Lightning strike damages 'Ewa Beach home
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
Their neighbors thought a bomb had exploded and every car alarm on 'Apu'u Place went off but no one was hurt when thunderstorms sent a bolt of lightning into Keith and Dee Yoshimura's 'Ewa Beach home yesterday morning.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
Three other lightning strikes hit Hawaiian Electric Co. transmission lines as the thunderstorms rolled over O'ahu from the west.
Keith Yoshimura examines damage to a wall, left, after lightning struck his 'Ewa Beach home yesterday morning. No one was hurt, but Fire Department officials who later visited the home said what they saw was extraordinary.
No flooding was reported from the rain.
"It blew my mind," Keith Yoshimura said. "I haven't heard of this happening in Hawai'i. Lucky me, huh?"
The lightning hit the home about 4 a.m., said Yoshimura, who is a trader for Morgan Stanley and was driving to work at the time. His wife was "just freaking out," he said.
Dee Yoshimura called firefighters at 4:33 a.m. after smelling smoke.
Firefighters found a 6- to 12-inch crack in the roof. The lightning traveled through the house along the edge of a wall.
When it reached the concrete foundation, it blew out a section of the wall and the carpet.
"Everyone who has come into our house, from the Fire Department to Hawaiian Electric Co., they have all looked at it and went: 'Wow, we have never seen anything like this,' " Dee Yoshimura said.
The strike affected only parts of the home's electrical systems, blowing out a TV and keeping an air-conditioning unit permanently on.
"It's not blowing out cold air, though," Dee Yoshimura said. "It's just blowing."
The National Weather Service, which called yesterday morning's thunderstorms "garden variety," said similar unstable weather conditions will last through much of next week.
"We will have brief bouts of heavy rain," said lead forecaster Jeff Powell. "It is impossible to tell exactly where, but the likelihood is high that you will see or hear about heavy rain."
A kona low more than 700 miles northwest of Kaua'i will linger for days, he said. The "wobbling" weather system brings up deep moisture from the south and mixes it with a pool of cold air at higher elevations, which combines to create the unstable pattern, according to Powell.
"It is not going to clear for a long time," he said.
The thunderstorms yesterday occurred between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., prompting the weather service to issue an urban and small-stream flood advisory. By late last night all weather advisories had been canceled.
A HECO spokesman said lightning is believed to have struck three "major" transmission lines somewhere between Kahe Point and Halawa — at 3:16 a.m., 3:24 a.m. and 3:31 a.m. Each one prompted an almost immediate switching of power from an alternate system, said Fred Kobashikawa, HECO spokesman.
"It resulted in blinks in the system, not a sustained outage, pretty much islandwide," he said.
Lightning strikes are not common but when they occur, they trigger HECO's automatic protection system.
