Having a 24-hour newsroom certainly has its advantages. So does having a reporter who loves chasing news, has excellent news judgment and can juggle several jobs at once.

It was 2 a.m. Saturday when a man from Maui called us to ask if we knew that a rockslide had closed Kamehameha Highway on the North Shore. The caller had just spoken to someone at Wahiawa General Hospital who heard nurses talking about the road being closed.

Veteran reporter Dan Nakaso, finishing up his postings on the big waves scheduled to hit the North Shore, knew that the hospital wouldn't give him information, so he called the Honolulu Police Department. An officer there confirmed that the road was closed after the 12:45 a.m. rockslide and nobody was injured.

Even with nobody hurt, Nakaso knew the ramifications of a rockslide in an area with one major roadway. He posted the news online and created a "special designation" for it so it would be prominently placed.

"Whether it was a minor incident that would be cleaned up by sunrise or a major slide, I knew that it was going to be a big story for at least the next several hours — a lifetime in a round-the-clock news operation — because I had covered the 2000 rockslide that shut down the North Shore for 95 days and I knew that another slide had hit the area just last year," Nakaso said.

The Maui man called back and Nakaso let him know what he had discovered and to follow our Web site throughout the morning for updates.

Meanwhile, Nakaso had already called Department of Transportation spokesman Scott Ishikawa (a former Advertiser reporter) and was digging into background information on the 2000 slide so he could produce a story with richer context. Nakaso, one of our first reporters to experiment with videography and now one of our top shooters, prepped himself for a trip to the North Shore.

When John Cummings, spokesman for the city Department of Emergency Management, called with fresh information from his people on the scene who described boulders "as big as Volkswagens" covering both lanes of Kamehameha Highway, Nakaso knew he would be headed to the North Shore for the next few hours.

After filing another update at about 3:30 a.m., Nakaso phoned Deputy Local News Editor Fernando Pizarro and they agreed he should grab his video camera and go. By 5:30 a.m., Nakaso arrived at Waimea Bay Beach Park, where he found stranded drivers sleeping in their cars. He started videotaping and used road flares for lighting.

By 6 a.m., with the sun coming up, Nakaso ran into Ishikawa, who escorted him to the rockslide area. We were the only media outlet there as we recorded transportation officials seeing the damage for the first time. A Ford pickup truck also was stuck in the rubble, its driver electing to walk home.

Nakaso also learned that the road would be closed at least for that day and needed to update the Web site. He called Pizarro, who took dictation and posted the new information at 7 a.m.

Then Nakaso and Pizarro spoke with Saturday reporter Will Hoover about what we'd need for the Sunday print edition. Hoover left his Ko Olina home and headed straight to the North Shore for a story about how residents and workers on the North Shore were expecting to cope with being cut off from their homes or jobs. As Nakaso drove back to town to process video, he saw people stranded by the road with cell phones, figuring out what to do next.

The plan was almost perfect until we realized that our multimedia editor, Seth Jones, had not gotten a call about getting a photographer to the North Shore. Once I called him at about 7 a.m, he dispatched photographer Rebecca Breyer to the scene. Nakaso downloaded Jones to let him know what video we had in hand. Jones notified Web master Scott Morifuji, who edited and posted the video by about noon and headed home, only to have to come back in and edit aerial footage of the scene that KGMB graciously shared with us.

Photo Desk Editor Norm Shapiro put together a photo gallery that complemented our two videos perfectly, and by 4 p.m., we had a wonderful online package, a full hour before the 5 p.m. news. The next day's print edition also was outstanding.

Our rockslide updates generated more than 25,000 page views on Saturday alone. Nakaso's video drew more than 4,000 hits for Saturday and Sunday combined. KGMB's aerial footage generated about 2,400 hits and the photo gallery exceeded 10,000 page views.

Kudos to everyone involved, but especially Nakaso, who contributed online updates, video, print reporting and coverage recommendations over 14 hours after being awake for nearly 36 hours.

"The key to this was Nakaso's clear thinking and planning," Pizarro said. "He knew exactly what needed to get done, had good suggestions about other folks to bring in and set the stage for the rest of the coverage."

And besides Nakaso, we'd also like to thank the mystery man from Maui who got all this rolling in the first place.