$600 MILLION and 90% Without Power — HAWAII Hurricane Lowell | Latest Updates

The centre of Hurricane Lowell never crossed a Hawaiian shoreline. At eleven o'clock on Monday night it was still ninety miles of open water west of Lihue, the strongest gusts anybody measured on the coast of Kauai were in the eighties, and by Tuesday morning the Associated Press was carrying a damage figure for the islands with eight zeroes after it. Nobody had counted a damaged house. This is the whole of Tuesday's published record on day two, read out with the organ and the hour on every number: what one mountain gauge took against the coast below it on the same night, the roads that went under, the sea at Poipu at twenty-two minutes to midnight, the district where the streams ran brown, and where the ledger stands now. Every figure comes from a published report, with the desk that published it and the time it was measured; where nobody has counted yet, this says nobody has counted yet.