Hawaii was girding on Friday for a long and dangerous brush with Hurricane Lane, the Category 2 storm whose outer bands have already unleashed torrential rain, surging floodwaters and road-clogging landslides on the state’s Big Island.
A new threat also emerged. Officials on Maui said a brush fire in Lahaina, on the western side of the island, was spreading quickly and had jumped over a highway. By early Friday morning, the wind was picking up, but the rain had yet to begin.
“I’m sure they wish it would rain so they could get rid of that fire,” said Victoria Monroe, a tourist from Orange County, Calif., who was staying at a hotel in view of the fire. “It was at the top of the hill and it went all the way down toward the ocean. I thought it was a volcano erupting.”
The storm was weakening on Friday but was still expected to pass dangerously close to the Hawaiian Islands, including Oahu, on Friday night. The island of Oahu and Maui County were under hurricane warnings, and Kauai County was under a hurricane watch. The Island of Hawaii had been downgraded to a tropical storm warning.
“There is no reason to believe that anyone is safe in the warning area,” forecasters with the National Weather Service said.
Because the storm was lumbering north at two miles an hour, forecasters said heavy rains were likely to continue into next week, with further inundation coming from storm surge and rising waters.
Here’s the latest:
• By Friday morning, local time, Hurricane Lane had weakened to a Category 2 storm, with maximum sustained winds of about 105 miles an hour. It was about 170 miles south of Honolulu. Tropical storm conditions had already begun on the islands of Hawaii, Maui and Oahu on Friday morning; Maui and Oahu were expected to experience hurricane conditions later on Friday.
• The American Red Cross said 1,500 people spent Thursday night in shelters on the islands.
• More than 30 inches of rain were recorded at one gauge on the Big Island, according to the National Weather Service, which said some areas could expect as many as 40 inches.
• The authorities evacuated people in Lahaina, in West Maui, after a brush fire ignited and spread quickly on Friday.
• Five tourists from California were rescued from a flooded vacation home in Hilo on Thursday, according to The Associated Press.
‘This is one of the worst fires we’ve ever had,’ Maui County’s mayor says.
The brush fire in Lahaina spread quickly, turning the sky a deep orange overnight and forcing the evacuation of more than 100 homes in the area, as well as the Lahaina Intermediate School, where 26 evacuees had taken shelter. Maui Electric reported about 4,000 customers had lost power.
The cause of the fire was not immediately known, but it left local officials wishing slow-moving Hurricane Lane would hurry up and dump some rain.
“We’re hoping that the rain that we’re supposed to get comes down so we can put out the fire,” said Alan Arakawa, the mayor of Maui County, in an interview with KHON, a local television station. He urged evacuees to go to the Lahaina Civic Center.
Mr. Arakawa said the fire had burned about 300 acres as of 6 a.m. local time. “This is one of the worst fires we’ve ever had in the Lahaina area,” he said.
By 8:30 a.m., Ms. Monroe, the tourist, said another fire had broken out in view of her hotel, Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club. Smoke filled the air under gray clouds and the power was out, she said.
Hurricane Lane Map: Tracking the Storm’s Path Toward Hawaii
By Friday morning, Hurricane Lane had weakened to a Category 2 storm, but the storm continued to dump heavy rainfall on parts of Hawaii.
Ms. Monroe was sheltering in her hotel room. It made for an inauspicious end to her trip away from home in Trabuco Canyon, Calif., near where the Holy Fire began. “I feel like I have some bad luck,” Ms. Monroe said.
A slow-moving storm can lead to a lot more rain.
The fact that Lane is moving slowly, about two miles an hour, means that it is likely to dump large amounts of rain.
In June, our reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis looked at a study published in the journal Naturethat focused on what is known as translation speed, which measures how quickly a storm is moving over an area, say, from Miami to the Florida Panhandle. Between 1949 and 2016, tropical cyclone translation speeds declined 10 percent worldwide, the study says. The storms, in effect, are sticking around for a longer period of time.
Lingering hurricanes can be a problem, as Texans learned last year when Hurricane Harvey stalled over the state, causing devastating flooding and billions of dollars of damage. The storm dropped more than 30 inches of rain in two days and nearly 50 inches over four days in some places. A report released by Harris County, which includes Houston, found that Harvey’s rainfall exceeded every known flooding event in American history since 1899.
It’s been a year filled with emergencies for Hawaii.
First came an errant alert that a ballistic missile was headed for Hawaii. Then 50 inches of rain were recorded in one day on Kauai, flooding parts of the island. Next a slow-motion eruption of the Kilauea volcano ravaged parts of the Big Island. Now the state is facing its latest potential calamity: Hurricane Lane.
On Thursday, we spoke with residents on the Big Island who were dealing with the deluge, and those to the north as they prepared for their own lashing of strong winds, heavy rain, rough surf and rising water.
For many of the islands’ residents, it was hard to believe that a hurricane would make a direct hit when they have been spared so many times in the past. Still, some people prepared with a sense of urgency.
“I’m normally not a person that makes sure my gas tanks are full and everything is all settled and organized, but I totally organized and brought everything in, and my chickens are in the garage,” said Heather Nelson, 39, who works in event production and lives in Volcano, Hawaii.
On the Big Island, in Kalapana, Suzette Ridolfi, a teacher who evacuated her home as Kilauea was spewing lava, said “the volcano was way more scary.”
“With the volcano there was no rest,” she said. “It was intense, intense, intense and the intensity never slowed down a bit. And, with the hurricane passing, there’s big rains and heavy rains and we get really scared for a few minutes, but then it stops and it’s peaceful, it’s calm.”
The storm put a damper on thousands of vacations.
The five California tourists rescued from a vacation home on Thursday were a minuscule slice of the 270,000 tourists estimated to be on Hawaii.
The state had a record year for tourism in 2017, according to George Szigeti, the president and chief executive of the Hawaii Tourism Authority, who said things had continued at a steady clip in 2018 despite the drumbeat of bad news.
“It’s been a very active year,” Mr. Szigeti said, “but I would tell you, Hawaii is a very resilient destination.”
Tourists who wanted to cut vacations short early may have found it difficult to do so, Mr. Szigeti said, because so many flights were already full.
Doug Okada, the general manager of the Aston Waikiki Sunset, a towering hotel in Honolulu, said his 330 units were full this week, since it was high season. Some visitors had canceled incoming stays, but others had extended them because they did not want to fly out during the storm.
“We just have to do our best to get through this,” said Mr. Okada, who was urging guests to shelter in place. “Some guests have never been in a hurricane situation, so it’s a thrilling experience. I’m glad they are positive, but they’ve been warned not to go out in dangerous conditions.”
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