told Honolulu Civil Beat<\/a>. \u201cFamilies have lost their homes; the entire community is impacted,\u201d the US representative said.<\/p>\nDebris near Pahala, Hawaii, on 16 August 2026. Photograph: Stephen Lam\/San Francisco Chronicle\/AP<\/p>\n
On the island of Oahu, the Honolulu fire department had received more than 600 weather-related responses by noon local time Sunday, including 147 reports of downed trees. There were also roofs blown off, downed power lines and one swimmer who had to be rescued, a city statement said.<\/p>\n
Lala was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm in the early hours of Sunday, but the National Hurricane Center warned that it could become a hurricane again by Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Hawaii was last hit by a \u201cmajor\u201d hurricane \u2013 meaning category 3, 4, or 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale \u2013 in 1992, when Hurricane Iniki caused at least six deaths and billions of dollars in damage.<\/p>\n
The islands were menaced by Hurricane Fausto last month, before the storm weakened and skirted north of the island chain.<\/p>\n
Road crews inspect road damage caused by Hurricane Lala in Pahala, Hawaii, on 16 August 2026. Photograph: Jill K Briggs\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Lala comes as a powerful El Ni\u00f1o has formed in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n
Temperatures are already so high that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicts a 69% chance of a \u201chistoric event that would exceed the strength of previous El Ni\u00f1o events dating back to 1950\u201d when it peaks between October and December.<\/p>\n
El Ni\u00f1o, a natural climate pattern when sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean become unusually warm, tends to promote hurricane activity in the Pacific while suppressing it in the Atlantic.<\/p>\n
The human-caused climate crisis can amplify El Ni\u00f1o\u2019s effects because a warmer ocean and atmosphere increase the availability of energy and moisture for extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and heavy rainfall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hawaii residents began to clean up after tropical storm Lala blew past the Big Island, leaving more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":588406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-588405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=588405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/588406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}