About 100 homes swept away after Hurricane Lala lashes Hawaii

Image source, Getty Images By Hafsa Khalil , Brandon Drenon and Ben Rich , lead weather presenter Published 15 August 2026 Updated 17 August 2026 Hawaii has been hit by flash floods and mudslides that have swept away homes after category one Hurricane Lala skirted Big Island, leaving one person dead in a car accident.

More than 100 properties were uprooted from their foundations on Big Island, but Governor Josh Green said there "amazingly" did not seem to have been any wider loss of life.

Despite not even making landfall, the storm still dumped up to 32in (81cm) of rain in places, sending torrents raging down mountainsides. More than 200,000 households were without power.

Although Lala has since weakened to a tropical storm and was tracking westward, south of Hawaii, the danger is not over, say officials.

The storm's eyewall howled within 30 miles (48km) of Big Island's South Point overnight, but it was close enough to bring flash flooding, Hawaii County said on Sunday.

After gaining hurricane strength on Saturday afternoon, packing wind speeds of 91mph, Lala's winds have now decreased to near 65mph, said the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in its latest advisory at 20:00 EDT (00:00 GMT) on Sunday.

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"It's actually hard for us to see... I've got a lot of water in my eyes," says a local reporter during a live TV broadcast on the Hawaii County coast

But tropical storm warnings remain in effect for all eight of Hawaii's major islands on Sunday.

Governor Green told a press conference: "It appears that the properties that were washed away did not, at least as of this moment, to my knowledge, have any fatalities associated with them.

"There were a lot of people that went to hospital for minor accidents."

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Watch: Strong winds and downpours in Maui and Honolulu as storm Lala approaches

About 180 Hawaii National Guard members were deployed to help with the emergency response.

Some 219,000 customers had lost electricity on Hawaii as of Sunday afternoon local time, according to tracker PowerOutage.

Three hospitals also lost power, but they had backup generators.

Big Island's two main airports, Hilo International and Ellison Onizuka Kona, were temporarily closed, but have since reopened.

According to the governor, 190 flights have been postponed.

In Maui, some residents were left without water supply on Saturday.

Image source, Getty Images Iniki, a powerful category four storm, was the last hurricane to hit Hawaii back in 1992.

It caused six deaths and $3bn in damage after making landfall on the southern coast of Kauai.

Hurricane season in the US has been relatively quiet the last few years - the last major storm was category three Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida in October 2024.

This year has seen a strong El Niño - a periodically occurring area of unusually warm surface water - develop in the Pacific, driven in part by climate change.

As hurricanes and typhoons feed off warm sea waters, this spike in ocean temperatures could facilitate a higher number of storms that grow to have a greater intensity.

Related topics United States Severe weather Hawaii Hurricanes More on this story World's oceans hit record-high July temperatures