Hurricane Lane threatens direct hit on Hawaii – weather service

Hurricane Lane, potentially Hawaii’s worst storm in a quarter century, on Thursday churned toward Oahu, the island with the largest population, Reuters reports. Schools, government offices and business were closed and residents stocked up on supplies and boarded up homes. Packing sustained winds of up to 215km per hour, Lane could dump as much as 20 inches of rain, triggering flash floods and landslides, the National Weather Service (NWS) said. “Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” the NWS’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu said in its advisory. As of early Thursday, Lane was centered about 370km south-southwest of Kailua-Kona, a town on the west coast of the Big Island. It was classified as a powerful Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane strength. The NWS said the storm weakened slightly overnight but excessive rainfall would affect the Hawaiian islands into the weekend.