Whether or not we get one

Whether or not we get one was Originally Posted on January 26, 2011 by

An East Coast friend on Facebook posted that her weather radio kept going off because of tornado warnings and so on. THAT is why I moved from the east cost. I got tired of hiding from bad weather.

So I moved to the middle of the Pacific where the weather is almost always warm and that means we rarely have thunder or lightning. That would also mean rarely getting hail or tornados. We CAN get waterspouts and tornados, but it is very rare. Back in Georgia we had tornados near my house a few times a year!

Here we have different challanges. Although we have not had a hurricane hit this island, we have had a bad one on Kauai decades ago. Our las thurricane threat dissapated miles offshore when the mountains and tradewinds stopped the thing dead in its tracks.

We have flowing within 70 miles of my house and that has been flowing for 25 years! In the past year a number of houses have met their demise and lava flowed over them.

A few years ago we had a watespout come out of the bay and up the mountain which then took out trees and caused some damage.

In the past 10 years we have had a few tsunami watches and one warning where we evacuated.Although it did no damage, we have had bad tsunamis here in the islands where many people died. We take them seriously!

Although we have small earthquakes almost daily, they are rarely felt any distance away. However, a few years ago we had a 6.8 followed a few hours later by a 6.2 quake. We were lucky to have had little damage and you should know that most building here are low to the ground and pretty strong.

You would think that with ALL THAt going on, that we here on the Big Island would have access to a NOAA Weather Radio station. Sadly, we don’t. Oh, they have stations serving most other areas, we have no coverage. I sent a message to NOAA on their website and explained why we should have one, but heard nothing.

This map shows the gap in coverage: http://www.weather.gov/nwr/Maps/PHP/hawaii.php

The area in blue contains all of the expensive resorts and properties on the island. Hopefully we can get coverage before the next disaster.