At two o’clock on Monday morning in Honolulu, the Central Pacific Hurricane Center placed Hurricane Lowell at 17.0 degrees north, 163.0 degrees west — about 415 miles south-west of Lihue on Kauai — moving north-north-east at 10 miles an hour, with maximum sustained winds near 115 miles an hour and a central pressure of 950 millibars. That is a Category 3 storm. Hurricane-force winds reached 60 miles from the centre and tropical-storm-force winds 175 miles, and the advisory’s headline said rainbands from Lowell were spreading over Kauai and Oahu.
Kauai County, the islands of Kauai and Niihau, has been under a hurricane warning since eleven o’clock on Sunday night, the third step in a single day: a tropical storm warning at five on Sunday morning, a hurricane watch at five in the afternoon, the warning six hours after that. The north-western Hawaiian islands from Nihoa to French Frigate Shoals, inside the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, are under a hurricane warning as well.
What has made Lowell difficult is not its strength but its pace. It became a major hurricane on Tuesday 1 September, reached Category 5 with winds of 160 miles an hour on Wednesday, weakened, regained Category 5 on Friday, and then spent the weekend crawling before it turned. Six days as a major hurricane on a slow approach gave the state an unusually long time to plan against it. The hazard figures that matter for land are these: 6 to 10 inches of rain on Kauai with isolated totals of 14 inches, 4 to 8 inches on the Big Island and 4 to 6 on Oahu; a storm surge of 1 to 3 feet in Kauai County and up to a foot on Oahu; and life-threatening surf around the chain.
Hawaii moved before any of that was certain. On 3 September the governor signed an emergency proclamation naming Hurricane Lowell, Hurricane Karina and Tropical Storm Marie together and running through 1 November. It activates the Hawaii National Guard, opens the Major Disaster Fund and suspends its normal $10 million spending limit, and sent six high-water vehicles to Kauai. It orders no evacuations, no curfews and no closures.
“Our state is still recovering from Lala, and we are not waiting for another storm to get close before preparing,” Governor Josh Green said in the release announcing it.
A proclamation signed four days before the turn, for a storm that was then still 600 miles away, is a wager on preparation being cheaper than response. Whether it was needed will be clear by Tuesday.