Paradise Driver: 03/15/07

Thursday, March 15, 2007

A MAN HAS GOT ...

... TO KNOW HIS LIMITATIONS

We had WEATHER yesterday and I slept through it. Judy asked me last night, when I was taking her home from a dinner party, if the lightning and thunder had woke me up.

"Uh, what lightning and thunder?"
"I knew you were a sound sleeper."

Apparently we had a real "gully washer" yesterday afternoon. When I left for work, I noticed that everything was wet but the skies were a beautiful sunset blue. Not a cloud in the sky.

Sometime after 8:00pm we all noticed the Maui Department Of Fire Control (a/k/a Maui Fire Department) helicopter

was flying low over the water just off Keawakapu Beach, on the Kihei/Wailea border. An obvious search & rescue mission. On the street were a MPD unit and a firetruck, from the MFD- Wailea Station.

Word on the street was that a 75 y.o. man liked to swim there at sunrise and sunset every day. Last night he didn't return. I don't know if he was ever located or not. A check of the local news sources proved negative.

I can't understand why anyone who lives here fails to obey the rule of the sea that you don't swim in brown water. The coast was inundated with the run-off from the thunderstorms. I think being the object of a tiger shark feeding frenzy is not what most people have in mind when they want to commune with nature. [shudder]
Mother Nature is unbiased and unforgiving in the enforcement of her rules.

***

It was a pretty quiet night. By 1:50am all the other drivers had gone "pau hana". I didn't break $100 on the meter. Bummer.

The only incident of note, other than the story above, was a "two-hit" fight. Guy #1 hits guy #2. Guy # 2 hits the ground, "lights out". Police, fire and an ambulance responded to Alahele Street, the southern border of the "Triangle", behind Lulu's and Bada Bing's. If the ambulance transported him to MMMC, they didn't roll "emergency".

***

You may remember that we had a couple of moderate earthquakes on October 15th, last year. Power was knocked out for most of the day. The bad part was that every radio station on Mau'i was "off the air" all day. No emergency backup generators. Well, it appears that some of the stations have rectified that problem. Here's the news article. Of course, they had better set up a SOP so the generators are tested on a weekly basis.