building in the event of an electrical outage.
But Brinson, a native of the United Kingdom now living in Denver, said many shops were closed, and those still open were frantic with people buying food, beer and water to take back to their rooms.
“We knew it was coming, so I tried to just cram as much as I could into the last few days in anticipation so we could cross things off of our list,” Brinson, who is accustomed to hurricanes after living in Florida, told the AP.
Other visitors in the Honolulu area were less experienced in the hurricanes.
“We are scared because we never expected a hurricane, we never experienced one,” Nadine Berg, of Germany, who was in Waikiki on Thursday, told KHNL. “They just told us we have to stay in the room, probably in the bathroom, not going to the windows,” she said.
President Donald Trump has declared an emergency for the state, freeing up federal assistance. Hawaii Gov. David Ige said he received a phone call from Trump, who pledged his full support.
Even after the hurricane turns to the west, the threat of rain will persist, said Steve Goldstein, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“This is expected to be a long duration flood event as the threat for heavy rain may continue after the hurricane passes to the west,” he said Friday morning.