 Good afternoon. Howard Wigg, Cold Green, Think Tech, Hawaii on Monday, October 25, 2021. We have a hurricane of a guest this afternoon, namely Dennis Wong, faculty of Sea Grant Program at UH Manoa, and I may be biased but I would call him the hurricane expert in the entire state of Hawaii. He has literally written the book on the subject. We're very honored to have him, but what is an energy efficiency guy doing talking about hurricanes? Well, part of energy efficiency is called resource efficiency. The less stuff you use, the less energy that goes into harvesting those things, putting them all together, transporting them all the heat to create the metal, so far, so far, so far. So let me ask a question. If in a hurricane in your home, if the wind blows and blows and cannot blow your house down or more appropriately blow your roof off versus it does blow your roof off, which is the more resource efficient of the alternatives? In case you don't get it, it is not blowing your roof off. You don't have to replace the whole gosh darn thing and a little bit of cost savings. You know, the insurance will pick up most of it, but I guarantee it won't pick up all of it. So great incentive to secure your home against the hurricane. The man to talk about all this, like no other in the state of Hawaii is Dennis Wong. Again, faculty with the Sea Grant program, UH Manoa, literally wrote the book on the subject. So welcome, Dennis. Thank you, Howard. It's good to be on your show. You're right about protecting your home saves a lot of resources. You know, we were just in Louisiana to look at the damage from Hurricane Ida and those houses that didn't do well, they had a lot of things that were taken out of their house and there were big debris piles on the street, you know, but those houses that did well, everything was intact in their house. So it did make a difference. It's pretty dramatic slides along those lines. Yeah, I know that. So Dennis, why don't you introduce yourself by bringing up your first slide, which shows you're a piece of Louisiana stones. Okay, Hurricane Book of Hawaii. Okay, sure. Can we have the first slide? Yep, it's up and running. Okay, so we at Sea Grant, we did the homeowners handbook to prepare for natural hazards, and you could see the cover here. First of all, it's available for free online, and if you want a printed copy, just contact the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program. And it's for homeowners, you could see it covers hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, and we added volcanoes to climate change for the fourth edition. And the thing to note is it has best practices for your family and for your home, not only for resilience to protect you against hazards, but also for climate adaptation and environmental sustainability. All of which, Dennis, are great buzzwords. In just a few weeks, Switch Maritime will be launching the world's first zero carbon ship, powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The reason we're doing this is because we envision a world where all diesel-powered heavy-moving transportation rules, even ones as energy-intensive as ships, can be decarbonized. There's really no reason we can't. We have the technology today, and we just have to take a risk and get started. We are already seeing the rapid rise of electric and fuel cell vehicles, such as cars, trucks, buses, and trains. It's taken time, but we're finally at what seems like a reflection point of adoption, and we're witnessing a modern mentor, irreversible ship, away from carbon-intensive and fuel. Maritime transportation, of both cargo and fuel, is a massively important understanding of the world, and it's going to be a very complex one to solve. We believe the best place to get started is with the passenger ferries that we ride, where the city is where we live. The sea change is a 70-foot-long, 75-passenger aluminum-catering ferries, powered by two 300-kilowatt electric motors. These electric motors are powered by 360 kilowatts of hydrogen fuel cells, combined with 100 kilowatt-hours of liquid and coal batteries. When you ride this ferry, you will notice a very different rider experience. Rather than spewing black smoke into the air, this next generation of ferries will slip silently through the water with the next slide also. Okay, so I want to point out that our first ferry is already contracted, and as it is launched and put into commercial operation in the upcoming months, we will have achieved a major milestone. It's been several years in the middle. It's almost hit us in the last few years. One is Lane in 2018, coming from the south, and if it did hit us, the winds would have been coming, if they would have been circulating counterclockwise, if they hit a wahoo, the winds would have been first coming from the east, ride down and then come from the west. We plan to fully celebrate that achievement. We have to get right back to work with the knowledge and IP we developed, and continue expanding the first fleet of zero-carbon ferries to roll out as quickly as possible from the north. At this point, the question is not if, it's just how long will it take? The winds can come from the east. We don't believe there is time left to roll. With your help, we can make it happen quicker. We need to protect the entire, a little bigger house. There's no preferred direction. So how about the next slide? Maybe go to that one. Okay, so here's a reminder of why we need to protect our houses. Okay, so this was actually this year. You may say, well, there wasn't a hurricane or a tropical storm this year. No, there wasn't, but there was some high winds in January, like 20 or 30 mile per hour sustained winds, and they gusted up to 50 miles per hour. And then there was topography at Montelani Heights. And at that location, it looked almost as if it was like a weak, a tropical storm or a weak hurricane. And you could see that house being impacted. Okay, you could see two things. You see the shingles and the roof, the shingles and the underliebing flying off the roof. And then later, the roof comes off. Now this is just for that local, one local spot. But if it was a hurricane hitting Oahu, it would have happened to thousands or tens of thousands of houses. Okay, so next slide. Okay, so now I'm going to go to, this is Hurricane Ida hitting Louisiana. This was in August 29. And we went down to Louisiana from August from excuse me, October 4th to the 11th to look at wind damage. And I'm going to show you some slides of what we saw there. Okay, so see the next slide. Okay, so this is Grand Island in Louisiana. And here's you're going to see a combination of wind damage and water damage. The wind damage is obviously the roof blew off. The water damage is from the front of the house. The shoreline eroded almost 100 feet undermining the front of the house. And in the back of the house, there's a phenomenon called scour, where water, when it returns to the ocean, it encounters turbulence. And that is, it's out that hole. Photos that you're showing, to me, though, those, the remains of those homes look like care downs. Yes, yeah. The only option there is to bulldoze. Well, for the occupants to try to find any valuables in the home plow through it. Yeah. To make a bulldozer to it and all you have left is a concrete slab. Yeah, that's true. It's a pretty expensive proposition there. Those are those houses we would classify as major destroyed or major damage. The majority of houses, though, had moderate to minor damage. And I'm going to show you a few of those. And and this, and you know, there's going to be some lessons learned for Hawaii here. Okay, so could we go to the next slide? Okay, so here's another house where the roof blew off. So this is common. We saw that almost we saw that monolani heights this year. And now we see it in Louisiana from this is not in Grand Isle. This is in St. Charles Paris. It's actually pretty far inland. But the roof is blowing off here. Okay, so what we have to do in Hawaii is see if we could prevent this type of damage. So could you give the next slide? Yeah. Okay, so this is in the homeowners handbook. And this is like the first thing we recommend to homeowners, they need to for houses that don't have them, they need to add hurricane clips which tied the roof to the wall. Okay, these are three different types of clips the H3, HM9, HPT between these clips almost every house that doesn't have hurricane clips could add them. Generally, if your house was built before 1988 on Oahu, you don't have them. Okay, so but it can be added as a retrofit. It's a very simple retrofit. We think we've retrofitted around 6,000 to 7,000 homes already. If you're handy, you could possibly do that, do it by yourself. You know, you should first seek the advice of a licensed structural engineer or architect. And if you're not handy, you could hire a contractor that could do it for under $2,000. Yeah, for a general size house. Dennis, I had my home done for I think it was under $2,000, even though in some cases the ladder had to be over 20 feet tall to get at the rafters. But what it involved was a walkthrough by the owners of the company and that took less than a half hour, I would say. We made the appointment and notified my tenants and they came in in the morning. They were out in the afternoon. This ding ding ding a real simple operation. Easy for me to say I wasn't up on the ladder. But the next day I got notification from my homeowner's insurance company. My insurance premiums are here by reduced by $200 a month or $200 a year for the life of the home. That gives you a bit of a financial payback in addition to getting the security from these guys. So just from personal experience, I highly recommend it. Yeah, and it'll pay it back. You'll get the payback. If you do get the insurance discount, it'll pay back in roughly around seven or eight years. And then you'll have a stronger house for the rest of its life. One of the things I recommend the homeowners do not wait. I mean, we're almost at the end of hurricane season. You might say, I'll do it next year during hurricane season. Do not wait. Now's the perfect time to do it, even when it's off hurricane season. Because like Howard mentioned, although it's fairly simple once they get to your house, it may take you two months to line them up to get on their work list. So it's not something you could do when there's an incoming watch or warning. And that has let me give an analogy here as a fair-skinned person who was born and raised in Hawaii and spent seemingly the majority of his time out in the sun. And now rapidly approaching my mature years, I have a skin issue or two or three. And I go back and see my dermatologist every three months. And sure enough, she finds a little spot here, a little spot there. It's quite, quite, let's get it done before, let's get this eliminated before it becomes a skin cancer problem. Same analogy with this. Let's get it done before when you don't need it, when everything is simple and inexpensive. Don't wait until there's doom and gloom headlines. Oh my goodness, huge hurricane season coming. Do it now. What we're doing is good. Yes, be proactive. Yeah. Okay. Could we maybe go to the next slide there picture? Okay. So remember in Manilani Heights, we showed you a house where the shingles and the underlayment was coming up. Well, that happened for a lot of houses in Louisiana also. More houses had the shingles and underlayment come off than the roof actually blowing off. And when the shingles and underlayment come off, it exposes all the seams between your plywood deck and the trusses or the rafters. And you could see like rays of light where there's seams and those rays of light or where water can leak through your roof and into your house. Next slide. Okay. So this house had no structural failure and the roof deck was still on the house. But the shingles and underlayment came off and it caused it to leak through the roof and then collected on the ceiling which is horizontal and then ran along the ceiling to the edges of the walls. Okay. And it saturated the walls and essentially this entire house had to be gutted because of the water infiltration from the roof. Okay. So when you attach your shingles to your roof, they need to be really put on well. And there's a guidance in the book in the homeowner's handbook that tells you how to do that. Okay. The next slide. One of the things we recommend is to create a sealed roof. Okay. A sealed roof is you check your deck. You see the plywood deck is that brown area on the roof. And then there's a black area. That black area is your, it's called peel and stick modified self adhering modified bitumen layer. It's almost like a layer of tar on your roof to prevent any leaks from like the seams between the plywood. Okay. So this is something that is not traditionally done in Hawaii but it's very simple to do. If you're going to re-roof and we don't recommend people just do this to, you know, only do it if you're going to re-roof anyway. Like if your roof has gone through is near its end of its life or you're going to put in solar. Most people re-roof before they put in solar. This is the time you do some of these measures in the handbook. And you want to make a sealed roof. You want to make a cool roof. Remember we want to be resilient. You want to be environmentally sustainable climate adaptation and all that. You know, this is the one, your roof is a key part of your house. And when you redo it, you really need to think how you could take advantage of all these new best practices that are out there. Okay. So next slide. Okay. The other thing you want to do is you want to make sure you have a wind and rain resistant envelope. Nothing gets in your house. Remember we showed the pictures of the two hurricanes laying in Douglas, you know, coming from different directions. The wind is going to come from different directions depending on where the hurricane comes from. You want to make sure your windows are protected. So next picture. I don't want to show all doom and gloom because there are houses that could perform well. You know, and this is a house that performed on Grand Isle that performed pretty well from the wind. It's elevated. Most houses in Hawaii don't need to be elevated. Did, you know, this one needed to be elevated because it was along the coast. But in terms of wind damage, it had no wind damage. First of all, the roof was securely fastened. It is a metal roof. The metal roof generally did better than the asphalt shingle roofs, but there's a way to make asphalt shingle roofs better. It has a good roof shape that's called a hip style roof versus a gable end roof. So the hip style roof performed better. And it also has window protection. You can see the, these are called Bahama shutters. So in the homeowner's handbook, there's 12 different ways to protect your windows. And it's all in the handbook. Yeah. And Dennis, you do see some, some homes on this island in the Hauula region that are up on the stilts. Yes. Yes. They put them on stilts when they're along the coast and they're threatened by wave action. Okay. And it could be like high winter, sure. It could even be a tsunami. It'd be hurricane storm surge. Now these ones that you saw that were elevated was because it was hurricane storm surge. Yeah. Okay. So why don't we go to the next slide? Okay. So I want to point out that we need to think about preparing houses but also preparing families. Okay. So when there's a hurricane, there's a triple threat. There's storm surge and waves. There's flooding and there's wind. So each one of those could be a big problem. Each one of those could prevent you from staying in your house. Okay. So on the top, on the top half of that figure is a flood map. Okay. And there's the link. You could see the link to the flood map there. And we're using Wailupi Peninsula on the south shore as an example. You could see the peninsula sticking out. And you could see on the flood map, it looks like the peninsula is safe from flooding. Okay. Okay. But on the storm surge map, which is below, the peninsula is not safe. If you look at the flood map again, again at the top, it looks like the stream is not safe. And then you look at the storm surge map and it looks like it is safe. That's why you actually need to look at both of those. And you need to know your hazard zone. And if you're in a storm surge or a flood zone, okay, this is all for planning purposes. It allows you to create your emergency evacuation plan. And then you don't act on it until you hear a cue from local emergency management. You should first listen to them first. Okay. But you want to be prepared because if they tell you to say, they say, oh, the south shore, you know, people in the storm surge zone need to go need to evacuate. And you're going, am I in the storm surge zone or not? You know, it's not something you want to make a decision on when the hazard is upon you. Okay. So it requires prior planning and think about both storm surge and flooding. And then the last slide, I just want to show the last slide, is the wind. Okay. So this is the situation most homeowners are going to be in. They're not going to be in a flood zone. They're not going to be in a storm surge zone, but they're going to be threatened by the wind. And this is like, this is like the example of some of those houses in Louisiana. They were away from the coastline, but they still threatened by the wind. You know, there was one house the roof blew off. So this is our shelter in place table. And if you, you remember the story of the three little pigs houses made of straw wood and stone. Well, the bottom row is a house, a single wall house middle is a double wall house top is a house made of stone. And then on the very bottom, there's unsafe marginal good, better and best. And the whole purpose of this is to find out what row your house falls into and try and move your house to the right. Okay. You can make every house could make be strengthened by putting in a good condition, maintaining it, add hurricane clips, which we already discussed. Okay. For a single wall house, we can only strengthen it so much. You know, if there's a category two or three or four, do not stay in your single wall house, go, go to a friends or relatives house, which is stronger, maybe they have a double wall house or a concrete stone house or go to a high rise condo or a last resort, go to a public emergency shelter. Okay. But that's how you use the shelter in place table. And it's all in the handbook. All of those retrofits are in the handbook also. So. And Dennis, we've only got a little bit of time, but what we didn't discuss was melding energy efficiency together with these mitigation measures. Okay. Did you want me to touch on that, Howard? Yep, yep. That's near, near, near to my heart. Okay. Well, again, if you look at the handbook, there's a critical part of your house, which you can make more resilient and more energy efficient. Okay. We already mentioned the roof. You can make it a lot stronger and you can make it more energy efficient. You want to have a cool roof. You want to make sure that it's reflecting heat and solar energy away from the roof and, you know, preventing like, you know, a lot of absorbing heat. You don't want that to absorb heat and it could make like an urban hot area. Okay. Same thing with your windows. Your windows are critical for hurricane protection. You want to make them strong. And there's a way to make your windows also cooler and more energy efficient. One, you could use, well, you could use a panel system, but for the building codes in Florida, they use impact resistant glass and it, it passes missile test, but also it allows the glass has reflectance. So if you look inside the window from the outside, it just reflects off the window and it's not only reflecting light, but it's reflecting heat. So, and there's some other measures in the book for drought. You know, you want to make sure our homes are, you know, resistant to wildfire and also resistant to drought and by doing so, you could save water. So those are, you know, they're all in the book. There's measures for roof, window, landscaping, solar. There's some tips in there for solar and a combination of resilience and climate adaptation and sustainability measures. And Dennis, I would mention that if you don't want to put in impact resistant windows, replace the whole windows, it is window film. Yes. It actually should be applied by a professional, but window film that is likewise impact resistant. And we are out of time, but please, Dennis, remind the audience how they can get hold of this handbook of yours. Okay. Well, the quickest way is just to Google University of Hawaii Sea Grant, you know, and they'll get to your, our website and you could download it from the website or you could contact our communications department and get a free copy. Also, all the emergency management agencies have copies or civil defense agencies on, say, on the big island. They'll have copies of the book also. So, again, the analogy we go to our doctors periodically to get checked up. And if the doctor finds that something is impending wrong, he says, let's fix it now. Well, it's not serious. Same thing with the homes. And I would say the first step is getting your wonderful handbook. So thank you so much for being our guests, Dennis. And let's hope that this saves hundreds of people a whole lot of money and grief. Yes. Getting your roof blown off is no fun whatsoever. I assure everybody of that. So we must bid the phone to do it. I think take away E-code green, Howard Wiig with Dennis Wong. Sea Grant is my guest. Thank you very much. See you next time.