Weather dictates when trail closes

LIHUE — When it comes to closing Kauai’s Kalalau Trail, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources relies exclusively on warnings from the National Weather Service and information from its ranger in Haena.

“When the National Weather Service issues a flash flood warning for Kauai, we will close the Kalalau Trail in advance,” DLNR spokeswoman Deborah Ward wrote in an email Tuesday.

In the case Sunday, however, Hanakapiai stream swelled and left 121 hikers stranded on its far bank. The NWS didn’t issue a warning.

“There was no advance warning,” Ward wrote, adding that the department did not discuss closing the trail on Sunday.

Mike Cantin, warning-coordination meteorologist for the NWS in Honolulu, said there is a perfectly good reason a warning wasn’t sent out — it wasn’t warranted.

For NWS to issue a flash flood warning, he said, it either needs to be expected or the department already has to be seeing a certain amount of rain over a certain period of time.

“In the case of what happened the other day … we never got rainfall amounts and rainfall rates to trigger a warning,” Cantin said. “It wasn’t reaching our thresholds of exceeding the bank and affecting other areas.”

In other words, streams can rise significantly without the NWS issuing a flash flood warning.

“If we issued warnings based upon stream rises, then our warnings would essentially become useless because we’d be issuing them all the time,” Cantin said.

In a 24-hour period ending around 8 a.m. Monday, areas of the island near Hanakapiai saw between 2 and 4 inches of rain.

Since those amounts were spread out over the entire day, NWS didn’t issue a warning. Had that same amount fallen in just a few hours, however, it would have likely been a different story.

“If (the rain falls) in one powerful shot it’s going to come out in one powerful shot,” Cantin said.

In addition to monitoring NWS reports, the DLNR ranger in Haena watches weather conditions at the trailhead five days a week and warns hikers as conditions warrant, according to Ward.

“We have closed the trail more frequently in the last year using this combined approach of onsite observation and weather reports,” she wrote. “Patronage is high and the park is located next to one of the wettest locations on Earth.”

The Na Pali Coast State Park, home of the Kalalau Trail, is owned by the state and maintained by DLNR. While the County of Kauai does not have jurisdiction to close the trail, it does work closely with DLNR during closures, according to county spokeswoman Sarah Blane.

When it comes to rescues, the county is in charge — and foots the bill.

Blane could not provide an estimate Tuesday of what the recent rescue operation in Hanakapiai cost the county, or how much the county budgets each year for the expense.

But the recent incident, which kept county helicopter Air 1 in the air for more than seven hours over the two-day rescue, has local legislators wondering if changes should be made.

During its department budget review meeting Tuesday morning, the Kauai County Council discussed forming a Special Committee Task Force to explore the issue, address the possibility of recovering expenses for rescue operations and how agencies can work to better protect visitors and residents.

“(It was) a pretty Herculean effort to get all those people out in the two days we got them out,” Fire Chief Robert Westerman told the council.

The task force would consist of councilman Mel Rapozo and Vice Chair Mason Chock, as well as representatives from the Kauai Fire Department, the Ocean Safety Bureau, Civil Defense, the Kauai Police Department, DLNR, the mayor’s office and the state Legislature.

“We’re hoping that we might be able to look at creative ways that might encourage not only less abuse from the community, as a taxi ride in a helicopter, but to also look at how we might defer some of the costs, which are shared costs in my opinion, since we service the Na Pali Coast and state trails,” Chock said following the meeting.

Council Chair Jay Furfaro said the updated count Tuesday was that 161 people received assistance along the Na Pali Coast within a 36-hour period.