The Beginning of the End

I have so many thoughts on Hurricane Lala that I just need to vomit onto a canvas, so sorry for the complete stream of consciousness style.  

I'm laying up here late tonight, my fiancee and two cats asleep by my side. No power since yesterday morning here at the house. The house is a strategically arranged checkpoint system between flashlights, candles and glow sticks. I expect this to be our reality for awhile. Not to say I knew, But I fucking knew this storm was going to be historic when I started really reading and tuning into all the details around Thursday. I'm no expert on hurricanes, but when I first moved to Hawai'i and experienced Tropical Storm Hone, I was fascinated at how primed east side Big Island was for a hurricane disaster despite never really having one in recorded history. I learned so much around that time about how hurricane systems worked and how to judge the impacts of potential dynamically changing systems. Over the few years I've lived here now I've begun to attune myself more to what is normal as far as rain, wind, and the resiliency of our infrastructure here. 

Before moving here, but especially since, I have also become fascinated with ecology and weather more generally. Hawai'i and specifically the Big Island is at an incredible nexus. It contains many different climate zones, sits isolated almost smack in the middle of the Pacific, and it's hydrology, topography, and weather systems that interact with these elements interact with the entire Pacific including my original home in southern California. The islands draw rain, push winds, and act as a key piece in a complex web of climate interactions. El niño being a key event globally that Hawai'i and it's surrounding waters are deeply involved in. That's why when this years super El niño was declared and I fell down that research rabbit hole, I realized our hurricane season here in Hawai'i was primed for an unprecedented disaster. My fiance & I's home was built in 1908. It is a wonderful home and has many strongly built parts to its structure as evidenced by it still standing today nearly 120 years later. 

However, once I saw that this storm had the potential to be the first ever hurricane to make landfall or at least come very close to making landfall on Big Island (and thus only the 2nd in Hawai'is history after the devastating Iniki in 1992) I knew Kaitlyn and I were gonna stay the night in the shelter. I just couldn't risk us being trapped by the large invasive and flimsy Albizia trees all around our surrounding home and neighborhood. I couldn't risk the tin roof, nailed in with sideways nails with half of them missing the wood to properly attach, and having to survive a night getting rained on with our cats. The shelter sucked ass and was a fucking nightmare with the cats, but once I knew the strong winds had passed and our home was still there, I took us and the kitties home. We went to bed exhausted. I felt like an idiot for staying in the shelter when our home appeared fine and our cats had just had the worst night ever. 

But then the next morning revealed the catastrophe that just unfolded on Big Island. All my neighbors carport tops were ripped off or apart (completely disassembled mine before leaving). Trees were downed in every yard. Kaitlyn and I went into Hilo to get a hot meal and saw the destruction just from our home on Mt view to there. All street lights to Hilo completely shot. Power lines all leaning or sagging the entire way too. Trees strewn across properties and the roads. Leaves and debris made the roads look more jungle than asphalt. We finally had quality phone service in town. Destruction. Ka'u, the district encompassing all the southern tip of the island, was closest to the eyewall. Entire towns in the district were decimated like Pāhala and Nā'ālehu. Cemeteries washed entirely away. Main Highway completely washed. People missing. Over 100 homes completely swept off their foundations. Just horrific shit. Up north from us in Waimea/Hamkua coast it seems like every tree possible went down. 42+ miles of winding and complicated grid lines were completely destroyed on this stretch, knocking out the power for 50,000+ residents here on Hawai'i Island. Estimates are already saying the damages and expenditures for this disaster are well over a billion dollars making it the second costliest natural disaster in Hawai'i history, also after Iniki at around 3.5 billion. FEMA is likely to get called in soon. It is the greatest disaster in recorded Big Island history. 

And it was exacerbated by climate change. The super el niño bred the perfect conditions for this storm to happen. The supercharged warm waters of the Pacific are already powerful factories for storms. Usually, tropical storms originate near western Mexico and then push their way towards Hawai'i, usually losing quite a bit of energy by the latter half of the journey. It's not super uncommon, but sometimes storms form more in the central Pacific closer to the island chain if the conditions are correct (namely warmer water interacting with other water and air fronts). That is what happened with Lala. It formed close to Hawai'i. It gave very little time for regular people to recognize for themselves the threat that was coming. Most locals passed it off as just another hyped up storm. And that is understandable given the long history of storms, the resiliency of this community, and the ability of the topography of the island to absorb and deflect the impacts. Not this time. The now extra warm el niño waters strengthened this tropical storm more quickly than anticipated. The warm front pushed the already close storm more directly into the Big Island than any potential hurricane force storm before. The storm perfectly crescendoed into a hurricane hours before hitting the Big Island. The warm waters around Hawai'i, and the volcanos that once shielded the island from the violence, slowed the hurricanes speed and helped it float right over the island for ever longer, unleashing it's winds, rains, and even lightning down on the land for even longer than normally anticipated. 

I'm tired. Running out of steam both because of the hell weekend I had worrying about my Fiancee and my cats, but also just worrying existentially about what the world is soon going to come to. The world over is racked with climate catastrophe. I've always loved writing, but around the first time I started doing it like this again just for me was when the fires ravaged Ventura during the Thomas fires. Climate Change and the weight of world catastrophe made me have to write. That's why I have to write now. My new home is feeling the worst in its history. We've cried so many times seeing the destruction of our home and of the lives of the people we love. 

People always come together here in Hawai'i. It is the indigenous ontology (way of being) actively always alive here. We will all need to have each other backs in this decaying world that unfettered capitalism has created. We will have to return to the attunement of the land. Recognizing it cannot be dominated or subjugated forever, without it shaking us off its back. I know this is the solution. I think at some point it might even be an attainable reality after the robber barons of the planet have let the masses die for their riches and the wretched of the Earth make a new world without those greedy scum. But the death, the squalor, the destruction, the unrelenting catastrophe of historic proportions globally that has happened and is going to happen, it all just makes my heart so heavy.