Hurricane Iniki pummels the Hawaiian island of Kauai - September 11th, 1992

On this day in 1992, a Category 4 hurricane devastated the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that charts the storms of history one day at
a time. I'm Gay Blues Yay, and in this episode,
we're reflecting on one of the worst natural disasters to

(00:23):
ever strike the state of Hawaii, a deadly hurricane that
wiped out almost every structure on the oldest island in
the Hawaiian chain. The day was September eleventh, nineteen ninety two.
A Category four hurricane devastated the Hawaiian island of Kawaii,

(00:48):
known as Hurricane Iniki, which means strong and piercing wind
in Hawaiian. The storm made landfall on the island's coast
with winds of one hundred and forty miles per hour.
The eye of Inniki was over the island for only
forty minutes before it re entered the Pacific Ocean and
proceeded northwest, but that was long enough to damage or

(01:10):
destroy ninety percent of the island's homes and buildings, and
to claim the lives of six people. Hurricane Iniki is
not well remembered on the US mainland, as it was
overshadowed at the time by Hurricane Andrew, which had wreaked
havoc on southern Florida less than three weeks earlier, But
in the Hawaiian Archipelago and on Kawaii in particular, there

(01:34):
is no forgetting Aniki. Some effects of the hurricane are
still present today, and it remains the most destructive storm
in Hawaii's recorded history. Iniki came about during the hurricane
inducing El Nino event of nineteen ninety two, and was
one of eleven named tropical cyclones that season. It first

(01:55):
formed on September fifth and strengthened into a full blown
tropical store on September eighth. One day later, it intensified
again into a small but fierce hurricane. Historically speaking, the
Hawaiian Islands have been largely shielded from tropical storms due
to a surrounding band of high pressure known as a

(02:16):
subtropical ridge. As a result, only a handful of major
storm systems have ever made landfall in the island's modern history. Unfortunately,
Hawaii's waters were uncommonly warm that September, which weakened the
subtropical ridge and produced the bathtube like conditions in which
hurricanes thrive. This effectively cleared a path for Aniki to follow,

(02:40):
and sure enough, on September ninth, the storm made a
sharp turn to the north and headed straight for Kawaii.
Nicknamed the Garden Aisle for its untouched natural beauty, Kawaii
is the fourth largest island of the Hawaiian Archipelago and
was home to about fifty one thousand people at the time.
Iniki's unus usual movement caught the island's authorities off guard,

(03:03):
and many forecasters wrongly assumed that it would still pass
just south of them. Instead, the system continued to strengthen
over the next two days, and at eight am on
September eleventh, it reached its peak intensity as a Category
four hurricane. As the warning sirens blared early that morning,
residents across the island scrambled to gather supplies and board

(03:26):
up their windows. Meanwhile, thousands of tourists rushed to the
Lehui Airport, hoping to get off the island before the
storm made landfall. Eventually, though, the airlines were forced to
stop service, leaving many visitors with no option but to
seek refuge in public shelters. Iniki reached the island that afternoon,

(03:46):
packing sustained winds of one hundred and forty five miles
per hour, with some gusts reaching an excess of two
hundred miles per hour. By three pm, the powerful winds
had uprooted trees and utility poles, tore the roofs off
of houses, and knocked out telephone and power service island wide.
The intense storm surge also washed thirty foot waves over

(04:09):
the highways and caused major coastal flooding, particularly on the
south shore. The eye of the swift moving storm came
ashore at roughly four pm, and within an hour it
had already swept across the thirty mile wide island and
moved fifty miles north into open ocean. Once the immediate
danger was over, the lengthy process of assessing and repairing

(04:32):
the damage could commence. More than one hundred people were
injured by the storm, but remarkably only six deaths were reported.
The most extensive damage incurred on Kawaii was to the
island's infrastructure. More than fourteen thousand homes were impacted by
the hurricane, with fourteen hundred being completely destroyed and five

(04:52):
thousand others severely damaged. There was also significant damage to
the island's roads and electrical grid. Many residents without power
or communication services for months after the storm, and while
the south shore of Kawaii took the brunt of the
wind and storm surge, the damage ranged over the entire
island and even to the neighboring island of Oahu. In total,

(05:16):
Hurricane and Niki caused roughly three billion dollars in damages,
the equivalent of around six and a half billion dollars
in today's money. According to Kawaii County officials, It took
the Garden Aisle about a decade to fully recover, and
to this day, Hurricane Iniki remains the most powerful and
the most costly tropical storm to ever hit the Hawaiian islands.

(05:40):
Iniki also had a peculiar impact on Kawaii's ecosystem, as
it set loose a large number of non native feral chickens.
The birds had been brought to the island centuries earlier
by Polynesian explorers, and had thrived there due to the
lack of natural predators. The population boomed in the wake
of the storm, and today Kawaii's feral chickens are a

(06:02):
kind of unofficial mascot for the island, as well as
a chronic nuisance for farmers and motorists. Another lesser known
facet of the storm is its unexpected brush with Hollywood history.
One of the most influential films of the decade, Steven
Spielberg's Jurassic Park, happened to be filming on Kawaii at
the time of the hurricane, and like many other visitors

(06:24):
to the island, the one hundred and thirty cast and
crew members had no choice but to hunker down and
wait it out. By the time the storm hit, the
filmmakers had already completed most of the on location filming,
including the helicopter landing scene, the automated ride through the park,
and various wide angle landscape shots that took advantage of

(06:44):
Kawaii's lush, tropical rainforests and soaring cliff sides. That said,
a few intrepid crew members actually braved the storm to
capture additional footage, and some of it even made it
into the final film. During the scene when a storm
strikes the fictional Aila Newblar, some shots of the waves
and torrential rainfall were actually filmed a long Kawai's Novelli

(07:08):
Villi Bay just ahead of Aniki's landfall. Most of the
film's stars, including Laura Dern, Sam Neil and Jeff Goldbloom,
later went on record about just how harrowing the experience
had been for them, but Richard Attenborough, the actor who
played Jurassic Park founder John Hammond, was surprisingly nonchalant. In fact,

(07:29):
he claimed to have slept through the worst of the storm,
and when his fellow cast members asked how that was possible,
he said it had been easy because, after all, he
had lived through the London Blitz during World War II.
Nothing like a German bombing campaign to put things in perspective.
I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you now know a little

(07:52):
more about history today than you did yesterday. You can
learn even more about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have
any comments or suggestions, you can always send them my
way by writing to this day at iHeartMedia dot com.

(08:12):
Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again
tomorrow for another day in History class.