Hurricane Lowell Leaves Kauai Dark After a Near Miss

Hurricane Lowell knocked out power to about 90% of Kauai after passing west of the island around midnight, then kept moving north. Kauai Island Utility Cooperative said about 33,000 of 36,000 member accounts were still dark Tuesday morning, on an island of about 73,000 people.

The hurricane warning was canceled after sunrise. What stayed was a failed grid, pumps that could not lift water, roads blocked by boulders and trees, and a state that had already taken Hurricane Lala in August.

A Category 2 Pass West of Niihau

Lowell never made landfall. The National Weather Service in Honolulu said the storm reached its closest point around midnight and was already beginning to pull away, with the center about 110 miles northwest of Lihue at 2:39 a.m. Tuesday and maximum winds still 105 mph.

At 11 p.m. Monday it had been a Category 2 hurricane with 110 mph sustained winds, passing just west of Niihau, which has fewer than 100 permanent residents. Hurricane-force winds reached about 70 miles from the center, enough to rake Kauai without putting the eye on land.

Lihue Airport, closed at 2:30 p.m. Monday, later reported sustained winds of 53 mph. The strongest gust plotted by the weather service was 85 mph a mile east of Waimea. Peak gusts across Kauai and Oahu over a few hours ran as high as 80 mph, the Honolulu office said, with Kauai still holding 60 to 70 mph after the peak.

South and west shores of Kauai saw a south-to-southwest swell of 20 to 30 feet, with 15 to 20 feet on the same exposures of Oahu. Storm surge of 1 to 4 feet on Kauai and Niihau was enough to run the ocean over low roads and shove sand and rock inland. On Oahu, crews scraped a western coastal highway after water topped the pavement north of Honolulu.

LOWELL’S CLOSEST PASS

1. Sept. 7, 2:30 p.m. HST: Lihue Airport closes for the storm.
2. Sept. 7, 4:13 p.m. HST: The weather service issues Hawaii’s first tornado watch, covering Kauai County until 4 a.m. Tuesday.
3. Sept. 7, 11 p.m. HST: Lowell, still at 110 mph, passes just west of Niihau.
4. Sept. 8, 12 a.m. HST: Closest approach to the main islands; damaging wind, rain, and surf continue.
5. Sept. 8, 2:39 a.m. HST: Center about 110 miles northwest of Lihue, 105 mph, moving north at 18 mph.
6. Sept. 8, 11 a.m. HST: Winds down to 75 mph about 230 miles north-northwest of Lihue; coastal warnings dropped.
7. Sept. 8, 5 p.m. HST: Lowell is a 70 mph tropical storm, still dragging rain north of the chain.

By Tuesday afternoon the core was gone. Bands of tropical moisture were not. The hurricane center said heavy rain could linger into Wednesday, Sept. 9, with flash flooding and mudslides still possible, especially on Kauai and parts of the Big Island.

Hurricane Lowell strikes the western Hawaiian Islands, causing widespread power outages and delivering hurricane conditions to the island of Kauai. pic.twitter.com/t3bAt4WyKx

— CIRA (@CIRA_CSU) September 8, 2026

Nine in Ten Co-op Meters Went Dark

Kauai does not sit on Hawaiian Electric’s Oahu grid. It runs on a member-owned cooperative whose lines cross about 1,500 miles of wet, steep country. KIUC President and Chief Executive Officer David Bissell said about 90% of members lost power at some point overnight, and that about 33,000 of 36,000 accounts were still out Tuesday morning.

Road closures, debris, and downed wires kept crews from walking those miles on a normal schedule. Estimated restoration times were not offered, because the co-op said it would not guess before it knew what had broken.

Our first priority is making sure conditions are safe for our crews, emergency responders and the public. We know our members want to know when their power will be restored. Right now, we need to understand the extent of the damage and what repairs are necessary before we can provide reliable restoration estimates.

David Bissell, President and CEO, Kauai Island Utility Cooperative

A later KIUC note said 466 members in Eleele and Hanapepe had been restored, with drones used on a first sweep of transmission lines. That still left almost the whole island dark. On Oahu, Hawaiian Electric said it had restored 13,100 customers and still had about 7,900 out, mostly on the Leeward and Windward coasts.

OUTAGES BY ISLAND TUESDAY

Those statewide counts moved through the day as Oahu came back and Kauai did not. The tracker’s Tuesday morning snapshot is the cleanest cross-island cut; KIUC’s 33,000 of 36,000 is the figure that still described Kauai after the wind had dropped.

The Water Pumps Quit When the Grid Did

The Kauai Department of Water had already told the island to limit water use to essential needs on Sept. 7, after Lowell jogged east. Cooking, drinking, washing, and sanitation were in; ice machines and irrigation were to be shut off so the system did not collapse into a full outage.

When the grid failed overnight, municipal pumps and wells went with it. The department repeated the conservation notice Tuesday and warned that pressure could fall, or taps could go dry, even in houses that took no wind damage. It asked residents not to run water-using appliances if service failed, and not to let water heaters empty. The county lists 24,468 water service connections on Kauai.

That put medical cold storage in a bind. Andrew Davis Henry, a Kauai resident with diabetes, told cameras he was hunting ice for insulin, with no cell service and no power. “I need that to live, so if I don’t have that, it’s going to be a bad day for me,” Henry said.

The state Department of Health posted an islandwide brown-water advisory. Floodwater and the ocean near stream mouths, drains, and harbors were treated as contaminated. Ocean Safety told people to stay out of the water.

Hawaii Had Never Issued a Tornado Watch

At 4:13 p.m. HST on Sept. 7, the National Weather Service office in Honolulu issued Tornado Watch 1 for Kauai County, including Niihau and nearby waters, through 4 a.m. Tuesday. Forecasters said short-lived tornadoes and waterspouts could form in rainbands as Lowell approached from the south and put Kauai in the right-hand side of the storm, where rotation is more likely.

Hawaii has recorded tornadoes before. It had not, in available records, issued a tornado watch. The Storm Prediction Center’s usual watch domain stops at the 48 contiguous states, so Honolulu had to do the product itself. The local statement listed tornadoes as a live threat on Kauai and Niihau, with a lower threat on the rest of the chain.

No confirmed tornado had been documented in early damage notes. The watch still changed how people were told to sit through the night: stay inside, move to the safest interior room if a warning followed, and treat flying debris as part of the same storm that was already taking down poles.

Rain was the longer problem. Hanalei, on Kauai’s north shore, had 17.76 inches. Mountain gauges ran close to 18 inches by early Tuesday, with 2 to 5 inches more common at lower elevations. The hurricane center had allowed for storm totals as high as 24 inches on Kauai. Oahu’s higher terrain saw up to 8 inches; Maui’s mountains up to 9. The Big Island was told to expect several more inches on already wet slopes, a bad overlay on districts Lala had flooded in August.

Lala Damaged 690 Homes in August

Gov. Josh Green’s office said Tropical Cyclone Lala, which passed the islands around Aug. 15 and 16, left intense flooding and wind damage across the state. In a recovery update posted Aug. 31, the governor said about 690 homes and structures were damaged, including households still climbing out of the March Kona low floods and a 6.0-magnitude earthquake.

The worst of Lala was on the Big Island’s Ka’u district, where floodwater swept away on the order of 100 homes, tore up roads and bridges, and opened graves at Naalehu Cemetery. Kauai was not spared that storm either. Lala put more than 7,500 KIUC members in the dark, dropped 10 to 15 inches of rain, and closed stretches of Kuhio Highway, with a water outage in the Haena-Wainiha area.

HAWAII’S 2026 STORM STACK

• March Kona lows: Back-to-back winter storms that already had families in repair, later cited by the governor in the Lala tally.
• Hurricane Lala, mid-August: About 690 homes and structures damaged statewide; Ka’u isolated; National Guard still working Maui and the Big Island at the end of August.
• Tropical Storm Moke: Passed farther away the same month, adding rain after Lala.
• Hurricane Lowell, Sept. 7-8: A Category 2 near-miss that blacked out most of Kauai and killed one man on Oahu.

After Lala, Green and the Hawaii National Guard ran Operation TREK808 with Pacific Air Forces, Southern California Edison, and Hawaiian Electric. Two C-17 Globemaster III aircraft hauled 143,790 pounds of utility equipment and vehicles from California to Hilo. That airlift is the practical answer to a point line workers elsewhere take for granted. Other states can convoy bucket trucks down an interstate. Kauai cannot. Repair starts with the co-op’s own crews, drones, and whatever can be flown across an ocean.

The last major hurricane to smash Kauai itself was Iniki on Sept. 11, 1992, a Category 4 that remains the state’s costliest storm at $3.1 billion in 1992 dollars. Lowell was weaker at closest approach and stayed offshore. It still put Kauai in the dark on a calendar that had already used up a lot of slack.

A Tent in Waimanalo Took the Only Death

On Oahu, a man living in a tent at Sherwood Beach in Waimanalo was killed Monday night when a large tree trunk fell on him. Honolulu police were called about 8:35 p.m. They listed the case as an unattended death and said they did not suspect a crime.

Green said the victim was homeless. “That individual was a homeless individual living in a tent, and a tree fell on him,” the governor said. “We’re doing what we can to recover, but this was a very serious storm.” He also said the man’s son got him toward medical care. Green told interviewers the storm likely caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, and that more than 300 National Guard members were on the job, with crews using two ambulances on opposite sides of wrecked roads and carrying patients across the gap.

On Kauai the pictures were of buildings, not a death toll. Cameras showed a waterfront house lifted off its footings and shoved across the street. Boulders sat on Kaumualii Highway at Kekaha. Elton Ushio, administrator of the Kauai Emergency Management Agency, asked people to stay off the roads so crews could see the damage without adding wrecks. “As the light comes up and the extent of the damage from Hurricane Lowell comes into focus, we want to ensure that no additional emergency situations arise unnecessarily,” Ushio said.

Tourist Dave Reed rode out the night with family and friends who had come for a wedding. “It was actually pretty scary,” Reed said. “I always said I want to ride out a hurricane. I never want to do it again.” He added, “I wish we would have left. We had an opportunity to leave and we didn’t.”

Mayor Derek S.K. Kawakami’s government said there was extensive damage along the shore and that heavy equipment was pushing trees and debris off roads. As of 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, five refuge areas held 301 people and 38 pets.

Crews Must Walk 1,500 Miles of Line

Kauai County canceled the hurricane warning Tuesday morning and left a flood watch and a high surf warning in place. State and county offices, plus public schools, were told to stay closed through Friday, Sept. 11, while power, debris, and water were sorted. The Kauai Bus stopped. Refuse pickup stopped. County parks, campgrounds, Wailua Golf Course, and state parks and forest reserves closed. The Pacific Missile Range Facility shut its guest recreation sites.

WHAT STAYED CLOSED ON KAUAI

• Highways: Kuhio Highway at the Hanalei Bridge, stretches of Kaumualii Highway, and Maluhia Road at Kaumualii, with more closures as crews checked debris, landslides, and live wires.
• Airport: Lihue closed at 2:30 p.m. Monday until inspectors cleared the runway and buildings.
• Public plant: Schools and government offices through Friday, Sept. 11; bus service, trash routes, and parks until further notice.
• Water and ocean: Islandwide conservation at the tap; brown-water advisory in streams, harbors, and near drains.

KIUC told members to expect a long outage and to stay away from downed lines, calling 911 only if a wire posed an immediate danger. Bissell called it a significant island-wide restoration and asked for patience until the co-op could give times it was willing to stand behind.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The miss: Lowell’s center stayed west of Niihau and Kauai; the hurricane warning was off by Tuesday morning.
• The grid: About 33,000 of 36,000 KIUC accounts were still out Tuesday morning, with 466 later restored in two west-side towns.
• The death: A man in a tent at Sherwood Beach in Waimanalo was killed by a falling tree Monday night.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Repair times: KIUC has not issued a restoration schedule for the remaining accounts.
• The bill: Green’s “hundreds of millions of dollars” is an early figure, not an insured loss total.
• Tornadoes: The first-ever watch was issued; a confirmed touchdown has not been logged in early reports.

Hanalei’s rain and the north shore slides will decide how fast those 1,500 miles can even be walked. Until the roads reopen, the co-op is restoring what it can reach, and the rest of Kauai is boiling water, saving ice, and waiting for a grid that failed in the dark after the hurricane had already gone north.