BOULDER KAM
Kam Highway Closes Due To (Another) Rock Slide at Waimea Bay

To protect and swerve. Bernie Baker

I made it through and so did the dozen or so other cars and trucks behind me. It was midnight at Waimea Bay. Overhead there were a few clouds - the moon was out, your classic late night sky across the North Shore. But 30 minutes later and there was an explosion- a rumble across the Bay cliffs that sounded like a cross between a fighter jet and a train, both passing by at top end. A huge section of the same rock wall that had collapsed in March 2000 broke apart from the cliff line with boulders twice the size of SUV’s blowing right through the protective guard fence and spilling across the two-lanes of Kamehameha Highway that ring the northern half of O’ahu.

Once again the entire island-county is cut in half. Traffic is being turned around at the Waimea church parking lot on the Sunset Beach side and on the Haleiwa side drivers are being re-directed back by looping through the Waimea Bay beach parking lot.

Heavy equipment has been brought in to pull the rocks off the road, mound the slide back off the cement barrier/fence and eventually clear the slide area so that geologists can better investigate the break-away and either give a green light to opening the highway or go on to Plan B (no one knows as of this writing). Fence and steel support pillars will have to be re- installed and the rest of the liability/insurance red tape connected with the State Highway department will have to be addressed.

To make matters even worse, since getting across to the other side means locking your car up and walking across Waimea Bay beach and hitching a ride onward, the last 24 hours has been a catastrophy of another kind. A most incredibly-late-in-the-season winter swell came roaring in at 15’+ on Easter Sunday, washing up and over the beach at Waimea and trapping hundreds of people making their way across the Bay for the parking lot and beyond. It’s been a nightmare for Waimea lifeguards and local Civil Defense volunteers, trying to escort everyone back and forth across the sand between giant shore-break sets washing up and over the beach ‘path’. Evening flood lights will have to be set up, with volunteers at-hand at dark fall in an attempt to keep the flow of humanity and everyone’s safety intact.

Bernie Baker

In the meantime, it’s seven years later and once again you’re either an ‘upside’ or ‘downside’ surfer, depending upon which way you drive into the North Shore this week. Officials have just announced, as of this posting, that a single lane will be open for three hours of dawn- hour traffic and the same in the late afternoon. Just don’t be THE car that doesn’t make the cut-off. It’s a longggg way back.