Two-thirds of the single-family homes on Hawaii’s most populous island have no hurricane protections
Jan Pappas and Ronald Yasuda hired a contractor to fasten the roof of their 1960s-era home to their walls with metal plates and nails so high winds of a potential hurricane wouldn’t blow it away.
Their motivation? Global warming fueling natural disasters around the planet.
“It’s happening right now, every place in the world,“ said Pappas, who installed the so-called hurricane clips after watching extreme weather in other parts of the world. „How are we to expect that it’s not going to happen here to us?”
Many of Hawaii’s homes are even more vulnerable than theirs. Two-thirds of the single-family homes on Oahu, an island of 1 million people that’s home to Honolulu, have no hurricane protections. That lack of preparedness is unnerving residents this hurricane season as the islands prepare for the possibility of a one-two weather punch: the increased odds of a tropical cyclone that come with any El Nino year combined with climate-fueled ocean warming that could mean bigger and more frequent tropical storms around the islands overall.
El Nino, a naturally occurring warming of equatorial waters in the central and eastern Pacific, affects weather worldwide. Already this year, Hawaii has felt its wrath as a tropical storm passed south of the Big Island last month. On top of that, warming oceans heated by climate change could strengthen tropical storms and nudge them farther north, potentially putting them on a collision course with Hawaii.
Hawaii’s experience stands in contrast to the U.S. territory of Guam, where stronger building codes and years of rebuilding after powerful storms means most homes are now made of sturdy concrete. In May, a Category 4 typhoon with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph (241 kph) slammed into the island. The storm destroyed some older homes, but the concrete ones generally emerged unscathed.
Many of Hawaii’s single-family homes are single-wall construction, a style phased out only in the 1970s, said Gary Chock, a licensed structural engineer.
Hawaii’s temperate climate means homes don’t need to trap heat, so most don’t have an additional wall to contain insulation. Structurally, their foundations aren’t often properly anchored to the ground. Their lower cost made them Hawaii’s preferred construction style for decades.
They proved particularly vulnerable to powerful winds during Hurricane Iwa, which just missed Kauai in 1982, and Hurricane Iniki, which slammed directly into Kauai a decade later.
