LOS ANGELES (AFP) – Hone, a Category 1 hurricane, brushed past Hawaii’s largest island on Sunday, bringing heavy rain and dangerous swells, the United States National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.
The Pacific storm, with maximum sustained winds of 130 kilometres per hour, was “gradually moving away from the Big Island,” the agency said at 11am local time. “Tropical storm conditions will continue on the Big Island into the early afternoon, with gradually diminishing wind and rainfall through the evening,” the agency said.
The storm was expected to bring between 7.6 to 20.3 centimetres of rain over the major island of Hawaii and its surrounding smaller islands.
Local TV station KHON2 said beaches had been closed and emergency shelters opened, while poweroutage.us reported more than 23,000 customers of the Hawaiian Electric Company were without power. The NHC warned that the storm was “producing life-threatening surf and rip current conditions” on coastlines.
Behind Hone, whose name is Hawaiian for “sweet and soft”, was Hurricane Gilma, a more powerful Category 3 storm on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale.
Gilma was still some 1,365 miles from Hawaii, and expected to weaken, the hurricane centre said.
