 Okay, we're back, we're live with Community Matters and Dennis Wan of the C Grand College program. C Grand College, which is really the oldest and most central college in all of UH Manoa, isn't it? Yes. That's what UH Manoa was established for, the C Grand College. Yes, sure. Yes. And part of the Land Grand College, same thing, yeah. It's a takeoff from the Land Grand College. And he's written a book, this is the latest update of the book, homeowner's handbook to prepare for natural hazards. We talked about that last week, we're going to talk about it again, especially now, we need to talk about it and get people aware of the need to protect themselves in the case of extreme weather and the like. So Dennis, welcome back to the show. Thank you, it's good to be back, and last time we didn't get to cover everything that we needed to, so you asked me that. Yes, I did, and I would like to cover the risks today, and maybe there's a certain refresh there, but the first thing is, we've had volcanic eruption in the big island now for what, 90 days. And so what is the risk of this going forward? What is the risk of this happening again? How concerned should we be? Okay, so we should be concerned. It's hard to say how long the volcanic activity will last, that we covered that a little last week, and in this show, I'd like to just show a little bit about how the volcanic risk that people should have expected, and also how that risk, just the concept of risk itself, I will use that to explain the concept of risk and relate that to hurricane risk, say for Oahu. Okay, you have some slides now about the big island, yeah? Sure. We had a recap of last week, but we just want to show a key indication of risk is the past. Geologists, so we say the past is a key to the future. So why don't we go to the first slide? Okay, so there was a slide before that, we had the slide before, okay, right there. Okay, so that was just before, that was a few days after the volcanic eruption occurred, and you could see the key thing is this map is on the southeast corner of the big island, and it shows, it's from the USGS, and it shows the history of lava flows in the area and the current lava flow. The key thing is there's an 1840 flow, and then right above Vacation Land there's a 1960 flow, and below is a 1955 flow. So it has a history of lava going by. So people really expect lava, even though it may not have happened for 60 years, and they may have amnesia about it happening. Different generations. Yes, because people forget, even within 5 or 10 years people forget about hazards sometimes. But if you go to the next slide, you can see what happened, okay? So this is a map made by the USGS two days ago, and it shows now this whole area in between the 60 flow and the 1955 flow has been covered. The lava is coming out of Fisher 8, and it went into the Vacation Land area, and now it's further to the south. But also you can see the former coastline there that's almost a mile out, and we covered that last week. So we wanted to explain about, a lot of times you look at the history of certain phenomena, and it gives you an indication of the risk for the area. We'd like to relate that to the hurricanes on Oahu now. Yeah, so what about the risk of, okay, the eruption will ultimately come to a stop, because they always do, and it'll be quiet after that. But the risk continues. It could happen again any time, it doesn't have to wait 60 years, and the world seems to have a lot of this kind of seismic disruption these days. So that's an ongoing risk, am I right? It's an ongoing risk. It's an ongoing risk, and the lava could stop, but no one really knows when it will stop, because it could stop next week, it could stop three months from now or two years from now. And it could start again. Then it would start again. But again, it's the lava risk there, there's also earthquake risk, which we covered last week, and there's specific things homeowners can do that are subject to the earthquake, like say in Volcano Village, they should really consider tying their foundations down, and we covered that last week in the book. But there are groups with regard to hurricane risk. So where can I get this book just in case? Okay, just Google University of Hawaii Sea Grant College program, and you'll scroll down and you can download the book. And in addition to the book, there's a lot of other information on retrofitting or to make your house stronger. So things you can do, there are things you can do. Now if the lava is going to cover my house, anchoring it down doesn't help too much. But there is a substantial risk that it will not cover my house, but it will disrupt my house and do damage to my house. And that's why it's worth doing these risk, what do you call it, risk retrofits? Yeah, mitigation, steps in mitigation, retrofit steps to protect my house when it's not necessarily going to be covered in lava, but only damaged. That's right. I mean, there's lava, there's nothing you can do too much, but in that area there's also a lot of risk of fire, and we've heard about stories about houses catching on fire. There are a lot of things you can do to protect your house from fire, like making defensible perimeters around a house and also making sure you don't have a lot of old things around your house that are just lying around easily. So we can't fire with some hot lava? Yes. We're actually, for the fourth edition of the book, this is the interim update for this year's hurricane season. But for the fourth edition that we do in around three or four months, we're going to have a wildfire section in there also. So it's going to, the new additions will be volcano climate change, and under climate change there will be wildfire, drought, heat. Sort of like in California right now. That's right. Wildfire is actually a greater risk in Hawaii than people know about or think about. Yeah, things get dry, a little something starts it off, and before you know it, a lot of people are involved in getting hurt. Right. So, let's talk about the other risks here. Okay, why don't we go to the next slide? Next slide. Okay, so here's what we're talking about, and we could make an analogy to the volcano and the flows that are going to the north and south of vacation land. You would expect that there would be some risk in between there. Well here's the same thing, this is a map, it shows the 2015 hurricane season, and it shows the tracks during the different tropical storms and hurricanes around Hawaii. There was a record number of 15 of those in 2015. And what you're seeing is tracks of hurricanes and tropical storms going north of the Hawaiian Islands and south of the Hawaiian Islands. And one day, people are going to be really caught by surprise when something goes right up the middle and catches one of the islands. Like the volcanoes. It's very likely to happen, right? You don't think it's going to happen and then it happens. Right. What happened in 2015? What happened in 2016 and 17? Okay, well actually we have another slide that'll show that. So why don't we advance? Well here's 2015, and this map just shows, for the first time we had three major hurricanes in the Pacific, and you can see where it surrounds the Hawaiian Islands. But the next slide after that, right here, okay. So this graph shows the record of tropical storms and hurricanes going back 20 or 30 years. This is put together by the National Weather Service. And you could see the record 2015 year is the third bar to the right. That was the most tropical storms or hurricanes we ever had, 15. That was during an El Nino year. In 2016, the tapered off, we were in what was El Nino neutral. And now we're in La Nina, 2017 we're in La Nina, but and I'll explain the significance of this because what's showing is the greatest number of systems are occurring during El Nino years. And actually if you look at this graph in 1982, there were 10. That's when Eva hit in 1992, there were 11, and that's when Aniki, they were both during El Nino years. And the significance of this is we may very likely be entering another El Nino period. Okay, we're on an El Nino watch now. Can you explain that? What is that? Okay. To go to the Google, NOAA Climate Change Prediction Center, and El Nino predictions, you'll see that we're in an El Nino watch right now. El Nino watch means that within the next six months, it's likely that we'll be in an El Nino. We may not see the full effects of it, and it's not certain. I think they haven't given it a 70% chance of it happening, but you may see the full effects of it, the hurricane season in 2019. But the thing is, a lot of the things we preach or we talk about in the handbook are not things that homeowners can just do in a week or two. It's like one month or two month projects to strengthen their house. And so this gives us, we should really think about preparing right now, because even this year there's risk, but the risk may be even greater next year. And just because in 2015, the hurricanes missed us doesn't mean they'll miss us next time. And we're just going into the hurricane season now. Well, yeah. We've been in hurricane season since June 1st. It goes from June 1st to the end of November. And the National Weather Service always says, we always need to be prepared. So it's like, it just takes one, and they always say it's not a matter if, but when. So it's going to happen, but the risk does appear to be getting greater, and we should really. So we have multiple risks to deal with. We have the volcanic risk in some places in the state. We have seismic risks really in more places in the state. We have hurricane risks everywhere. You never know. We're lucky we haven't had a big one in Oahu. And we have tsunami risks as well. So you have to look at this whole bundle of risks and decide how you're going to protect yourself. And what you told me before is there's always something you can do. That's right. You never give up on this. You never say, no, I'm not going to do anything. You have to do something. So what's a good course of action? Okay. Well, we talk to a lot of homeowners. So it's really the frame of mind. They have to think about these things. Not to scare them, but it's just going to the doctor every often. Or it's having the right frame of mind. So homeowners are always doing things around their house, kitchen improvements, bathroom. They spend just a 10% of that budget on making their house stronger. It's really the cost to retrofit, say they had hurricane clips. The cost, that would be like one 10% of the cost to remodel your kitchen. And we always tell the homeowners, make your house strong first and pretty. So it's changing your frame of mind, knowing what's important and putting value on your house. Another good example is they always say you should paint your house every 10 years. And if you get a quote to paint your house, it's like $10,000. But put in hurricane clips, it could only cost $2,025 and once it's in there, it's on there for the rest of your house, the rest of the life of the house, protecting the house. Could save your house. Yes, and it could save your house. So really just think about little things you could do. Always think about it in the back of your mind and make it part of your decision-making process when you do things for your family or for your house. And then for the family, now we do talk about emergency supplies, we covered that last week. And we're going to cover a little bit about evacuation planning this week because this is really the part that the reason that I think you wanted us to come back is we didn't get to cover this last week about evacuation planning. Let's take a break and then we'll come back and we'll talk about evacuation planning. As you know, I'm really interested in that. I think we all have to be interested in evacuation planning. It's not something you can do on the spot. You know, when the storm or the earthquake or, you know, the tsunami is upon you, you have to have it figured out in advance. We'll be right back with Dennis Juan. Back with Dennis Juan and we're talking about what you do to protect yourself against to mitigate the risks that we all have to these natural disasters, which are coming. We know they're coming. So, one of the things you wanted to talk about is the load path type things with the timbers. And we can take a look at a bunch of slides that you brought regarding what you can do about reinforcing the structure of your house. Sure. Okay. So, again, we covered this in past shows, but just to reiterate it for our audience. This is a diagram of what a continuous load path is. It's an engineering term and it essentially ties the roof to the foundation. Okay. Each intersection in a house is connected with a strong fastener, say a hurricane clip for the roof to the wall, a strap from the second floor to the first floor, and an anchor bolt from the bottom to the foundation. So it's like throwing a chain over the roof of the house and tying it down. This will protect your house against any natural disaster that's going to stress the members of the house. Right. It's going to protect you for a hurricane. It's going to protect you for an earthquake. And so we're going to show some slides and show you how that works. Tsunami too, right? Not a tsunami. Not a tsunami. Okay. All right. Okay. But here's a single wall house, two pictures for a single wall house and a top left one. We've added hurricane clips as a retrofit. This is for a single wall house. This is not that hard to do. And the reason you do that is when there's a hurricane, there's uplift on the roof and it could lift the entire roof off. The roof comes off, the walls aren't supported. And it's sort of like... Single wall house. Yeah. Progressive failure and then the whole house could collapse. And then on the bottom right, a lot of single wall houses are in these post and pier structures. It's possible to retrofit that. We were talking a lot about that last week because this is what the people at Volcano Village should be doing for their house because they get magnitude, almost magnitude four or five earthquakes every day right now. So the idea here is you don't want the post shifting on the pier or shifting off the pier. Yes. It'll migrate right off the termite pan. Yeah. You know, with the different... And then everything's going to start coming down. Yeah. Okay. What else? Okay. And then here on the left is again a diagram showing the continuous load path. And on the right is a picture. This is currently on our website and it's like a new retrofit option that'll be in our update coming in three or four months, but it's currently on our website now. And it's actually creating the retrofitting to add a load path to a double wall house that doesn't have one previously. So like generally most double wall houses built before 95 on Oahu do not have a load path, but you could add it with these structural screws. Makes it much stronger that way. Yes. Yes. So it's tying everything down together. And it doesn't cost much. It doesn't. It's... The screws are like 50 cents a piece. So I can do it myself. You could. It's a little tricky, but we do provide some guidance in the book. It's on our website. That one's currently on our website and it'll be in the book for three or four months down the road also. What else can you do to mitigate? Okay. Let's go on. Okay. Whenever there's a hurricane, you have to worry about winds. And actually there's a risk assessment that FEMA did for if an Iniki type hurricane hit Oahu, they expect roughly 50,000 structures to be damaged or destroyed. Wow. Okay. And a lot of it will be by the wind, okay? So in this picture, you could see the flying debris on Kawiki and Kawaii from Iniki. And so it's important to protect your windows. Next slide. Okay. So the reason you need to protect your windows is because if the wind gets inside, it'll blow up your house like a balloon and make the roof more likely to come up. And the walls. Yes. Push the walls out. Yeah. And the masking tape will not work. So if we could get that other slide, it was just shown here. Okay. So one of the, the book has 12 different ways to protect your windows and one of them is plywood. So this is an example of a house protected with plywood. And the, on the bottom, it's a sliding glass door and two windows, a window to each side. So that's, that's probably the cheapest way to protect your windows is with plywood. So you have to have the plywood handy, maybe you leave it in your garage. Yes. And you have fittings so you can put it on real quick. Yes. It's in the book. It should be prepared, pre-cut, pre-labeled, pre-measured, pre-drilled, everything. Because it may take an hour to prepare each plywood for the window, but once it's prepared and you know how to do it, it takes five minutes to put up. Save your house. Yes. Okay. But you can't put them on just some windows. You have to put them on all windows. Right. Right. Because the wind could come from any direction. Yeah. So why don't we have the next slide? Because this is another example of a sliding glass door, two windows on each side, but the previous picture showed a protected with plywood. This is protected with impact resistant glass. This is actually gone through missile tests. They shoot a nine pound two by four at 34 miles per hour. This is what's rated in like Miami-Dade, Florida. This is what's required in a lot of the building codes. So this is probably the most expensive way to retrofit. The window, and then there's like 10 other methods that are in between that are in the book. So if I have the high impact glass, I don't need the plywood? Yes. It's in place all the time. So that's the advantage. And the, with the options, it's usually the trade off. The trade off is cost, cheapest being plywood, most expensive being the impact resistant glass. That's the cost versus time to deploy. With the impact resistant glass, it's always in place. And the advantage of it is it's always in there for a hurricane, for a burglar, it'll protect against burglars. It reflects the heat. So it has, it's very cool, and it's, you can actually see through the window, but people can't see in during the day. So it's like opens up your entire, it opens up your entire. So it's expensive. It's almost like buying a car, almost to do your entire house, but think of it this way. You buy a car, you drive off the lot, it loses 25% of the value right away, and it's gone. You're not using it 10 years later. You buy this impact resistant windows, it adds that much value to your house. It stays there, and it's going to protect your house for 50 or 100 years. You want your house to be there 50 or 100 years from now. Once you're going to renovate or remodel your house, it'd be a good time to consider high impact glass. Yeah. So, and again, people don't need to go to the cheapest method or the most expensive because there's 10 other options that are in between. So it's in the book. We don't have time to cover all of it, but it's in there. Okay. Can we get to the evacuation table? Sure. Sure. Okay. So this is very important, and we briefly mentioned it last week, making an evacuation plan. There's a lot of documents that just say make a plan, but it really doesn't tell you how or differentiate between a tsunami evacuation plan and a hurricane evacuation plan, which is different. This is our shelter-in-place table for a hurricane. And you can think of it like the story of the three little pigs. One made it with straw, another house made of wood, and another was stone, right? And the concept is, you know, the stone is the one that survived when the wall tried to blow it down. Same thing. Inherently, your house is going to be dependent on what's it made of? Is it single wall, double wall, which is stronger, or concrete or stone, which is the strongest? Okay. And then it's going to depend if it has something like the continuous load path. Remember, we just mentioned the continue. So houses built before 1995 don't have a load path. So inherently, houses built after 95 are stronger, but you could retrofit the houses built before 95 so they do have a load path. Same place. Yeah. So why don't we go to the table, and I could try and explain it to you. Okay. This is the big moment, the evacuation table. Okay. So this is the shelter-in-place table. So... Shelter-in-place table. Sorry. Yes. At shelter-in-place table, this is where you try to decide if there's a hurricane coming, am I going to stay in my house or am I going to go somewhere else? Okay. And the first thing I'm going to emphasize is you can't shelter-in-place if you're in a flood zone. If you have any risk of flooding, you can't shelter-in-place. You got to go. Yeah, you got to go. But on the table, there are three rows, single-wall house, double-wall house, concrete house. And then there's a double bar at the very bottom, unsafe, marginal, good, better, best. You want homeowners to be proactive, you know, always make good, better, and better, best, and never let it rest until good is better and better, right? Yeah, with the three piggies as you like. Yeah, okay, or the three piggies. But let's take an example for a single-wall house, okay? So starting the weakest is a single-wall house in poor condition. Poor condition, termite damage, wood rot, corrosion of fasteners. Always maintain your house to keep it strong. And then you move, the idea is to move along the table by adding hurricane clips that'll add, and then, you know, doing foundation upgrades. Eventually, you can move along the table and go into that. You want to try and get to the right, the part of the table to the right. Okay. Now, you said before that it was a flood. We're not talking about relying on mitigation, we got to get out of there. Right. But other things, you know, one of the set of circumstances make me want to leave. And what should, what plans should I have about evacuation? Well, evacuation shelter in place is like a very personal decision, okay? And people should really give it some thought where they're going. There's, we, these are general guidelines that we provide in the table. But there are always a lot of variables. For instance, one is the flood. You could be in a flood zone, but even if you're not in a flood zone, you could have flood risk, you know, because a lot of, a lot of people get flooded and they're not in a flood zone. The other variable is you may be on topography or in a bluff or something where, where the wind is amplified. And then a really important one is trees. You know, I feel like my house is pretty strong because I, I do spend a lot of time trying to strengthen it. But right across our property, there's a big tree and you never know what's going to happen. So you always try and make things as strong as possible and, and, but you can never plan for everything. And that's why insurance is important also. So, what kind of insurance should I get? Okay. Well, they're all different kinds. Okay. And of course, if you have risk of flooding, flood insurance through the flood insurance program. Okay. Um, uh, for a hurricane, everyone should have hurricane insurance and a lot of these insurances are required if you have a mortgage, you know, they're going to, the bank is going to require you to have flood insurance if you're in a flood zone and hurricane insurance. If you're the bank wants to protect its risk, you know, investment, right. So the houses are collateral for their mortgages. So they want these, they want these, uh, the collateral to be around and survive these events. Okay. And, um, in terms of a lot of times, there's confusion, do I need flood insurance or hurricane insurance? So generally, if the water is coming from the bottom up, you need flood insurance and it's coming from the top down, you need flood insurance. That's how you do it. Again, uh, there's also, um, regular homeowners insurance, you know, because you should have anyway, you should have any way, but that should cover like fire, robbery, you know, some windstorms. And it's important to read your policies because each company is a little different and what's covered is a little, is a little different. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's all kinds of risks. And certainly you have to protect your home and, uh, you can't, you can't rely on luck. Right. We, we, we sort of led into a, this kind of, uh, approach that we, oh yeah, we'll be lucky, but not necessarily, not in Hawaii, not with the, not with climate change, not with our history. Right. And so you, you have to take proactive steps. That's, that's right. And, um, you may have seen an article in the, um, Starry Advertiser this morning because they were talking about, um, flood damage in Texas from Harvey and we were there and we were there in Texas to see the damage in Harvey and, um, 80% of the homes did not have flood insurance and their, the burden on them was, was tremendous. You know, they, a lot of people had flood insurance and they go, oh, I haven't had anything in five or 10 years. So my, there was one story in today's paper, the guy, he just let his flood insurance go like a year ago, a few months before Harvey hit and, Well, I think that's, that's a lesson. That's the underlying lesson of all of this is you take all these mitigation, um, steps, you do all the things you can, um, you have insurance, but you're never sure, you're never sure that you cover it all. That's why we should do the show again and again, you know, talk about covering it all. Sure. Dennis Warren. See, see Grant College. Thank you for coming down and, and check out the book and the website. Sure. Thank you. Thank you.