Civil Defense Response to Heavy Rains

Days of heavy rains caused rockslides along the south side of Diamond Head crater, from the road cut onto Diamond Head Road. On the evening of January 2nd, 2004, I responded to help staff a road block on Diamond Head Road, just past the first scenic lookout (heading west).

[TV image showing erroneous location] A cameraman from KGMB showed up, sometime around 11 or 11:30 pm, and his footage appeared on the KGMB 6 and 10 pm newscasts the next day. It was part of a 13-second clip which combined footage from a road block on Kalanianaole Hwy in the Makapuu area, along with footage of the road block at Diamond Head Road. The newscaster's narration only mentioned the Kalanianaole closure, thereby misidentifying our location as being in the Makapuu area. An on-screen graphic likewise said "Kalanianaole Hwy at Makapuu" over video taken at Diamond Head.

In the first image below, I am on the right, walking in front a line of barricades, which had just been delivered to our location. In the second image, I am standing behind the barricades, directing an approaching car to use the lookout parking area to turn around. The orange spots are from rain drops on the camera lens. Although the Oahu Civil Defense Agency has issued me a vinyl rain suit, I am wearing my own nylon/PVC rain suit and waterproof hat.

[TV image showing barricades]

[TV image showing Ralph directing traffic]

These screen shots were taken from a 720 x 480 pixel MPEG-2 capture of the 6 pm newscast, recorded from a cable TV feed using a video card with video capture capability. They were then resized to 480 x 352 pixels, to better fit on this web page, and to restore the 4 to 3 aspect ratio of the viewable TV image. This is because digital video uses pixels that are slightly taller than wide, for reasons explained by this external website that I found. Because a horizontal line in a TV image is about 2% wider than what is intended to appear on a TV screen, these images have been adjusted to have a 1.364 to 1 aspect ratio (720 ÷ 704, multiplied by 4 ÷ 3), rather than a straight 1.333 to 1 (4 ÷ 3).


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Rev. Jan. 10, 2004