LAWA‘I KAI — On Saturday night, while most residents and visitors watched lightning strike and rain flood roads and yards, folks at the National Tropical Botanical Garden endured what seemed like a tornado that left in its wake destruction not
LAWA‘I KAI — On Saturday night, while most residents and visitors watched lightning strike and rain flood roads and yards, folks at the National Tropical Botanical Garden endured what seemed like a tornado that left in its wake destruction not seen since Hurricane ‘Iniki in 1992.
In fact, some buildings that survived Hurricane ‘Iwa in 1982 and ‘Iniki in 1992 fell victim to the strong winds associated with severe thunderstorms which rumbled across the island Saturday night.
The Saturday storm caused enough damage to close NTBG to the public for several days.
While no one was injured, preliminary estimates could send the bill higher than $100,000.
And this suspected tornado or tornadoes came a week to the day after a huge flood closed the popular tour through Allerton Garden, bent a footbridge, and sent a car floating down Lawa‘i Stream, carrying it a couple of hundred yards before it stuck in mud, upside down, where it remained yesterday. The ground around the vehicle, owned by NTBG, remained too soggy to attempt recovery.
“We’ve had a couple of natural disasters the last two Saturdays,” said Scott Sloan, assistant director of McBryde and Allerton Gardens. “We’re doing a good job of clearing up.”
Between the flood and the suspected tornado, Allerton Garden was opened for just a day or two, while McBryde Garden had yet to be opened in the new year. And it appears that it will be a few days before Allerton Gardens is reopened, and perhaps a week until McBryde tours are restarted.
Few of the rare species were damaged, and only about 30 of the thousands of trees were destroyed, though.
“We were kind of lucky in an unlucky kind of way,” said Sloan. “It was weird the way it worked.”
Sloan gave reporters an hour-and-a-half-long tour through the damaged region in the gardens yesterday, hollering over the chain saws at work near a great many trees.
The wind event cut a wide, mile-long swath, bouncing around haphazardly, destroying pockets of trees in one area, then blasting one tree and leaving the next one unscathed.
The brand-new Conservation Horticulture Center lost a huge portion of its roof, while the fragile greenhouse that’s connected to the building suffered only a little bit of damage. Small saplings were knocked over, and were re-potted and given new soil Sunday. Another roof on an old McBryde pump station was torn clean off.
If not for the 40 to 50 volunteers who were out Monday morning, Sloan said, many other trees could’ve suffered. “They just dug in,” he said of the volunteers.
Workers from an arborist company and a haul company were also brought in to help with the cleanup. And tour guides and office staff have been pitching in as well, Sloan said, since there’s no regular jobs for them to do.
“Everybody just pulled together,” an appreciative Sloan said. “People have been coming up to the plate and get dirty, whether they’ve done it before or not.”
The gardens had to be closed, Sloan said, because debris from the wind event lined many of the walkways through Allerton. And roads damaged by the flood in McBryde have yet to be fixed.
The hardest hit, Sloan said, were monkeypod trees that dotted the side of the stream, the garden’s only sausage tree, and the collection of Munroidendron racemosum, a Kaua‘i native. A few of the bucketed trees were damaged beyond repair, Sloan said.
Two-foot-thick limbs were sheared cleanly by the wind from a 50-foot-tall bicentennial tree, planted in 1976 and across from the new conservation building.
Asked whether it was frustrating that garden employees were cleaning up twice in the span of a week, Sloan said he heard nary a grumble.
“These guys work with nature every day,” he said. “But seeing what Mother Nature can do, it’s amazing.”
And while National Weather Service forecasters could not confirm whether the wind event was a tornado or just high winds, NWS Warning Coordination Meteorologist Nazette Rydell said that they would be investigating.
Rydell said she was just planning a few calls to Kaua‘i for information on the heavy thunderstorm when The Garden Island reporter called her. A meteorologist issued a severe thunderstorm warning at 8:45 p.m. Saturday, after noticing a possible rotation in the cloud formations on the radar.
“The radar data lit up the screen, so to speak,” Rydell said.
“It was quite an attention-getter,” she added. “Of all the thunderstorms (in the state this week), this one (that hit Kaua‘i) was the strongest.
“It’s possible a tornado touched down. We’re going to look into it,” the forecaster added. “Straight-line winds could have been just as damaging.”
While no one saw the funnel cloud, two employees were on the grounds at about 8:15 p.m., and experienced the brunt of heavy rain, wind, and ferocious lightning, said Sloan.
Tom Finnegan, staff writer, may be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) or tfinnegan@pulitzer.net.
