 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Bingo, I told you we're coming back, we came back. This is a technology show today. This is Think Tech Talks. And this is Dennis Wang. You saw Dennis Wang before. Hi Dennis. Hi, it's good to see you back. Sea Grant College, nice to see you. He came and told us how we should put our houses in order, so to speak, for any storm and possibility of any storm. And now we have this sort of delicious moment. We're going to look back and see what he said and whether people did it and how it affected things. And John Braverton, thank you. Thank you for coming down, John. Glad to be here. Thank you. So you're with NOAA and with the National Weather Service. How does that work? So I am a forecaster at the National Weather Service Office Central Pacific Hurricane Center here. We're responsible for all the hurricane forecasts for the Hawaii area. Did I spell your name right? Bravinder. Bravinder, yeah, okay. So anyway, thank you for coming down. We want to hear about the, you know, about the lane. You know, the problem is in the past we've had hurricanes, but there's been such a, you know, a hiatus between them that we forget how concerned we were on hurricane one by the time we get to hurricane two. That's over. Now we're going to have at seriatim hurricanes. It's the way it works. And so we have to be more concerned about it. So the first thing I'd like to do today in approaching this from a tech point of view is sort of, you know, restate what you were suggesting a couple of times already on ThinkTech. Sure. And tell us how a responsible homeowner who cared about his property and his family would have been prepared. What he would have done had he listened at the time lane started. Sure. Okay, so if you're really prepared, there would be no need to get rest of the store for supplies or to buy plywood. And there would be no reason and people shouldn't return those supplies after the event or, you know, because it puts a burden on some of the stores for making an effort to help the community. For myself, all I did was because I felt that I was pretty prepared was I bought two gallons of gas because I don't like to store a lot of gas around the house. But if you prepare properly, it's almost effortless to be constantly prepared. You don't want to prepare for a hurricane and then become unprepared by returning your supplies and going through the cycle. A lot of the stores weren't taking returns after that happened. Okay. Apparently a lot of people return their supplies or try. Okay, yeah. So like for myself, you know, the new guidance is two weeks of food and water per person. Okay, so it's one gallon per person per day. So family of four would need 56 gallons of water for two weeks. If you go to Costco and get a case of water, that's five or six gallons. They would need 11 cases, which is hard to do. For myself, we do this by a case or two or three of water and it's bought like weeks in advance because water has a shelf life of like almost nine or 10 months. And then we supplement it. We put it in water containers. There are these things we mentioned previously in the show called water bobs or aquapods. The bladder in your bathtub. The bladder in your bathtub that holds 100 gallons of water. You just get that Amazon. And in fact, so we were prepared and the more prepared you are, the more able you are to help other people. So because we felt we were pretty prepared, we actually gave some of our water containers to our neighbors and we gave some of our plywood to some of other neighbors. I mean, the bottom line is in terms of your supplies, it should be effortless. So regarding food, you never buy food. If you're not going to eat Vienna sausage, don't put it in your emergency kit because it's going to expire. So if you say you eat a lot of corn, so buy a case of corn and it has a shelf life of two or three years. And as soon as you buy it, put the expiration date on it in big black letters and put it at the bottom of your case. And then within one year after it's about to expire, you start eating that corn. That's how it's effort, an effortless to keep your emergency supplies. And then regarding plywood, you know, a lot of people bought plywood and they probably, oh, I got to get plywood, but they have no idea of how to really put it up. So you need to plan and prepare it. Again, refer to the homeowner's handbook. Well, this is Dennis's book. Well, this is very much who I see, Grant. See, Grant's book? Yeah. And you should have this and you should abide by it. Yeah, so because if you prepare a paddle, it'll take an hour or maybe an hour and a half to, you know, pre-cut it, pre-label, pre-measure, pre-drill. But once it's prepared, it's easy to store for other events and it's easy to put up. It'll take five minutes to put up. So that's how you prepare so it becomes effortless and you prepare always into the future. Yeah. And these days with that seriatum storms, we should always be thinking about this. Are we properly prepared? Yeah. So I was bugging my wife for months after our first show. I said, you know, you got to buy water. We got to have water. We got to have some food just in case, you know, just a little bit of food carries over and we get hungry, you know, when the storm starts. And she didn't listen to me. And all the neighbors were running down to the Safeway and she found water there and she bought tons of soup. Soup's a good idea, isn't it? Soup. Yeah. Where we got stuck is we did not know. And you can answer it now right here as a scoop on ThinkThink. Okay. I'll try to. Do you leave the windows open or you leave the windows closed? Oh, you're supposed to leave the windows closed. You never open them. Completely. That's a myth. Two myths. Don't tape your windows. Don't open your windows. Okay. You're supposed to have a complete wind and rain resistant envelope around your house. Nothing gets in your house. You treat hurricane, wind, rain and debris like a burglar. You don't want a burglar in your house, right? Yeah. You don't want any hurricane elements in your house. Yeah. And then you, you know, people don't realize, we realized last weekend that when you have a hurricane, you stay home. You can. Right. You can't have to go to a shelter. If you stay home, you have to find ways to occupy yourself, especially if you don't have an electrical power, which we didn't have a problem with now. But, but suffice to say, I, you know, we stayed home for four days in our house. And we got along the whole time. Isn't that amazing? That's great. But you have to, you have to see that as a, what could be a very long time when you're just at home. And it requires planning too, because you can't shelter in place if you're in a flood zone. So a high risk flood zone, like in the book, we explain how to look up your flood zone. If you have any risk of flooding, because there's many, you know, hazards related to hurricane, there's a flooding, the rain, the wind. But if there's any risk of flooding, you can't stay in your house. And then also whether you're able to shelter in place is a function of how strong the storm is and how strong their house is. And that's where the shelter in place table we have comes into play. So this goes to warnings. That's what you do, John, isn't it? Yep. So at some point, you know, in any kind of disaster like this, there may be, as Dennis says, a need to leave. A need to get out of your house. It's a hard choice to make, because, you know, whatever you see on television, it's not going to be that granular. And you're not going to know exactly what's happening. You're going to know the news, but not the exact state of affairs. And you may not know that you should leave at a given moment. So how do you find out? What will you tell me? How will you tell me that now I have to leave and seek shelter outside my house? We rely a lot on emergency management community and the media to communicate those messages. We work very closely with the state and county EMS for decisions like that, for opening shelters, evacuation shelters to open. Any areas that would need evacuation, we provide to the public as well. Anybody can see the forecast that we make. And then the emergency management officials will go through and decide, you know, based on their local knowledge, which areas are most susceptible to flooding, to other hazards such as wind or even surge along the coastline. So I mean, I live in Oumano. So are you going to tell me that in Oumano, you guys better go now, go down to school or something because it's time for in Oumano to get away from the floods or whatever. And how do you refine that message so you're telling just the people in Oumano? That's one of the most problematic things as far as taking a large-scale hurricane forecast. We will forecast where storm could go. And even that, there's a fair degree of uncertainty and you'll see a gradual ramp up in impacts as well. For example, on the Big Island, we saw rain begin well ahead of time. Wind will increase as well over a period of time. We usually use the onset of tropical storm force winds, which is about 40 miles an hour, as the drop dead time for when preparations need to be completed. Beyond that point, it's not safe to be outside. Actually, a lot of organizations will use a time frame before that. We estimate they'll begin at this time. Therefore, they'll pull their people off the street six to twelve hours before that just to add that safety buffer. Will you ever go out and tell them door to door or street to street it's time for you to evacuate? Sometimes the police will do that, especially for coastal areas. We generally don't evacuate for wind hazards, but we will evacuate for water hazards. If there is a storm surge expected, then that would cause evacuation. That's where, as Dennis mentioned, knowing your flood areas, because a storm surge would be water from the ocean moving inland, whereas as we've seen, the biggest impact that we've had from land was from the freshwater flooding, very heavy rainfall causing problems there. That will be covered by some of the flood inundation maps. That's always an interesting question. We're having Carl Kim of the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center next week, and his word is preparedness. That's what he does. That's your word, I think, preparedness. So the question is, anybody call you on Thursday or Friday? Dennis, what do I do now, Dennis? Yes, a lot of people call. Do you want to help them? No, a lot of people call them, and you know who actually called the most were the TV and radio stations. And I always tell them, they've attacked us two or three months before hurricane season, or at least when National Weather Service has their annual announcement, because two days before the event, it's very hard to prepare. You may be able to prepare at least to get your plan, your evacuation plan together, or even supplies, but for the things that we cover in the homeowner's handbook, strengthening your house, there's very little, I mean, there is, you know, conceivably if you have a few windows and you could get the plywood and cover some of those windows, or if you have a simple configuration of your roof wall, you may be able to put some of the easier hurricane clips to install in. But a lot of the things we cover in the book are not that hard. People can do it in a Saturday or two, but it's very hard to do two days before the event. Yeah. And, you know, your role, I mean, I'm asking, I'm saying, your role during the event is not to get out there, you don't necessarily want to help people on the street or help them get water or soup or whatnot. Your job is really to the extent it's done, it's done before the hurricane starts before the disaster starts, right? You're into preparedness, like Carl Kim. Making plans, advising people how to prepare. But that may not be the same for you, John. Are you busy over the past weekend? Yes, you are. Yes, you are. Yes. Leading up to a big event like this, there's so many things that come into play. The workload in our office between the hurricane forecasting, the local statements for Hawaii, phone calls, media interviews, everything like that, briefings, working with the decision makers, working with all sorts of other government agencies, with FIMO, with the Coast Guard, with the state and counties. It makes for quite a few long days. We're going to have a short day right now. We're going to have a one-minute break, okay? When we come back, we'll have a longer time to ask you guys what happened and see your clips and photos. I'm so excited about that. We'll take a one-minute break. John and Dennis will be right back after this break. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Gabrieli. I'm the host for Young Talent's Making Way here in Fintech, Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Fintech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Okay, Dennis Wong and John Breverton. I get it right? Breventor. Breventor. Breventor. Thank you. We're back. We're going to talk more about the hurricane that just happened. Dennis is with the Sea Grant College at UH Manoa, and John is with NOAA and the National Weather Service. So let's go. Let's go. You have some great graphics. We really have to see them. So let's look at Dennis's graphics first. Dennis, give us a slide show. Okay, real quick. Let me go to the first one then. It's coming. It's coming soon. That looks like mine. You want to go over that then, John? Sure. This is just a quick look for the wind to weaken. The wind's on the right. Pretty strong winds from the east and then upper level strong winds from the west. Wind shear. That was our saving grace. So that shows the wind shear that we just spoke about. What else you got? That looks like a hurricane too. You want me to mention that? My photo. But this is a common scene, that I've seen in a couple of days before expected arrival of, you know, lane. And again, people, if they prepare properly, they won't need to go to the store for food. You know, have your supply, have a plan to recycle your emergency supplies, have a plan to recycle your emergency supplies. And again, we're going to talk about that. These are a way to strengthen your house and especially the roof to wall connection. That's the weakest part of it. Where was that picture taken? It was probably taken at Home Depot. So you can buy these clips you're talking about in the book at Home Depot or any of the others? Yes. You can clip your house. Almost every house could be strengthened. Keep it in a bottle of water. Well, yeah. You must drink expensive water. Okay, what else we got? We're going to show some of these pictures now and some later. Just more connectors. There's really, we have methods to strengthen both single wall and double wall houses. And we're trying to tie the roof to the foundation. There are a lot of new options people should explore. And if they do a lot of these things that they could actually get, they may actually be able to get hurricane insurance discounts. Okay, what's next? I guess we're jumping back and forth. Okay, John, what is that now? This more wind shear? Yeah, this is just the zoom in of the wind field. The image is 20,000 feet below or so. This is from the weather balloon that we launched from our data collection office in Lihue Friday afternoon. So what is that showing us? This is the measurement of the wind. This is not the wind itself or representation of the wind. It's the scale of the wind. The little barbs, 10 knots so pretty windy day down to the surface. Then the westerly winds 30-40 knots as well. The difference between those two we have the bottom half of the hurricane trying to move westward and the top half trying to move eastward. That's what disrupted that circulation and caused that dramatic collapse in Friday. Thank God for that. But you know when the lane was first coming, I got a great title for our show today. Learning to live with the likes of lane. When it first started coming, they said this is east of Hawaii the winds were like 160 miles an hour before it got sheared with the trades. At 160 miles an hour would your system work? You mean it's very hard. 160 mile per hour winds very strong and generally the force on a building is not proportional to the windward speed but the square of the wind speed. 160 miles per hour is almost like a catastrophic event. Can tear anything apart. The thing is people need the strength in their houses because a lot of times say there's a category 5 hurricane but it'll only have like a diameter of 15 miles or so. The larger diameter of it maybe 200-250 miles across when that large part of the island may be covered by the weaker winds and there it's going to make a difference. Category 5 I wasn't aware of this until now but I'm learning and we're all learning about this for time to come. You were saying? If you look at the shelter in place table remember the three types of buildings. Remember the three little pigs straw, wood and stone. This is in the book. You've got to look at this book. It's got cartoons for the kids. No. The stronger the strongest buildings will be the stone then that will be the double wall house and the last will be the single wall house. You can strengthen even a single wall house to make it suitable for say a category 1 hurricane and then a double wall house is inherently stronger and you can do a lot of things and maybe 5 or 2 or 3 or 4. What about 5? Well, if it's really really bad you may want to still shelter in place because there's some probably some buffer anytime you shelter in place the point is to stay as long as you're outside of a flood zone have no risk of flooding the point is to stay in the lowest floor in the interior What about going out on the street? No, it's crazy. Because things are flying on the street. The reason you stay in the lowest floor in the interior is because when there's a hurricane and damage occurs everything peels from the outside and goes in. It's like peeling an onion. You can make a double wall house pretty strong. My contingency is no matter how strong a hurricane, I'm going to stay in my house my house feels pretty strong because I've worked on it a lot. You followed all the guidelines. Right, and there's things that people could do there too. Inherently there are houses that are stronger than my house but I retrofitted it to make it stronger than those houses. It's a function it's almost like a body How strong were you born and what have you done after to make it stronger? It's an ongoing process. It's all related to the building codes also. That's why it's very important to have very strong building codes and implement them properly. The current in 88 the building codes required hurricane clips on Oahu in 95 they required a continuous low path connection on Oahu and in 2012 roughly the state building code required a continuous low path connection and window protection or safe room that's where you go for a category 5 but the counties are all unified. We talked about that. To go to the hurricanes that are category 5 is that the top number? It doesn't get any worse than 5. How do you define 5? Winds up to what? 160 miles and above is the threshold. That's the Sefir Simpson hurricane scale is determined by the wind how strong the winds are starting with hurricane force at 34 miles an hour going up incrementally and then to category 5 that's the extreme which for a brief period of time a lane was as it passed that approach from the south. Let's look at a video and see if we can imagine and feel the power here. These are video clips of these weather formations recently. What is that John? We're looking at a satellite image this is a 24 hour loop of lane on Friday ending at 4pm Thursday to 4pm Friday showing that pretty much bass catastrophic collapse of the thunderstorms right around the center. The brighter colors indicate higher cloud tops so the blues to the reds to the greens the thunderstorms higher in the atmosphere indicating a strong updraft strong system. That would be the center of the eye around the eye. By this point the eye had filled in a bit because it had started to weaken but in a strong hurricane the eye would be bigger more defined which the other the longer loop does show in it passing south of the area but this kind of highlights how fast right now is not over the islands directly it's southwest of the island. This is the point where the hurricane was just west of the big island very slowly moving northward and the southwestern winds aloft just pulled the thunderstorms away the mid-level center became separated and the thunderstorms just collapsed. How did you get these pictures? Did you take a plane? They're geostationary satellites. We have two of them in the US geostationary operational environmental satellites. One of them is overlooking us western US out through us and is primarily what we use when we have hurricanes over the open ocean. Let's go to the next one. What's this John? This is the same satellite infrared imagery view. This goes from Monday afternoon through Saturday so you can see islands under there. Those are real islands. Those are us and then for the first few images each image is about every two hours or so and when it starts off you can see that well defined eye as at this point it's a high in category four or low in category five very warm eye very cold clouds around it. So where the most forceful winds are they in that blue area or are they beyond that outside of that? They'd be right around the eye, right surrounding it. There is intense convection right in the eye wall and those were where you'll have the strongest winds right near that edge. So is this a picture that we have lots of there are lots of hurricanes like this, the way this thing configured or is this unusual in some way? A strong hurricane like this is not uncommon. We tend not to see them near us that frequently in part because of the strong wind shear that we have over us. Creations at the surface southwestern winds aloft but obviously it can be it can happen and actually even just two weeks beforehand hector hurricane hector was a major hurricane as it passed just south of the island. Let's look at the last of the three videos and see what we can make of that. What do you think? This is the track forecast. This is a loop of our hurricane forecast from the Central Pacific Hurricane Center starting with when we picked up responsibility for laying when it crossed 140 west and continuing through Saturday morning when we dropped all tropical storm watches and warnings just to give an idea of how that track evolved starts off with some uncertainty as to where it will go but by the time we start putting warrants out for the islands it actually looks pretty consistent as far as moving northward weakening and then taking that westward track which is all tied together actually. It wouldn't have taken that west return had it not weakened but had it maintained its strength maintained it as a hurricane it would have kept moving northward. If it had crossed our path and come on to us it would have been stronger by definition. Could we go back to that one because I just want to could we go back to that video? This is a very useful product by National Weather Service and again they put out their forecast every six hours 5am 5pm, 11pm people need to know what that cone, that white cone of uncertainty is and what's also very useful is that they added there's a light brown circle and a dark brown circle the light brown circle is like the extent or the diameter or radius of tropical storm force winds and the dark brown is the extent or radius of hurricane force winds so people are packing this on the National Weather Service website to know how strong your house is and you can always make it stronger by retrofitting and how strong the winds are you going to encounter? We're out of time guys but the good news is John and Dennis we are going to have another show in half an hour or less and we're going to continue this whole discussion with Maria Tome and the energy show and we're going to find out at that time what we learned what we learned in preparing your property what we learned in identifying the problems and giving notice to the public and what we learned in terms of dealing with other storms whether it's Miriam and Norman or whatever else is coming down the pike in the future this is really important so we'll come back in a few minutes just stay there have a beer and we'll come back in 20 minutes or so and you'll hear the rest of the story wow more exciting be right back I'm glad you brought up expand on that mention what the lines become where that comes from maybe you can talk to that get back