 Okay, we're back. Exciting. We talked about hurricanes this afternoon. We talked with Dennis Wong and John Bremender. Last hour, when they're actually here in the studio, they're going to resume that conversation in a minute. But for now, okay, Maria Tomei, my co-host and me, we're going to have the benefit of Shannon Tanganon's experience at Hawaiian Electric with what happened over a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday here in Hawaii. So what happened as far as the utility company is concerned, Shannon? Well, we were fully prepared. We stood up our incident management teams. We were on 12-hour shifts. We had people positioned in different areas to make sure that we had, you know, quick coverage when we needed it. But, you know, O'ahu was spared mostly. Spared as the right way. Yeah, but we still got the effects of, you know, we had some outages. Any outages in O'ahu? Yeah, we had from about Thursday through last night. We had about 23,000 total, you know, and it's brief. Well, how about the connection between the storm and the outages? I mean, what in the storm causes the outages? Mostly the wind. The wind, you know, and the vegetation hitting our power lines. Flowing objects. Yep, trees, branches, hitting our lines. The wind, you know, swing shorts where we have one line touching another, and that causes... Swing short, you call it? Swing short. I may remember that for the future. It's catchy, isn't it? Yeah. Okay, the big island now, that was relatively hard. Yes, definitely, there were about 9,500 outages over the course. I'm sorry, maybe, yeah, 9,500 customers that experienced outages. I mean, they got really hit with rain and the wind, vegetation. Yeah, and some people had flooding. Definitely, yeah. A lot of flooding in residential areas and all that. The big island has its share of trouble. I know, they've had a bunch. And Maui has a fire while they have a hurricane that was fired. So what, you know what, so actually when you were on last time, and when Shelley Kimura was on this past Monday, I can't wait with the feeling that, you know, Hawaii really pays attention to this. And it's got all kinds of systems and people and resources in place to deal with it on a very expedited basis. And so, you know, you're doing the best you can in view of sometimes an unpredictable natural effect. Yeah, it's a very unpredictable situation. But all we can do is be as prepared as we can be. Again, positioning in ourselves, making sure we have enough employees to respond when we do have outages, but also making sure that we're going out only when it's safe to do so. Yeah. So it's actually becoming the new normal. I keep thinking. Well, we're always ready. If we have a system coming or some kind of emergency, we do have a system in place where we get the word out to employees to let them know where they're coming in, whether they're doing a 12 hour shift. You know, we go to a 24 hour, you know, two 12 hour shift kind of a situation. And of course, as a spokesperson for Hawaii Electric, you get to deal with the public, sometimes in a one way discussion, but sometimes in a feedback discussion. What kind of feedback did you get after Lane? I think mostly positive. You know, you can't really help mother nature, you know, creating, you know, situations where we have outages. So I think people what we try to do is set expectations. And we did tell people prepare for outages. So we're hoping that helped, you know, as they weren't caught off guard, you know, we were telling them that the wind is, you know, it can cause outages and heavy winds will cause outages. So be prepared. Yeah, do you think people out there are generally cognizant of the fact that we're in a sequence of storms? It's not just one. It's not this one comes to season. These these days, it's more than one. And we always have the risk and and every time, you know, we escape, so to speak, the risk of getting hit by the next one is that much greater, like a paramutual. Yeah, it's gambling almost. Yeah. I think people are well aware that, you know, we were fortunate this go around, at least on Oahu. So I do think that they're going to remain vigilant and prepared. Yeah, I do have that feeling of the feeling of people are, you know, it's hard, but they're getting educated about this. And so they're going to be quicker to stock up quicker to fix their homes. Maria, is your home fixed? Well, after Hurricane Iniki in 1992, that there was something else heading this way. And somebody had the radio on in the office. And so I went. So I took vacation. I went to the hardware store. We got hurricane clips. We didn't have enough to do the whole house. So we did some. And so we went to the hardware store again this weekend. And we looked at the huge array. I think there was a picture on the three o'clock show of how much stuff there is. And we weren't sure what we needed. So then we figured we would listen to the homeowners headbook fellow about the preparing your house better because we've got maybe one third of the hurricane clips we want even on the roof. We didn't do anything with the base. We didn't do anything for windows. Yeah. So no, we're not prepared. The house is not prepared. We've got an emergency kit and the rest of that stuff. Emergency kits. It seems to me that if you've been through what we had this past weekend, you will develop some kind of emergency kit. I know I did. But I also thought about what else I might have, you know, while it was too late to develop an emergency kit. I thought to myself, what else would I like to have in my kit? So I was mentally reorganizing my kit, planning, if you will, a better kit for the next one. And I think that's probably going to be common. People will have a place set aside in their home for the things they may need. You know, I have my, Sharon, do you have candles? Sharon? And she said, yes, I do. I got candles. Also, Maria gave us a, we had it on the show. Oh, the windup radio. The windup radio that you charge your cell phone? We opened the box on that. We were ready to go on that. But it takes a long time to pre-charge those things. You know, now the ones you get, you know, they actually has a little USB plug, but it takes a few hours to get it up to full charge. So you do need to do that. Even if you have it in your kit, you want to charge everything up. Like you were saying, charge your cell phone. If you have those extra battery bank type of things, you know, charge stuff. So the idea is that you know, it's dynamic and you know it's going to happen again. That's a certainty. And so you have to, you know, plan for the next one. So what about, what's the culture about planning for the next one? What do you do now that you've had four days of experience here in the new normal, if I can call it that? What do you do for the next one? Well, we always do a post-mortem or lessons learned type of survey so that we can identify, you know, where we need to improve. I mean, it's always an improvement process. So we feel like each time we go through this, we're better for it. You know, it's a unique problem we have. Yes. And it's different than many other places. And it's part of living in Hawaii right now. It's what it is. And it's probably not going to change. Sorry. Yeah, unfortunately. All we can do is stay there. Okay, stay alert. As a Coast Guard, I was in the Coast Guard. Simpa Paratus. You know what that means? Simpa Paratus is Latin for be prepared. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're going to break down for a minute. We'll come back and talk to Dennis and John. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments, and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. Okay, we're back. We're back with Dennis Wan and John Brevinder. And with my co-host, Maria Tomei, we're talking about hurricanes. It's a good time to talk about them because, you know, we had one last week, and we're likely to have one going forward. So it's the new normal for us. And that's what living in Hawaii is about. We have to deal with that on every level, including the mental level, dealing with this spectacular weather. The spectacular may not be the right word. We'll work on it. How about extreme weather? But the more prepared people are, the easier it's to cope. They're more able to cope with it physically and mentally. Agreed. It's part of our lives together in these islands, and we have to cope with it. Everybody. It's not just the organizations that are, you know, institutionally responsible or involved, including Hawaiian Electric, but it's everyone, everyone all around. Okay, anyway, so let's get back to Hector for a minute. This is, we have some video of Hector, or photograph of Hector now. Harvey. Harvey. Okay, Harvey. Harvey and Hector. So we're starting with Harvey. The decimated neighborhood. Which one do you want to talk about first, Dennis? The Harvey photo? Okay. There it is. Okay. So this is Rockport, Texas. This is Harvey making landfall as a category for hurricane. And you could see in this one block, there's tremendous difference in performance of the houses. There's some houses that are totally gone. And there's some houses like in the number one that have virtually no damage. And so we went down there with FEMA, the building science branch, trying to determine what, why those houses number one, since it's one performed well, and how we can make our existing houses in Hawaii perform like that house did in number one. What did you find? Okay. The key thing, building codes. You have to have strong building codes, and they generally require two things. A load path, a continuous load path that's structural term, tying the roof to the foundation. And then the second thing is having a complete wind and rain resistant envelope around the house. That's like protecting your windows. And that was going to, for sure, going to have an effect on whether your house is one of the survivors, like in the left side of the farmer, or one of the disasters on the top right in that group of houses. Right. And that's why a lot of the things we mentioned in the homeowner's handbook, retrofitting, we're trying to have homeowners, even homeowners that have old houses like Maria, you know, you can add hurricane clips. You can try and complete the load path as much as possible. And you can also add protection around your house to make it, to make that wind and rain resistant envelope. So to go back to a parallel situation, with Puerto Rico and Maria, and the huge field of solar panels, huge field. And on one side of the field, they use one kind of fastener where they applied it differently from the other side of the field, where they use either a different application or a different fastener. And one side of the field was ripped up by the hurricane, ripped up, destroyed. And you can see, you know, the panels everywhere, even the tracks on which the panels were fixed were, you know, all twisted. And on the other side, everything was fine. Yes. And they were still working, after the hurricane. And it was not, you know, it was not a matter of a different wind in one side or the other. It was the fasteners. Yes. Sometimes you can explain this huge variation in damage simply on the basis of how well you prepare the property or the equipment, whatever. It's very, very interesting. So this is, it supports your point. Yes. And I would only add this, though, that we talked about category five hurricanes, which we could easily have some more. A category five hurricane is 160 miles plus per hour. Can we, what kind of assurance can we give people, you know, that they'll be okay at 160 mile an hour wind? Because, I mean, my guess, you can tell me I'm wrong. My guess is 160 mile an hour wind will tear the roof right off your house without hardly blinking. Well, what can you do? If you saw that picture before, that house number one, that's a category four hurricane. So it's almost a category five, but not as strong. But the bottom line is every house could be made stronger. And you're not going to be able to make an older house like a 1950 or 60 house as strong as the new houses today, but you make it stronger. If we encourage people to do make your house as strong as possible, and if there's a major hurricane coming, go somewhere else that's stronger, but at least when you come back, you'll more likely to have something in place, you know, protecting your house, your valuables, whatever. Yeah. Assuming all that, John, assuming that. And we find that there's no sheer effect going to happen. I don't know if we know that for sure, but, you know, the trades are not coming very well. And this could happen next year with El Nino coming next year. It could be worse. Okay. And you know, at a certain point in time that the winds are going to be 160 miles plus. And there's no hope, you know, no relief from that. Okay. What do you tell people about their houses, even assuming their houses are really built well? What do you tell them? You say, if you have hurricane clamps on your house, you can stay. But if you don't, you better leave. What do you tell them? This is one of those instances where Dennis as the more the expert is the one that we get this question a lot at the Weather Service as an organization, what to do during these events. You tell you what we expect to happen, but we don't necessarily know how to translate that into to new directions. Yes, if you go to the shelter in place table, we could cover it right now. This was not rehearsed. Yes. I mean, this is exactly what could we have the shelter in place table as a graphic? Well, this, let me just point out, this is one of the two elements you need in a strong house. You need a continuous load pad that ties the roof to the foundation. Okay. And the typically the weakest link is the roof to wall. You can strengthen that. Maria was already mentioning hurricane clips. Then there's a, you know, every intersection of the house is fortified with a connector. So that's one element. The other is the envelope around the house. Who are the next? Maybe. Okay. This is continued, completed a load path for a single wall house. We could fortify both single wall houses and double wall houses. Next. This is protecting the envelope of your house. Plywood, impact resistant glass, the handbook, there's 12 different methods to protect your windows. Next. I would like to get to the shelter in place table if we could get that. There it is. Okay. So remember, Jay, we discussed this at a previous show. Yeah. And think of it like the three little pigs, the one made the house of straw, wood and then stone. And here we go. Single wall house, double wall houses are inherently stronger. The stone or concrete houses are actually stronger. And actually, we saw some of this. We saw a category four house, like the double wall houses there with the load, complete load path. They survived the category four in Harvey. And in Maria, in Puerto Rico, we saw a lot of houses made out of stone that survived the category five hurricane there. Okay. But the bottom line is you start at a certain row, say with single wall, you know, is it in poor good condition? Good condition, you know, well maintained, no corrosion. And then you could add hurricane clips and that hard to do um, window protection. And the goal is to move to the right in that, in that shelter. By the way, the shelters place table is on our website. When Sea Grant posted it on the website, it was shared during lane by 37 organizations. So it had a lot of people going, going to it. So that's if I call you in the middle of the hurricane, I don't think I could reach you. But if I called you in the middle of the hurricane and I say, look, you know, I'm on the left side of the chart, not the right. Should I stay in my house or get out and go to a shelter? You should probably go, we recommend to people and this is all preparing. First of all, you try and move to the right. But if you haven't, you know, it's part of your evacuation plan. Because the preference is to go, if you can't find a place, if your house is not strong enough, go to your friends or relatives. So your house was built in 1960 and your son's was built in 2015. Go to see your son. Go to your son's house because it's going to have the continuous load path built into it already. As a matter of code. As a matter of code. Okay. So a lot of these things are required under the building code and we could always make building codes stronger. So that's very important. So people will have places to go when there is a category five, you know, under the new building code, if it was implemented properly now, they could go there during a category five problem. Yeah, you know, I keep thinking that we're going to see other category five hurricanes here. And, you know, it's a bullet out there with our name on it somehow. And if it strikes a category five strikes, which is the most dense population, the most most exposed infrastructure, I would say, what's going to happen? Can you, you got an idea about, you know, how you would see that coming and what would happen and what we would do if we could do things. So this is actually what the the status plan for in the catastrophic hurricane plan. Worst case scenario, major hurricane striking the south shore of Oahu, knocking out the airport, knocking out the deep draft harbors, and essentially isolating us for an extended period of time. That is from the research that's gone into this, that they developed the 14 day recommendation for supplies, based on the time it would take to get equipment out here. And two weeks is a minimum, that's for sure. That's based on getting equipment out here, surveying the harbors and repairing it. But then you still have the time for the supply chain to catch back up again, time to offload ships, everything like that. So people that everybody here will be on their own for an extended period of time, just while government services are focused on restoring access via roads, clearing debris, restoring the ports and airports. And you saw all the ships left port, they stopped operating cargo for what, for four days or something. That'll happen again with every significant hurricane. The Coast Guard will shut down the harbors progressively. They have different port conditions that they set based on onset timing expected. And once you get to closure, I think, within 12 hours or 24 hours of expected onset, then no more activity. Well, if you have a Hurricane V, must you always have trade winds? In other words, is it possible to have a Hurricane V without trade winds to ameliorate the wind, where we can't predict, we can't rely on the shear factor, where the thing would come in at a full five? Or as somebody said during the break that, well, you never get a full five because there are scientific factors that stop a five and make it a four if it were to come over. Is it true? The worst case scenario planning we've had is based on a category four. But the background for that, for example, that water near the islands would be cooler, isn't necessarily the case. For example, right now, just looking at sea surface temperatures, they're 45 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. So they're warmer as it is right now. And it's the warm water that would provide the strength and the heat and energy for the hurricane to maintain its strength. I'd like to mention, too, you know, you need to prepare and make the house as strong as possible. The category five is probably a very, very rare statistically, because there's been statistical studies on it. You mean before climate change got really bad? Well, even with climate change or without, we're much more likely to be hit by tropical storm winds or category one than a five, much more likely, you know, two. So each one, it becomes less likely. So and so and then also realize that like a category five is going to have very tight diameter, high wall or whatever. And it's, you know, Hawaii is a big place and, you know, for it to, you know, maybe it's like 15 miles or 20, 30 miles in diameter, it could miss us. And most likely, even if it's category five, a lot of areas will be hit by tropical storm winds. So the things that you do will make your property more, you know, more likely to survive. And also, if it's a really strong storm, you know, just make your property strong and then go to a place that's stronger and you're more likely to be able to return to that place. And the last thing, insurance, you know, you can always make your property strong, but there's always unpredictable factors. And that's why what insurance is for. Well, I'm just thinking of the numbers that came out of Puerto Rico at first, the number of casualties was 14 to 1500, something like that. Next time you look at 3000 or 3000 more, that means dramatically more. I'm not sure why they didn't have all that data. Maybe they just weren't connecting the dots on the natural effect of a storm like that on the population. Seems to me, though, that we have to see this as part of our lives, that we have to see it philosophically. That, you know, this is mother nature and she's not taking wooden nickels. And maybe we didn't treat her really well in the past. And now it's coming back to haunt us. And it's irreversible for all practical purposes in our lifetimes. And we're going to have increasing bad weather, extreme weather. And we have to get used to that. We have to get used to the possibility of a Puerto Rico right here with casualties. Right? I mean, and we have to prepare for that. So on the one hand, it's the, in my view, it's the threat of mother nature being scorned. And on the other hand, it's the majesty of mother nature. This is a world weather system. You studied that. And we have to live with it. Right. And we have to respect it in awe. And we respect it and plan for it. So a lot of these casualties you're talking about, that's why evacuation planning is so important. People, you know, we always hear people say make a plan, but they really don't tell you how to make a plan. So you need to know what you're going to do during a tsunami, what you're going to need to do for a hurricane. The problem is people don't want to think about it or spend the time to think about it. But if everyone thought about it and knew what to do, then the casualties would be much less. So that's what the, that shelter in place table is sort of like how trying to help people decide how to make a plan specifically for the hurricane risk because they should make a plan for each house. It should be the hurricane. They should make a plan for a tsunami because it's going to have to respond differently. And that's, it's all about planning and thinking about these things beforehand. Okay. Maria. Well, I don't want us to run out of time before we get to see some of these interesting hands-on examples. And I had a couple of questions about windows. Okay. I don't know if we have time for that. Go for it. Okay. Well, the most common way to protect your window, the cheapest is a plywood, but needs to be prepared, pre-cut, pre-labeled, pre-measured, pre-drilled. They take an hour to prepare it, but if it's prepared properly, it's easier to store and takes five minutes to put up. Okay. In addition to the plywood, there are these things called these plastic paddles. These are also good for protecting windows and lightweight. Okay. There's this thing called impact resistant glass. It's gone through missile tests. This is probably the most expensive. This is the most, this is really having duty. This is, this is not only impact resistant, but it has like heat reflectance and it's, it's quiet. And then there are some other things called like hurricane fabric. This is what they use in Miami. This has been approved in Miami-Dade County. But it's sort of like, imagine catching, you know, catching golf balls at a driving range with a net. That's what this thing is trying to do. You put it in front of large or unusually shaped windows. It's not paper. It looks like paper, but it's not paper at all. Yeah. In the bottom line, there's like 10 or 12 different ways to protect your windows. Not that hard to do, you know, but just people got to think about it. And do they make louvers out of this stuff or is that just? No, this is a panel that goes in front of your window. Okay. Okay, temporarily. But if you have louvers, I imagine you have a single wall house of louvers. It is possible to make, this is impact resistant glass. It's monolithic. This is like monolithic and then a layer in front of it. But it is possible to make an awning for your jealousies with something like this. Geez. Okay. Or cover your jealousies with this. Yeah. Okay, if we didn't know about this before, we better learn about it. Let's go check out Dennis's book. Skylights. Yes, you can get skylights that are impact resistant. Okay. Yeah. And there are companies here that sell them. Yeah. I just want to cover one of the things before we close and that is, I want to know the community who are interested in protecting us. There's the Sea Grant College for sure. You put a lot of time into this. And you have a lot of people at Sea Grant that work on this. Right. But what else? And we have NOAA, which sits virtually in the lap of HIGP and the Sea Grant College as a federal agency working with them to protect us, which is very nice of you. Thank you. Who else is working on it? Oh. The National Weather Service. Yeah. They're separate facilities. John and I, I was going to say from a community resiliency standpoint, there's something called the Hawaii Hazards Awareness and Resiliency Program where individual communities will develop their own action plan. With the thought that when there is a disaster, whether it's a hurricane or a tsunami or something else, individual communities will become isolated and cut off and need to be self-reliant. So developing communication protocol, how you encourage them and help them to do that. Yep. We work with them from a weather standpoint, educating them about hazards. Tsunami Warning Center works with them from Tsunami Hazards. The state and county emergency managers will help train them on how to prepare a plan. So you've got police, you've got fire, you've got National Guard, you've got the military, right? Yeah. And the Hawaii, and all the emergency management and civil defense agents, they're all, we're all working together. Yeah. And then you've got the National Preparedness Disaster Training Center across the street over here downtown. Who coordinates all this? You? No. It's usually the, that the director of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency is usually, I mean, each county is autonomous in a way. They've run it, but Hawaii Emergency Management Agency also sort of like helps to coordinate the counties. And they're like the in-between, between the federal and the state and the county. So everyone's, to really be resilient, it requires everyone to be involved, all organizations, all individuals from the feds, the state, the county. And individuals, organizations, voluntary organizations, homeowners, everyone needs to be well. And it actually, the more prepared individual people are, the more they could help others. Because a lot of times the first responders turn out to be your neighbors. Right. So it's very important. We have to care for each other. Yeah. There was an article in the paper a day or two ago about how this was notable, this whole experience, because these first responders and the coordination and communication between all these, you know, first response organizations was good, probably better than before. So we're learning. We're learning on preparation and we're learning on response. And I have to say we haven't had all that much experience recently on cleanup. But that's coming too, I think. Yeah. Okay. Closing remarks. Dennis, you go first. Just everyone, you know, prepare. It's, don't think of it like just doing it during hurricane season. Always think of the back of your mind as a, just your frame of mind, you know, just when, especially your house, like it's not a big home improvement project. It's like something you do a little each time you make a decision on your house or always think about making things strong, being more prepared and get it to know your neighbor. Dennis and Sean, thank you for coming down, you know, spending not one show, but two shows with us today. Sean, what are your closing remarks? Steyler, we're right in the peak of hurricane season right now. It lasts through November. Don't get complacent. If you've bought number two supplies, keep them. You may need them again. In fact, build them up. Yeah, keep building on lessons learned so far. So you'll be more prepared for next time. Yeah. Thank you, John. Maria, what's the wrap around? So that book. This book. Where do you get that? Oh, okay. You could just, we give it out for free and you could also download or just Google University of Hawaii Sea Grant College program and it'll get to the front page and then it'll go right to the book and you can download the book and the shelter and place table. Excellent. And some other retrofit options. And there's a three-day weekend coming up. Get the book, make your plan, go to the store, get your clamps. Yeah, don't wait. Yeah, and then have a list of the rest of the stuff that you'll tackle as time permits. No time to waste. Thank you, Maria. Thank you, John. Thanks, guys. Thank you, Dennis.