Late in the day on January 2nd, a predicted storm rolled in over Maui with high winds and rain. Over the last few years, the electricity has been going out at our house every time any sort of mild storm blows through — at least five outages in 2014 — so given the strength of this storm, we we were all surprised the power held out as long as it did. But around 7:30 pm two explosions announced the end of light and heat.

As expected, power was not restored overnight, so in the morning we finally had a chance to put into use the two generators Ron had picked up a few years ago. None of the earlier outages had lasted long enough to bother. The little Honda generator provided that essential of life, morning coffee:

The big Honda generator successfully ran the refrigerator all day, along with occasional use of the microwave (at the same time!), as well as charging up phones and laptop computers — all of this on one small tank of gas. I was very impressed with how well it worked. And I was able to keep working on book 3 of The Red Trilogy!

We were fortunate and didn’t have much damage — just a lot of leaves and twigs in the driveway and a few broken branches. We also collected a lot of avocados that had blown off the tree:

Oh, and there was a bit of frost on Haleakala’s summit. I think that’s ice, not snow:

Power finally came back on at 10:30pm last night, after a twenty-seven hour outage. My gratitude goes out to the amazing, hard-working crews at Maui Electric. But at the same time, this storm ought to be a wake-up call for Maui County. We do not have a resilient electrical grid and if/when a hurricane rolls through her, the damage will be vastly more.

Posted on: Sunday, January 4th, 2015 at 12:11 pm
Categories: Hawaii.